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This is a six-hour video that shows you most of The Last Of Us, beginning to end. It's achieved by recording linear gameplay (no dawdling or getting stuck or dying) and including all the cutscenes and story elements. Why would you watch this, when half the fun is playing through the game's combat and exploration? Let's say you really want to see what all the fuss is about with The Last Of Us, but don't own a PS3. Or you've finished it and want to revisit it. Or you're writing an article on it and want to be able to see vast sections of it without having to go back and replay stuff. The vid's creator, dansg08, says he hopes " it succeeds in presenting the story in the way it should be experienced". If you want to watch it, remember, it's six hours long, so get some popcorn.

This lovely illustration of Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us by the one and only Olly Moss. Am I the only one who gets freaked out and moves the pallet reeeeally slowly whenever Ellie's on it? No? Cool, glad it's not just me.

Know why Eidos and AMD made such a big deal about Lara's hair in the new Tomb Raider? Because video game hair is normally pretty ugly, and something incredibly hard to get right. The Last Of Us gets it about as right as the current generation probably can, though, with all those wavy curls and bushy beards, and having seen these terrific examples earlier today, I thought it'd be interesting to show you how it's actually done. In the old days, hair was simply sprites. When games shifted to polygons, hair became immovable clumps of polygons and then, a little later, 2-3 slightly movable clumps (like crude ponytails) meshed together. Today, though, in order to get hair looking "natural", artists basically (and I'm simplifying here) arrange sheets of polygons atop each other, which when textured give the appearance of layers of hair, which not only look real in screenshots, but can move independently (and thus realistically) when you're playing. You might not notice this when you're playing, if the developers have done a good job, and in the Last of Us, they've done a good job. For that, thank people like Michael Knowland, a lead character artist at Naughty Dog. These are some of the character sculpts he made for the game, which he's shared today, and while the quality of the models is amazing, I was more interested in the beards. I'm always a sucker for seeing the man behind the curtain, the secrets behind the tricks, and these images definitely ticked those boxes. Especially since they make Joel look infected. You should check out the rest of Michael's post on zbrush, it's got loads more terrific sculpts from the game.

There are a good number of enjoyable easter eggs hidden in The Last of Us, but this one takes the grand prize. At one point in the game, Joel will come across a couple of phone numbers for "pest control." But they're not actually numbers for pest control hotlines… they're phone sex hotlines. When tipster RevsUnlimited sent in this image, I felt almost certain he was joking. After all, they're 555 numbers, which are used for movies and are almost always fake. Aren't they? But I called the first one anyway. 1-800-555-2545. "Welcome to 800-666-1234," moaned a woman's voice. "Mmmmmm. We're spread, wet and ready for you right now. Come on baby, let's play!" DANG. Okay, then! I called the second number. 1-800-555-6784. "Welcome to America's hottest talk line!" said a bubbly, chipper female voice. "Ladies, to talk to interesting and exciting guys free, press one now! Guys, hot ladies are waiting to talk to you…" "Pest control" indeed! I can't say whether or not those numbers were chosen on purpose, and there's always the possibility they were photoshopped into the image, though they look real—we haven't found them for ourselves. But that is a hell of an easter egg. And hey, you don't have to take my word for it; call the numbers up top if you like! You know, just for research.

Some people might blame the fungus zombies for destroying society in The Last of Us. But based on this Uncharted easter egg video by mynameisfeli, I'd say we should blame the collapse of society on Justin Bieber instead. Spoilers for various easter eggs in The Last of Us follow. It's a tad difficult to read, but this newspaper which you can find in The Last of Us says Justin Bieber plays Nathan Drake in Uncharted 13. That's...a lot of Uncharted movies. Hmm, should we blame sequels for the post-apocalypse instead? Either way, that isn't the only Uncharted easter egg in the game. At some point, you can come across some more Uncharted and Jak and Daxter easter eggs, like this board game one—here's video by NukemDukem. And finally, GamerForEternity has footage of Sackboy-like dolls of Uncharted and Jak and Daxter characters which you can find. The real question is, of course: is there an easter egg hidden somewhere in The Last of Us that teases Naughty Dog's next game, like Uncharted 3 did?

The Last of Us represented several accomplishments during its first week of sale in the UK, where it took the number one spot on the region's sales chart. According to Chart Track, the game is the first Sony exclusive to take the top spot since Uncharted: Golden Abyss on Vita in early 2012. It's also the third fastest selling game of 2013 behind Bioshock Infinite and the "weak" Tomb Raider, along with being the biggest launch for a new intellectual property since L.A Noire in 2011. Overall, a fine start to developer Naughty Dog's swan song for PlayStation 3.

The cash infusions for the UK retail market didn't end with The Last of Us, as Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Leaf debuted in second and became (wow, y'all love your Tom Nook debt programs) the biggest non-Mario 3DS launch ever. The UK top ten indentured to Tom Nook can be found after the break.

Eight artists. 23 pieces of concept and promotional art. One game of the year contender. That's what we're showcasing today in a very special edition of Fine Art, Kotaku's daily look at the art - and artists - creating the worlds from the game's you love. This feature normally covers an individual artist, but today we're blowing the doors off and featuring pretty much the entire art team behind Naughty Dog's masterpiece, which is awesome not just because the work these guys do is woefully under-appreciated (publishers rarely publicly credit the actual artists behind the work they use for wallpapers/promos), but because it's really amazing stuff. Seriously, if you've played the game, and are as engrossed in the lush/devastated world as we are, this is where it all started. You can see how well the artist's work has made it into the finished product, a testament not just to their original creative vision, but the skill with which Naughty Dog can turn that into a 3D virtual space. A lot of this stuff can be seen in the flesh in an art book that's out soon. Below you'll find the names of the artists responsible for each respective piece, as well as links to their personal sites if you wanna check out more of their work. If you're in need of a new desktop wallpaper, good news: most of these are huge. Nick Gindraux – www.ngindraux.blogspot.com/ Maciej Kuciara - www.maciejkuciara.com Aaron LiMonick – www.limonick.com/ Hyoung Nam – www.hyoungman.cghub.com/ Alexandria Neonakis - https://twitter.com/Beavs Shaddy Safadi - http://www.shaddyconceptart.com/ John Sweeney - http://sweeneyillustrates.blogspot.com/ Eytan Zana - www.Zanabrush.com

Don't call it "that Ellen Page game." Thanks to our intrepid commenters, we've got today's new release, game of the year contender, and all around awesome title The Last of Us for $45, a full $15 bucks off its MSRP. You'll be getting it through eBay, but the seller is actually Newegg, so buy with confidence. Free shipping. [Newegg via eBay] Here's the Kotaku review and here's today's Moneysaver. Keep up with Shane Roberts on Kinja and Twitter. Check out Dealzmodo for more great tech deals, and Deals.Kinja.com for even more discounts. This is Moneysaver Day One, a segment covering the the deals for a given game on its launch day. Join us every weekday at 2:15pm ET for the full Moneysaver roundup, brought to you by the Commerce Team. We're here to bring Kotaku readers the best gaming deals available, and to be clear, we also make money if you buy. We want your feedback.

