Please don't spoil the game, I haven't finished it yet.
When I first played The Last of Us on a friend's PS3 near the release of the original... I was bored to tears, the story didn't catch me (tbf, I wasn't really paying attention) and the game had so many mechanics to aid you in encounters most of them ended up being just bland and methodical which was the opposite of what I was looking for in the game. The game running awfully on PS3 didn't help, it's really hard to be impressed by the incredible graphics they managed to pull on that machine when all the effects made it look like a blurry mess.
That terrible impression of the game stuck with me, and even when the game was like 10 bucks I didn't even consider picking it up on PS4. However, after rediscovering Uncharted 4 a month ago I was going to pick it up since some suggested playing TLOU on Survivor mode, and I really intended to but... it was a PS+ monthly game! That was a nice surprise. Fast forwards to last week, I finally started the game again and damn, playing on Survivor really changed things up:
- First of all, the Remaster is absolutely the way to play this holy shit. I can actually discern characters that are more than 3 meters away from me! Plus 60FPS definitely helps for those action moments where I need the extra clarity to aim better and save an extra bullet or two that could help me later.
- Survivor mode changes EVERYTHING. Earlier this year, I played through Metro 2033 for the first time with one of the most memorable things about that game being how it had me searching every corner for an extra bullet or some extra seconds of filter and that's exactly the feeling I've been getting about TLOU on Survivor. No more wallhacks, no shiny items, just pure resource management and a true skill test when shit hits the fan and you have to think in a couple of seconds how to deal with a situation; it makes stealth much more interesting as well as it's definitely harder than rambo-ing your way through but you save so many more resources.
- The story's actually decent from what I've seen. Again, haven't finished it yet so please don't spoil but when a moment hits hard, it hits hard. Some of the animations do take me out of it a little, as it falls in some weird uncanney valley on cutscenes but the interactions that happen while playing the game are superb. I wouldn't put it above Uncharted 4 regarding this (which, fair enough, is the game they developed after this one), but they definitely built a believable world that just grabs you.
- Atmosphere. This is something I already liked about the original, so it's not a surprise I still greatly enjoy the atmosphere of this game. Alongside with the variety of the enviroment it definitely makes every encounter more tense, as you never know what could be lurking near you. This is something that Naughty Dog had already mastered with Uncharted 2, but the game also just knows when to let you "take it in", with beautiful landscapes or a moment of peace in the middle of the hellscape that The Last of Us' is.
Overall, and with the context of the impact this game caused after its release, I can where the "Citizen Kane moment for games" quote comes from. You know, this was really the last of the games I wanted to ever "replay" (does it count if you didn't finish it previously? :p) but it's definitely been worth it so far. Haven't finished it yet though, but I'm definitely going two as I have to find out if Ellie and Joel are really The Last of Us.