Naughty Dog's much-anticipated (and excellent) action/horror game The Last of Us is fairly straightforward: Keep moving and try not to die. But between the various upgrade trees, the open-ended combat and the crafting system, we thought it would be helpful to offer some tips. So, here are some tips for playing The Last of Us. These tips do not contain any major story spoilers. Try it on hard difficulty. The emphasis here is on "try." This game is really good on its higher difficulty setting, and you'll have to play it very differently than if you play it on normal. That said, normal isn't exactly easy—it'll test your skills in plenty of places. But for the most intense experience, I recommend playing on hard. Furthermore, you can't play New Game Plus on a higher difficulty than you finished with, and New Game Plus makes normal difficulty waaay too easy. And if you find hard to be too challenging, you can always drop it down to normal if you get stuck. Don't get frustrated on the first major infected encounter. The first time you take on a group of the infected, you're probably going to get hosed. A lot. That's because this game throws you into a room with a bunch of runners (who can see) and one clicker (who is tough to kill and will take you out in a single hit). I loved that the game did this, but only in retrospect—it's maddening, terrifying and difficult in the heat of the moment. If you got stuck there, take heart—that was pretty much the idea. Just keep moving, and don't try to fight the zombies all at once like in a different zombie game. You can outrun all of them, and if you don't get yourself cornered, take them out one at a time. Once they're all gone, you can take down the clicker. Don't fight enemies head-on. If you get spotted, run. This ties into that last one, and it applies to both human and infected encounters. (You can see some of this in action in the demo video I posted today.) In past games, including Naughty Dog's Uncharted games, once the enemies spot you, the jig is up. Not so with The Last of Us. The enemy AI is really good, and by really good I mean, it's possible to fool them and they'll react in surprising and realistic ways. If you get spotted, quickly run and hide, and keep circling and moving. The levels are huge for a reason. Motion and stealth are your biggest advantages—use them. Don't rely only on autosave. As we saw upon the game's launch, there was an autosave bug that cost some players a lot of progress. Sony says that Naughty Dog has fixed the problem, but all the same, it's probably a good idea to manually save your progress from time to time. Leave no stone unturned. It's tempting to run through the story, but if you see an open room off your path, chances are it contains something useful. In addition to useful tools and parts, you'll also find conversation-pieces for Joel and Ellie. Some of the game's best little stories are told while rummaging through rooms. Take all you can carry. It's generally wise to leave yourself with enough parts to craft one health kit/molotov and one shiv/melee upgrade. But if you wind up with too many of a given crafting object, make sure you're carrying the maximum number of items (3) and if you're not, craft one more and pick up the spare part. Do everything you can to avoid leaving crafting materials lying around. Save your shivs. Shivs are probably the single most useful item in the whole game. You can use them to take down enemies silently and quickly, but you never should. Instead, save shivs for use on unaware clickers. That's partly because even as your shivs get more durable, there are rooms that you'll have to sacrifice an entire shiv to open. You should always do so, as those rooms will contain enough parts and materials that it's always worth it. But you never want to be without a shiv. Don't waste blades upgrading your melee weapons. It's not worth it to upgrade your melee weapons by using an entire set of blades. Save your blades for shivs. There are enough melee weapons lying around that you'll almost always find a new one when yours breaks, and it's not worth sacrificing a blade for the extra one or two hits your weapon will get. Crack all the safes. At various points throughout the game, Joel will come upon a locked safe. The combination for that safe is always located somewhere nearby, and every safe is worth opening. There's one in a hotel in Pittsburgh that's particularly worth getting, as it has an incredibly valuable upgrade manual. Be creative and examine every bit of the room you're currently in. The Last of Us doesn't allow for much backtracking, so you'll always find the combination on a document somewhere in your immediate vicinity. Upgrade health and listening distance first, then weapon aim. The first thing you should upgrade of Joel's is his health. Then, listening distance. Save your upgrade pills, though, as some of the abilities—faster healing, faster crafting—are mostly useless. Also, the single-save against clickers is nice, but it wastes shivs like crazy and I found that I almost preferred to just keep the damned clickers away from me in the first place. Improve your holsters first. As you collect parts, you'll be able to upgrade your weapons and gear on workbenches. Before you upgrade your weapons, save up and upgrade both your long-gun and pistol holsters. That'll make it possible for you to quick-select two of each weapon, and make it much easier to survive without having to rummage around in your backpack. Choose your other weapon upgrades wisely. You won't be able to craft all of the weapon upgrades in the game, or anything close to it. So you'll want to choose your upgrades wisely. The next best thing to upgrade is the hunting rifle—add a scope and increase its weapon capacity. Past that, it's smart to focus more on clip capacity than reload speed, and don't worry too much about fire-rate and range. Any weapon that can only hold one bullet should be quickly upgraded to hold at least two. Those weapons are powerful, but if you miss, you want to have a backup round ready to go. Let sleeping clickers lie. At several points in the game, you'll make your way through a room or a building filled with infected who are "asleep." They're not moving and can't see you, and won't react unless you make a lot of noise. If you're careful, you can get through those areas without alerting them to your presence, and can even grab all the loot around them. There's no real reward for killing zombies, so save your ammo and materials and just sneak around them. Save ammo whenever possible. Ammo is scarce in The Last of Us. Super scarce. As a result, you'll want to save it. The best way to do that is… Try everything in your inventory. This isn't a game where you should pick one or two favorite weapons and just stick to them. Nearly everything in your weapon inventory, from smoke bombs, to nail traps to different types of guns, is useful. Try them out in various encounters. Only the revolver seems redundant. Everything else has a good use against at least one of the enemy types in the game. Bricks are your friend. The brick is the easiest weapon to forget to use, but it's also one of the most useful. That's partly because it can be used to take down an unaware clicker or dude, and partly because there are so many cinderblocks lying around that you'll never "run out" in the way you'll run out of other things. Save your lead pipe for extreme situations where you're mobbed, and use the brick whenever you can. Don't read anything else about this game. Really! Okay, so you read our tips article. But this game is best experienced completely cold. Just go in, play it, and learn it. Some of the lessons it teaches are harsh. But they're fun to learn on your own. And you definitely want to go in knowing as little about the story as possible. Enjoy the game, and remember: When the clickers come at you, there's no shame in running the other way.

A number of threads, posts and tweets around the web indicate that some players are having trouble saving in Naughty Dog's latest game, The Last of Us. If the glitch kicks in, then the game tries to autosave but can never complete the task, resulting in lost progress. While not everyone experiences the glitch (no one at Kotaku has encountered it), Sony says that there's an easy fix. This is what Sony had to say: Some players may have been encountering an issue with The Last of Us which affected the autosave feature, which can result in a loss of progress in the single-player campaign. The team at Naughty Dog has been diligently investigating as soon as we heard from our community, and we have determined the cause to be on servers for The Last of Us which were capturing player statistics. We have made a change to ours to address this issue. All players should quit any game in progress out to the XMB and restart The Last of Us. All players can now enjoy single-player and online multiplayer matches as normal. And there you have it. Did you encounter this problem? Did Sony's solution work for you? Let us know in the comments.

Sure, I've written a lot of words about the terrific new PS3 game The Last of Us. But I haven't really gotten to show you the game. That's largely because, doubtless in a fit of spoiler-phobia, Sony put draconian restrictions on the amount of pre-release video footage they allowed the press to show. Those restrictions lift today, as the game has been officially released. You may know that The Last of Us has a great story, good characters, and cool cutscenes. But how does it play? It'll always be easier to just show you, so that's what I'm gonna do. The video above spends a little under an hour going through the basics of playing The Last of Us. It covers stealth combat, outright gunplay, crafting, scavenging, and combat against infected enemies, which is an entirely different thing from fighting humans. A word on spoilers: Everyone has their own sensitivity to spoilers, so if you want to play the game totally fresh, I'd say just go ahead and play it. Don't watch this video. If you're on the fence or just curious, however, this video contains no major story spoilers, and only has footage from the first third or quarter of the game. You won't learn anything major about the plot except for two early cities/settings - you'll see Joel and Ellie together, and you'll see them interacting with one side character. No big-arc stuff, no cutscenes, no surprising set-pieces, no hints about the story's beginning or resolution. This video is concerned with demonstrating how TLOU is designed and what it's like to play it. That's all it shows. But, you know, it's an hour of the game. So if you don't want to see anything at all, don't watch. It's a long video, so I've broken it up so that you can skip around to whatever you might want to see. As follows: 6:28 - Scavenging and crafting. 15:23 - Upgrading weapons. 21:45 - Stealth/combat versus a whole bunch of dudes. 38:20 - Stealth versus zombies, introduction to clickers. 52:05 - Open combat against zombies. And that's that! A whole bunch of The Last of Us gameplay, for those who are interested. (Though I'll certainly understand if you want to avoid watching it and just go play for yourself. Your call.) If you've got any questions about the game, let me know in the comments and I'll do my best to answer. Also, this was more or less my first try at making a lengthy gameplay/commentary video like this, so I welcome your feedback! (I'm about to swap the video with one that's less dark, too.) If there's something you'd like to see more of in the future, or anything I can do to make this type of video more helpful, I hope you'll let me know.

We venture into what might be the last days of the PS3 but it seems to be going out with a bang...or stomp.

Uncharted developer Naughty Dog's upcoming PS3-exclusive The Last of Us is a grim, grim survival horror game. Critics, however, found that beneath its bleak, dark exterior, The Last of Us hides a deep, extremely rewarding experience. Apart from a few technical issues, like the AI being wonky in places, reviews talked at length about the raw emotion, the sheer terror, the incredibly tense action, and the nuanced, compelling and very well voice-acted cast that all serve to make The Last of Us a true masterpiece. Let's have a look at what the reviews say. Polygon The Last of Us made me feel sick to my stomach. The Last of Us mines the same post-apocalyptic scenario as dozens of other games, but its approach is starkly its own. It paints a vision of a near-future that is cold, heartless and, in many cases, downright evil. It's not a fun place to be, and likewise, the game isn't really a fun thing to play. Developer Naughty Dog's commitment to this dark, depressing tone is alternately impressive and frustrating. The Last of Us actively fought any enjoyment I might have gained from it — from its oppressive world to its inconsistent mechanics. Being anything but fun might be the point, but The Last of Us doesn't always make that point gracefully. GameSpot One night the heart of society beat loud and strong; the next it was silent. The outbreak happened so quickly that there was no quarantine plan in effect. Infected monsters crashed through their neighbors' windows, smashed the doors to splinters. Husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, dead before they could react, or worse. Maybe they became one of the infected. The virus spread through major cities and suburbs, and the military, with all of its training and weapons, was powerless to stop the epidemic. Joel is just one man amid a sea of people whose lives have been destroyed by the infection, but who still cling to life. Though he never asked for such power, he now holds the key to saving the world. NowGamer The story focuses on Joel's journey as he takes his young ward, Ellie, from one side of an American wasteland to the other, encountering the trials and tribulations that you might expect along the way. And that’s all we’ll say about the details of the story. It’s a large part of why you’ll play, truth be told, and Naughty Dog has excelled itself both in terms of characterisation, animation and general quality of storytelling. If Uncharted is Michael Bay, The Last Of Us is the Cohen Brothers: character-driven, plot focused and not always derivative of its forebears. Metro GameCentral We don’t really consider the infected to be the primary enemies in the game. They’re the reason the world has gone to pot but the most dangerous enemies are still ordinary humans. We’re not sure if that was always the plan, or if Naughty Dog just realised partway through that it was more interesting fighting intelligent enemies, but scavengers and other humans are your opponents for over half the game. Given the often shocking levels of violence they’re just as frightening an opponent, if not more so. The presence of the infected may seem to paint the game as a survival horror, but it really isn’t. It’s tense, not frightening, and never more so than when you have half a dozen wild-eyed scavengers bearing down on you and you’re down to your last bullet. Game Informer While most games sell the fantasy of superhuman powers, The Last of Us constantly reminds you of your vulnerability. Stealth is the key to your survival, as overwhelming odds often encourage you to remain in the shadows before leaping out to perform graceless executions with blunt instruments like shivs. If events escalate into melee or gunplay, you are forced into tense, harried battles that leave you breathless. While the game never lets you feel at ease during combat, the play mechanics — from stealth to the weapons — are solid. I noticed occasional AI lapses and some of the "trial and error" frustration that creeps into any game that relies heavily on stealth, but overall it's an impressive action game that distills the strengths of the survival horror genre into something that's both deeper and more accessible. Giant Bomb Naughty Dog has built on the surprising success of Uncharted's multiplayer with Factions mode in The Last of Us. You want to know the crazy thing, especially coming from a guy who usually can't give a crap about a game's multiplayer modes? It's great. The methodical, slow-paced gameplay from the single-player translates well to multiplayer. In both game modes, players are split into small teams, and working with one another is not only essential to survival match-to-match, but it plays into the larger metagame. (...) One thing that kept with me, though, was multiplayer's focus on rewarding gruesome execution kills. When a player is almost dead, they go into a hunched state where a teammate can rescue them—or an enemy can end their life in a terrible way. Unlike single-player, there's no terrifying us-versus-them mentality contextualizing these alarming acts. Here, it's more points and a bothersome use of extreme violence. Kotaku The Last of Us often feels like a crystallization of the big-budget, Hollywood-style video game. It’s constrained by all the limitations of a rigidly linear, movie-like video game experience, even as it is a smashingly well-executed example of the form. For a variety of reasons, the video game industry does not appear ready to make a non-violent, character-driven big-budget game, and so game developers must find a way to embrace character amid the shooting and the zombies. That Naughty Dog has succeeded feels noteworthy, another step toward worthwhile, affecting video-game stories that aren't built entirely on worn-out genre tropes. That being said, art isn't so much about the what as it is about the how. And The Last of Us, from its overfamiliar beginning to its shocking ending, reflects the courage of its makers' convictions. It is a terrific feat of storytelling, design, art direction and performance. As it turns out, good things still reside within the house of cliché. Top image courtesy of Gergő Vas. Questions? Comments? Contact the author of this post at andras-AT-kotaku-DOT-com.

As many of you will have seen, the review scores are finally in for The Last of Us – the brand new PS3 title from Uncharted studio Naughty Dog. At the time of writing, its Metacritic score sits at a mighty 95/100, cementing its place as one of the very finest video games of this console generation. Perfect scores came in from some of the toughest critics in the business, including Eurogamer, Edge and Videogamer.

In just seven days’ time you’ll be able to judge for yourself, but in the meantime I caught up with the game’s Creative Director Neil Druckmann to delve into the project’s origins, its development and the studio’s thoughts on the finished product. He was in fine form – just as we started talking, he was handed an early print-out of the very first review – that Edge 10/10. Read on for some great insight into video game development at the very highest level.

Neil, you’ve been tasked with creating a brand new IP and following the hugely successful Uncharted series. Do you feel much pressure on your shoulders?

Neil Druckmann: Absolutely, just because it’s a new position for me as writer and creative director. But I guess it’s less so much for people outside the studio and more about me wanting to make the team proud. I’ve said this before but I feel I’m surrounded by the most talented people in the industry and often I feel I’m out of my league, so it’s more like making sure they’re proud of the work we’re doing. It was really gratifying when we wrapped this thing up to have a lot of people compliment the project and say how proud they were of it.

Joel and Ellie aren’t your typical video game heroes. How confident are you that they can become gaming icons in the same way that Nathan Drake and Crash Bandicoot did before them?

Neil Druckmann: I don’t know about them becoming icons, but I will say that having seen how people play the game and seeing their reactions, I can say confidently that these will stand as two of the best ever performances in a video game. It’s a bold claim, but these guys really blew us away. Not only that but we’ve had a bunch of focus testers play the game and have had people actually cry. They’d come up to us and say “I’ve never felt so attached to a character”.

How difficult is it to imbue a video game with genuine, believable emotion and drama?

Neil Druckmann: It can be difficult. I don’t want to say it was too difficult – working with such talented actors, I didn’t have to do much! I just tried hard to stay in line with what we were trying to say with the game, and to write simple dialogue. The mantra I had was ‘never get fancy with the dialogue’. Just keep it short and natural. If it ever sounds wrong, change it. The actors were really good at telling me when things weren’t working. We’d spend a lot of time in rehearsals saying lines, ironing them out and making them as natural as possible.

The general themes addressed in The Last of Us’ story are really in vogue at the minute – we’ve had The Road, Revolution and The Walking Dead all cover similar ground. What do you feel you’re bringing to the genre that is new and unique?

Neil Druckmann: All those other things you’ve mentioned are from passive mediums – you’re watching it or reading it. We’re fans of all those things, but we felt in a game – specifically an action game – there was a lot of stuff we could do with mechanics and gameplay that could really get you attached to the characters, to form a relationship through story, performance, dialogue and gameplay mechanics.

With you interacting with Ellie you’re really forming a reliance on this character. We felt that combination was really strong and lacking in games, especially in the survival genre. We felt we could structure everything round this relationship. Every decision has always been – ‘how is this helping this relationship and the goal of forming a bond between Joel and Ellie?’ I really feel we hit on something unique and that’s what people who’ve played the whole game have told us.

Have you played BioShock Infinite yet? How do you feel about how they used their supporting character, Elizabeth?

Neil Druckmann: I haven’t played it yet – I have a backlog to catch up on! But I will say that what we try to do with Ellie is to constantly keep her alive and feeling human. Whether you’re in or out of combat, Ellie should make interesting or surprising decisions on her own.

In a lot of games where you have NPCs that come with you, they’re annoying as you’re essentially babysitting them. We didn’t want that, but we didn’t want the opposite either – them sitting in the corner with enemies ignoring them. If that happens they don’t feel like a real person. For us, it was important that enemies do engage with Ellie. And in combat if you’re being attacked she will pick up a brick and help you. As you progress through the game and she’s spending more and more time with Joel, her abilities grow. You’ll feel like she’s changing as a person.

How expansive is the universe and mythos you’ve created. Have you left space for more stories?

Neil Druckmann: We’ve spent a lot of time researching the world and the disease and how institutions react to a pandemic. But then a lot of that stuff is in the background and we’re very conscious of keeping it there. Because that’s not what the story is about – it’s about these two characters and the journey they go on.

I think the world is ripe for more stories, but as far as the journey Joel and Ellie goes on it ends with this game. We were very conscious that we didn’t want to leave this story dangling. If we never do a sequel we’re ok with it, because we told the story we needed to tell.

What elements have you included to encourage repeat playthoughs?

Neil Druckmann: It’s the longest campaign we’ve ever made – in terms of pure hours. It’s long. And there are more collectables than we’ve ever had, and there’s a lot of backstory you can pick up on through them. You probably won’t find them on your first playthrough.

And then there are RPG elements in how Joel can upgrade his personal skills – how steady he is when aiming, how much health he has, and so on. And there are upgrades for each weapon too, which you can find by scavenging for parts. You won’t find those on your first playthrough, so we’ve got New Game+ encouraging players to go into scenarios and try different strategies.

It’s our most systemic game too. Stealth, how you strategise – each confrontation can play out differently. You can avoid combat altogether if you like. It’s hard, but you can do it.

How have you gone about differentiating the combat from the Uncharted series?

Neil Druckmann: It’s a very different game. I know people try to compare it to Uncharted – but we’ve had players taken aback by how different it is, not just to our other games, but from any game they’ve played before.

For example, running away is a big strategy here. Usually in a shooter you don’t do that. You hunker down and blast away. Here, you’ll really need to run away at times and re-strategise, take stock of you inventory, craft new items and so on. There’s a learning curve at the beginning but then when you get into the flow it’s going to feel very different from anything you’ve played before.

How far is the finished game from the original concept you started out with?

Neil Druckmann: Surprisingly, the core of it has remained pretty much the same. We had the idea for these arcs for the characters and there’s something very specific we wanted to say with the story. That has stayed the same, even when vast parts of the story around it have shifted and gameplay elements have been cut out and replaced. The heart of it is Joel and Ellie and the bond that builds between them remained. That was our original vision and we stuck to it, I’m proud to say.

Any regrets?

Neil Druckmann: If I could go back and change anything? With the team we’ve had and the time we’ve had, we’ve made exactly the game we wanted to play. We always said – let’s not worry about what other people like, or what’s popular, or try to second guess what’s going to be successful to market. Let’s make the game we want to play that doesn’t exist right now. And that’s what we did.

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While delirious with the last bits of E3 planning, we manage to bring you the new releases for June 11th, a heaping helping of listener letters and Gems (thanks guys!), and some impressions and musing on The Last of Us (spoiler free!) at the tail end of the episode. See you at E3!

Stuff We Talked About

• The Last of Us
• E3 2013
• PlayStation E3 2013 LiveCast show
• Next week’s PSN releases
• Aliens, and the Colonial Marines who hunt them
• Flying Hamsters
• Listener Gems of the Week
• The Last of Us

Send us questions and tips: blogcast@playstation.sony.com

The Cast

• Sid Shuman – PlayStation Social Media Manager
• Nick Suttner – PlayStation Account Support Manager
• Justin Massongill – PlayStation Social Media Specialist

[Editor’s note: PSN game release dates are subject to change without notice. Game details are gathered from press releases from their individual publishers and/or ESRB rating descriptions.]

• Thanks to Cory Schmitz for our beautiful logo and Dormilón for our rad theme song and show music.

Naughty Dog, best known for the Uncharted series, has received near universal critical praise for its PS3 swan song The Last of Us. Our review gave it a perfect score, which doesn't mean the game is perfect, it just means that when The Last of Us launches next week, you won't want to be the last of us who plays it.

• Edge (100/100): "At times it's easy to feel like big-budget development has too much on the line to allow stubbornly artful ideas to flourish, but then a game like The Last Of Us emerges through the crumbled blacktop like a climbing vine, green as a burnished emerald."
• Eurogamer (100/100): "It starts out safe but ends brave; it has heart and grit, and it hangs together beautifully. And it's a real video game, too. An elegy for a dying world, The Last of Us is also a beacon of hope for its genre."
• Giant Bomb (100/100): "There are bitter pills to swallow along the way, and nothing is taken for granted, not even characters. People live, people die. Sometimes it's fair, sometimes it's not. It's still a zombie game, but a sobering one. Take a deep breath."
• Gamespot (80/100): "The Last of Us stretches on for hours, forcing you to endure the suffocating atmosphere and unrelenting despair that citizens of this world have become accustomed to. And that time spent navigating the desolate wasteland draws you deeper inside."
• Polygon (75/100): "It's not a fun place to be, and likewise, the game isn't really a fun thing to play."

There was a moment in The Last of Us that was so serene I could have watched it forever. Protagonists Joel and Ellie were finally afforded a breath - a stitch of peace - and I hesitated to nudge them forward. The moment was so starkly different from all the violence that preceded it, so beautiful that it was painful. I could have let them stand there until the disc drive in my PS3 broke down, until the power went out or the world came to an end. The pair had been through so much, it seemed cruel to make them move on.

The Last of Us has a curious inertia though - the stumbling, inevitable momentum of a man off balance - and I couldn't deny it. Whatever laid ahead, I knew that their slow, torturous tumble was far from over.

On the street where you live, there's a house built out of zombie clichés. The porch looks like an abandoned quarantine zone, and the walls are covered with hastily scrawled graffiti. The roof is crafted from the finest wrecked national monuments, and the floors appear to be made of actual zombies. And yet: Two people live in that house. They moved right on in and built a life, and everyone in the neighborhood got to know them and came to care about them a great deal. They had a hard time of it, in that zombie-house. We watched them suffer great loss and abandon hope, then lean on each other and persevere. We became greatly invested in their fortunes. Against the odds, their story moved us. Naughty Dog’s new cinematic action game The Last of Us is that house, built on the skeleton of so many post-apocalyptic stories before it. At every turn, it embraces the tropes of zombie fiction—the fall of government, the refugee-camp cities, the scrawled goodbye notes, the roving bandits and the desperate survivors and the great sacrifices and on, and on. We've been down this road before, dozens of times. And as the game kicks off with one of the most shopworn narrative tropes of all, you'd be forgiven for asking, "Do I really need to do this again?" Yet despite the foundation of overfamiliar zombie junk, the answer to that question is, “Yes, absolutely!” The Last of Us is a rousingly well-made, emotionally grueling work of pop entertainment, and a noteworthy synthesis of game design and character-driven storytelling. It is even, in the end, genuinely surprising. The Last of Us is a third-person action game that consists mainly of sneaking, exploring and shooting. It takes place in North America around the year 2033, twenty years after a freak fungal outbreak infected and killed most of the world's population. And by "infected," I mean "turned into zombies." And by "killed," I mean "killed by the zombies." So, yes, in this zombie game, the zombies are fungus-people. Does that sound horrifying to you? Because they are horrifying. You remember the time io9 wrote about the Cordyceps fungus that overtook and ate that tarantula? And they posted this nightmare-infecting photo? Picture that, but it's alive, and human-shaped, and it wants to kill you. Yeah, pretty much. The two main characters are a world-weary middle-aged smuggler named Joel (Troy Baker) and a 14-year-old girl named Ellie (Ashley Johnson). Against his better judgement, Joel accepts a job to smuggle Ellie out of the relatively safe but frightfully militarized Boston quarantine zone. Things don't go according to plan (cf. zombie clichés number 25, 26 and 27) and in short order the two of them, strangers to one another, set off on an epic adventure across the country. The game's tone is grim yet not quite dour, and refreshingly forthright. Every moment, be it of extreme duress or unexpected grace, is presented in a straightforward manner. It's a lengthy game, yet developer Naughty Dog has managed to keep the tone consistent throughout. This apocalypse is viewed from ground-level. In a world defined by death, what will our children inherit but more death? The Last of Us finds two close literary cousins in P.D. James' The Children of Men (specifically Alfonso Cuarón's heart-stopping cinematic adaptation) and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. McCarthy's intimate horror masterpiece has come into vogue lately among video game developers, and his influence is felt particularly sharply here. The Last of Us displays a distinctly McCarthy-ish naturalism, set at it is in a nightmare world brutally reclaimed by nature. And like The Road, The Last of Us addresses the ways in which our human desire to forge connections with others comes into conflict with our animal will to survive. A partner, we're reminded time and again, will probably just wind up getting us killed. But what good is a life that's lived alone? And in a world defined by death, what will our children inherit but more death? In other words, as with so many post-apocalyptic stories before it—Hello, zombie clichés!—The Last of Us's fungal pandemic is really just table-setting for a much more intimate, human story. Like last year's The Walking Dead game, this isn't actually a tale of zombies and bandits and the end of the world. It's a tale of loss and hope and friendship and family that just happens to feature zombies and bandits and the end of the world. And it’s a fine, worthy tale, at that. It may not come as a surprise that Naughty Dog would successfully blend broad-strokes genre hackery with human-scale storytelling—their Uncharted games swam through oceans of Indiana Jones cliché, buoyed by charisma and wit such that when they were at their best, it was hard to complain about how rote it all was. But the Uncharted games weren't particularly deep or all that consistent in tone, despite some uneven attempts to inject drama into the series' third entry. In comparison, The Last of Us is focused and resolutely humane, a clear evolution of the studio's brand of scripted, linear storytelling. The majority of The Last of Us’s most affecting drama takes place during non-interactive cutscenes. But the game itself—the part you actually control and play—is also well-done. I'd describe the gameplay as "Stealth/Survival," in that you'll spend most of the game crouched around a corner, waiting for a deadly enemy to walk by before pouncing. Sometimes you'll go up against fungus-blind zombies that use echolocation to track you; other times you'll take on human bandits who use their regular ol' eyesight. Depending on your play-style, you might get into frequent firefights, which feel appropriately sloppy and chaotic. You also might sneak past a good amount of the enemies. Ammunition is scarce, as are precious health-restoring medical supplies, so retreat is often the best option. Fortunately, thanks to the cautious and intelligent enemies, it's almost always possible to retreat and regroup, shaking your pursuers and re-engaging from a new angle. Each scenario in the game feels distinct and carefully assembled, and the skirmishes evolve with fluidity. For the most part Naughty Dog avoids the repetitive, copy-paste gunfights that plague so many other big-budget action games, including their own Uncharted series. The open-ended levels allow for a good amount of improvisation, and the limited resources will have players scraping the far ends of their toolkit to survive each encounter. Oh, the panic I felt as I blindly fought my way through my first extended face-off with the infected! I punched and pummeled, smashed bricks into faces and vaulted through empty conference rooms, then I sprinted, climbed, and waited, two bullets remaining in my revolver. The final fungal horror shrieked and dashed at me, deadly as ever. Two shots… one shot… please let this hit. The Last of Us is emphatically not a "fun" game While the default difficulty setting is no walk in the park, The Last of Us really sings on its harder two difficulty settings. That's not just because the enemies are tougher to kill, but because supplies and weapon-crafting materials become so very scarce. When forced to rely on every possible trick and advantage I could muster, I came to appreciate just how much work had gone into making The Last of Us balanced and consistently challenging. Well-made and satisfying though it may be, The Last of Us is emphatically not a "fun" game. It is, in fact, a fine example of just how useless that descriptor has become. The Last of Us is a brutally violent, often horrifying, emotionally exhausting piece of work. It may not have the over-the-top gore of other more cartoonish video games, but its violence has a core of savagery that can be deeply chilling. Joel rushes at a man, crushes his trachea with an elbow, and smashes his jaw into a countertop; Ellie leaps onto another man's shoulders and, screaming and grunting, stabs him over and over with her knife until he crumples to the floor. Over the course of the story, the two protagonists happen upon some exceptionally grim scenarios, and sometimes will commit atrocities of their own. Yet the violence doesn't feel gratuitous. It feels heavy, consequential and necessary. With a few exceptions, the fight sequences are humble in scale: There are 5 men coming for you. They're going to kill you both and take your things. Hide from them, fight them, but whatever you do, survive. Crucially, the characters never act as though violence isn't happening all around them. Unlike many other games of this type, the action sequences and the non-interactive cutscenes don't seem to exist in separate universes. Even in the heat of the moment, Ellie will regularly remark on Joel's brutality, and as the story progresses, both characters come to carry deep physical and emotional scars. That said, The Last of Us does require a degree of suspension of disbelief, and occasionally it doesn’t earn it. Your partner's artificial intelligence will cause some odd things to happen from time to time, and zombies are entirely unable to see Ellie, despite her graceless galumphing around. There's a fair amount of stealth-game wackiness, as enemy AI can behave believably at some times and strangely at others. No man, not even one as fearsome as Joel, could realistically take down as many dozens of armed hunters as he does, and there are some points toward the end of the game where the fight-explore-fight rhythm starts to finally feel predictable. But by and large, The Last of Us trades on being believable rather than being realistic. In that, it succeeds. The story’s impact relies greatly on the weight of the game's difficulty. After finishing, I replayed the first quarter of the game on the "new game plus" setting, which allowed me to carry over my souped-up weaponry and improved stats from the end of the game in a new playthrough. I found that, with the difficulty significantly lowered (you can't play new game plus on a higher difficulty than you finished the game), the story itself lost a lot of its kick. The Last of Us is most cathartic and believable at its most difficult, which nicely illustrates the primary way its gameplay and story intersect. The violence also loses some impact in the game's included multiplayer modes, which I had a chance to sample for a few hours during a Sony-organized session last week. It's a sparse setup, with only two match types—one is a traditional team-based deathmatch, the other "Survivor"-type deathmatch with no respawns. (I greatly preferred the latter mode.) Both multiplayer modes are wrapped in a clever metagame that has you pick one of two factions at the start and earn supplies for your team by winning matches. It's a cool idea in theory, but for the brief amount of time I've spent playing it, I found it to be too abstract. You'll see how many people in your camp are hungry, or sick, or healthy, but I never really got a sense of who they were or what was actually happening. The multiplayer isn't something I'd cite while recommending the game, but it's enjoyable and it certainly doesn't detract Furthermore, with no downtime, the constant human-on-human multiplayer violence becomes overwhelming and loses a lot of its punch. With each grisly finishing move (say, flipping an injured enemy over and putting a bullet into his face as he stares at you, wide-eyed), I became further disconnected from the action until after about a half-hour, I was just playing another third-person shooter. That's not really a slam on the quality of the multiplayer; it's well-made and a good deal of fun on its own. It also rewards smart and stealthy play, which is nice for players like me who don't excel at fast-reflex multiplayer shooters. With only a couple of hours under my belt, I can't yet see the metagame's big picture, and therefore can't make too much of a judgment one way or the other. At the moment, the multiplayer isn't something I'd cite while recommending the game, but it's enjoyable and it certainly doesn't detract. In the singleplayer game, the characters are pushing themselves so hard to survive despite such extreme circumstances that their story is directly informed by the desperate violence they must undertake. That's a noteworthy accomplishment, and an about-face from the dissonance that plagued the Uncharted series. In Uncharted, heroic Nathan Drake was a charming rogue who sometimes happened to kill hundreds of people. In The Last of Us, Joel and Ellie's arc is shaped (and deformed) by the terrible things that you, the player, must help them do to survive. The game represents a deliberate, cohesive attempt to fuse violent gameplay with a character-driven story, and it often succeeds. It bears mention that none of this would have been possible without two outstanding lead performances from Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson. The actors have an uncommon chemistry and fearlessly tackle their roles; time and again they're faced with difficult, emotionally raw material, and time and again they deliver. While the script has no shortage of stomach-dropping histrionics, it's often remarkably subtle. At one point early in the game, a bit of vocal inflection and a quick look between two characters communicates years of backstory. That's thanks in part to a superb script by creative director Neil Druckmann and his writing team, and in part to the no-doubt Heaven-and-Earth efforts of Naughty Dog's technical staff. Their motion capture engineers, directors, and animators have mastered the art of rendering human performance into polygons, all while skirting the uncanny valley. Their work is, at times, jaw-dropping. Over the past couple of years, Baker has revealed himself to be a fine voice-actor, and The Last of Us must now surely be at the top of his resume. If I hadn't known this was the same guy who voiced Booker DeWitt in BioShock Infinite and Two-Face in Batman: Arkham City, I never would have heard him in Joel's weary drawl. As the story drew to a close, I was reminded of a talk given at this year's Game Developers Conference by Walt Williams, lead writer of last year’s military morality play Spec Ops: The Line. "Your main character can never be more righteous than the core mechanic demands," Williams told a room full of game developers. In other words, if the game requires the main character to mercilessly kill people, it cannot also expect the player to think of that character as a hero. Joel is no hero; he's a tired old killer who over the course of his life has done as much harm as good. The game doesn't shy away from that, instead regularly reminding us that Joel's morality is ambiguous at best. Characters allude to Joel's past as a highwayman, how he conscripted those closest to him into the service of murdering the innocent. "We're shitty people, Joel," observes a woman in the story's early goings. "It's been that way for a long time." And yet, thanks largely to Baker's performance, Joel manages to be both relatable and maddeningly enigmatic, a fascinating character not in spite of his flaws but because of them. I sense that his actions over the course of the game will be the subject of much debate, defense, and condemnation. I'm looking forward to it. As good as Baker is, it's Ashley Johnson's Ellie who steals the show. Despite being a 29-year-old actress voicing and performing motion-capture for a 14-year-old character, Johnson is completely convincing. Ellie herself is fierce and sharp, loyal and kind, scared but funny about it, and tougher than any kid her age should have to be. Yes, she's something of a video-game superteen, and sometimes can seem too good to be true. But Johnson plays her with such conviction that I found myself believing in Ellie anyway. I see now why Naughty Dog fought to keep her on the game's cover. The Last of Us is not Joel's game; it's Ellie's. Wasteland cliché or no, the world of The Last of Us feels as consistently believable as the characters. The backdrops have been carefully crafted to tell specific, sometimes wrenching stories, and whatever architectural slight-of-hand was required to keep things moving along has been deftly executed. As Joel and Ellie venture from Boston through rural Massachusetts to Pittsburgh and beyond, every government building, suburban home, abandoned shop and woodland area has been rendered down to the last sewer grating. (And boy oh boy, if there's one message this game would like to impart, it's that Pittsburgh *crag*ing sucks.) You'll have a lot of time to drink in the scenery, since between battles and chase sequences you'll have to explore your surroundings and scavenge whatever parts you can find. Scavenging is necessary to prepare yourself for whatever ordeal will be next, but it also contributes to the game's strong sense of pacing. Often, you'll see something interesting—a movie poster, a photo backdrop—and upon approaching it, will find that Ellie wants to ask Joel about it. These sorts of casual conversations lead to some of the game's best character moments. If there's one message this game would like to impart, it's that Pittsburgh *crag*ing sucks One particularly memorable bit sees Ellie, Joel and two other companions wandering through houses outside of Pittsburgh, slowly getting to know one another while scrounging for supplies. The game goes on for about fifteen minutes with nary a zombie or bandit in sight. What's remarkable isn't just that this segment exists, but that it's far from unique—in fact, that sort of thing happens regularly over the course of the game. That these sections almost feel like a waste—all those art assets and lovely levels, with no one to shoot!—says as much about Naughty Dog's restraint as it does about video gaming's general lack thereof. Special mention must also be given to Gustavo Santaolalla’s musical score. The Argentine guitarist, best known for his Academy Award-winning work on Brokeback Mountain, has imbued the quiet moments of The Last of Us with an eerie mournfulness, all guitar-swells, electric bass melodies and lingering cluster-chords. When enemies are about, dirge-like drones and muted tom-toms summon dread without getting in its way. Santaolalla's work is personal and distinct in a way that big-budget video game soundtracks rarely are. The Last of Us often feels like a crystallization of the big-budget, Hollywood-style video game. It’s constrained by all the limitations of a rigidly linear, movie-like video game experience, even as it is a smashingly well-executed example of the form. For a variety of reasons, the video game industry does not appear ready to make a non-violent, character-driven big-budget game, and so game developers must find a way to embrace character amid the shooting and the zombies. That Naughty Dog has succeeded feels noteworthy, another step toward worthwhile, affecting video-game stories that aren't built entirely on worn-out genre tropes. That being said, art isn't so much about the what as it is about the how. And The Last of Us, from its overfamiliar beginning to its shocking ending, reflects the courage of its makers' convictions. It is a terrific feat of storytelling, design, art direction and performance. As it turns out, good things still reside within the house of cliché. To contact the author of this post, write to kirk@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @kirkhamilton.

Over the past few days we invited media to play our The Last of Us multiplayer mode called Factions. Most of these impressions are available online now but you’ll be seeing more as our review embargo on the game ends very soon. The multiplayer is an extension of the themes you’ll find in the single player game. The moment-to-moment survival present in the single-player campaign is integral to the multiplayer. You’ll feel tension and need to be intensely alert at all times. We want to show you a glimpse of what the gameplay looks like.

In Factions you’ll have to pick a side and roll with the Hunters or the Fireflies. Each player starts with a small clan of survivors that you need to keep alive and grow. There are two modes in which you can accomplish the growth and survival of your Clan. In Supply Raid, you’ll have to scavenge the area and keep your team alive. Your team has a pool of twenty reinforcements. Once the reinforcements have been exhausted, the match will go into sudden death. In Survivors, you’re going to have to be extremely vigilant. There are no respawns. Once you’re gone you’ve been eliminated until the next round. It’s a best of seven rounds in which the first team to win four rounds wins the match.

The core gameplay is very tactical, featuring the same crafting system found in the single player experience. Stealthy players can do well by using Listen Mode to locate enemies and flank them with silenced weapons. Teamwork is essential – fallen teammates can crawl to their allies and be revived, so players who stick together will excel. Melee combat is a brutal affair, and after downing a player you have the choice of performing an execution move. There are many more layers to explore, from the robust loadout system to the in-game economy. We can’t wait to see you online!

Pre-Order The Last of Us to receive some cool multiplayer items via the Survival DLC Pack. Pairing with the initial game offerings if you buy the Season Pass you’ll be entitled to receive even more multiplayer content when we release newly created DLC we’re planning for the game.

The Last of Us is available globally June 14, 2013.

Showing up casually late to the marketing party, here's a trailer featuring the multiplayer modes in The Last of Us. They seem to draw from the same well of brutality and paranoia evident in the single-player game.

Naughty Dog's The Last of Us has multiplayer. Not that it needs it, but hey, video games. While there's no official footage of the mode in action, this clip appears to have been prematurely posted (it doesn't appear to be viewable anymore) by Spanish site Hobby Consolas. Let's not be too harsh; it's leaked footage, so there might actually be modes in there that actually take advantage of the game's unique setting. Then again, going by this interview with Game Informer, I guess not. Team deathmatch variations it is. The Last of Us Multiplayer Gameplay Leaked [YouTube, thanks Justin!]

Games on PlayStation platforms are renowned for their rich and vibrant artistic history. This is reinforced by PlayStation’s repeated inclusion in Into the Pixel, a videogame-themed art show that runs during E3 each year.

This year sees the induction of two new pieces from PlayStation’s ever-growing gallery. Remembering, from Naughty Dog’s impending survival epic The Last of Us, portrays a young, reflecting survivor in a post-pandemic world.

The Last of Us

Remembering by John Sweeney

“Lighting played a huge role throughout the creative process on “The Last of Us”. In this piece, I wanted the lighting to feel inviting and illustrate Ellie remembering what life could have been like before the pandemic.”

– John Sweeney, Concept Artist

And representing Wonderbook’s upcoming interactive mystery Diggs Nightcrawler, Three Blind Mice puts a noir spin on the ubiquitous nursery rhyme.

Wonderbook: Diggs Nightcrawler

Three Blind Mice by Tyler Schatz and Christina Faulkner

I really enjoyed working with such a hardworking, dedicated and talented team on Diggs Nightcrawler. For me, it is a major honor to have Diggs be a part of Into the Pixel among a tremendous foray of talented artists.

- Tyler Schatz, Moonbot Studios

Growing up, what I loved about video games is that they were set in fully fleshed out, unrealistic worlds that were crazy and cartoony. We wanted to do something like that with Diggs Nightcrawler and I’m really honored that our work was chosen for Into the Pixel.

– Christina Faulkner, Moonbot Studios

Those that don't have a copy of God of War: Ascension won't be able to play the free Outskirts level demo from The Last of Us until the game launches on June 14. To alleviate the pains of said folks, YouTuber HystericalGamez uploaded a full 14-minute video of their playthrough of the demo.

While watching the Outskirts level isn't the same as playing it, we recommend clicking the full-screen option and holding a PS3 controller while the demo video plays. Be wary of your boss believing that you're playing games at work, though.

[Thanks, Fabian!]

If you have a copy of God of War: Ascension, you can check out a free The Last of Us demo today. Access the demo through Ascension's main menu, which will auto-direct to the PlayStation Store and queue up the download.

The demo contains the Outskirts level of The Last of Us, where Joel, Ellie and Tess must take on multiple infected - including the clickers we tussled with earlier this year.

The Last of Us is Naughty Dog's latest, the story of mankind's attempt to survive the fungi-infected remnants of an apocalyptic outbreak from two decades ago. Protagonists Ellie and Joel will also need to avoid other human beings on their journey across a ravaged United States.

In transitioning from PS3 to PS4 development, Naughty Dog will use its current in-house engine that powers PS3 game The Last of Us. Naughty Dog game director Bruce Straley says this is in contrast to the studio's strategy transitioning from PS2 to PS3, where the developer scrapped its competent Jak & Daxter engine in favor of an entirely new one for the first Uncharted game.

"We scrapped everything at the beginning of Uncharted 1, and we had a perfectly good engine with the Jak & Daxter franchise," Straley tells Digital Spy. "We could have started with something there and then built off of it and only changed the pieces and parts as we needed, when we needed. And that really caused a lot of turmoil." Naughty Dog will now make modular adjustments to its existing tech as needed for story and game design.

The Last of Us launches on PS3 June 14. A season pass was announced earlier this week, marking Naughty Dog's first foray into single-player DLC content.

As you’ll find out in just two weeks’ time, Naughty Dog’s rabidly-anticipated new survival adventure The Last of Us does a phenomenal job of making you really care about its two protagonists, Joel and Ellie.

Partly through Neil Druckman’s nuanced writing, partly through the tactile, reactive gameplay, and partly through the pitch-perfect performances of the voiceover cast, The Last of Us packs an almighty emotional wallop to go with its blockbuster action set-pieces. It’s bar-setting stuff from the Uncharted studio, and these are characters that will resonate with you long after the game’s epic conclusion.

To find out a little more about how Naughty Dog pulled it off, we sat down for a quick chat with Ashley Johnson, the young actress bringing world-weary teen Ellie to life.

PlayStation.Blog: How did you first get involved with the project?

Ashley Johnson: My voice-over agent sent me the audition and asked if I’d be interested in doing a video game. She warned me that it was motion capture and that whole thing. I said yes, so I went out for the audition and met with Neil, Bruce and Evan. I did a few auditions and got the part. After that I put on the mo-cap suit and we did auditions for Joel, until we finally settled on Troy (Baker).

PSB: How did you get on with mo-cap? Was it your first time?

AJ: Yes, it was my first. It’s been really fun. It was definitely difficult at first to get over the fact that you’re wearing this really strange suit but once you get into the scene and get into the character… Neil would show us all the environments and we’d get to see pictures of the world we were in – that made it pretty easy. PSB: Does the suit make it more difficult to really inhabit the character? “I actually think it helps in a lot of ways.”

AJ: It definitely was very different for me because I’m not used to it. Sometimes when you’re playing a character, how you’re dressed or what shoes you have on, that changes the way you walk and how you act. So when you have that funny suit on – just a skin-tight jumpsuit – and your hands are covered, and you have a sock on your head, it can be a little challenging at first!

But a couple of hours in you get used to it. I actually think it helps in a lot of ways. You have to expand your imagination a little bit more, which I think is really good.

PSB: Have you played the final game yet?

AJ: I’ve played parts of it. I haven’t been given a finished copy yet. But I’ve played parts when I’ve visited Naughty Dog. I’ve been tempted to play more… but I want to wait. I want to experience it as a whole. I don’t like spoilers and I don’t like watching trailers – I like to play something from start to finish.

PSB: Has what you have seen of Ellie in the game surprised you at all?

AJ: It’s very weird. I think if you were voicing a character and then you see that person walking around with your body movements you’d think it was weird too. Weird and exciting. Mostly I’m just so excited that it’s done and I can’t wait for people to play it, knowing where the story goes. It’s going to be good!

The decision comes from a desire to avoid past mistakes, game director Bruce Straley told Digital Spy. This isn't the first time that Naughty Dog, the studio behind action-adventure franchises Uncharted and The Last of Us, have talked about the difficulties they faced when moving from the PS2 to PS3. Now, the lessons they've learned are spurring them to keep their tried and true game engine instead of creating a new one from scratch. "We scrapped everything at the beginning of Uncharted 1, and we had a perfectly good engine with the Jak & Daxter franchise," Straley said. "We could have started with something there and then built off of it and only changed the pieces and parts as we needed, when we needed. And that really caused a lot of turmoil." He went on to describe how they plan to approach the hurdles of moving consoles this time around. "We learned our lesson in saying, as we move into development into next-gen, we want to take our current engine, port it immediately over as is and say, 'Okay, we have a great AI system, we have a good rendering system'. We have all these things that already work. Only when we hit a wall will we say, 'When do we need to change something? When do we need to scale it?" Naughty Dog have used the same engine for all Uncharted games and the upcoming The Last of Us, and will keep using it for many years to come. Let's hope it continues to serve them well. Naughty Dog will use existing Uncharted, The Last of Us engine for PS4 [Digital Spy] Questions? Comments? Contact the author of this post at andras-AT-kotaku-DOT-com.

For two years, the developers at Naughty Dog managed to successful keep one of the biggest secrets in gaming. So how is it that they almost spoiled their own surprise in front of millions of gamers? Ah, that's a good story. (No spoilers, I promise!) What happened? "We screwed up," Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann recently told me, now that he's able to laugh about it. Druckmann is the creative director of The Last of Us, a post-disaster survival-action game that his studio was making in secret since 2009 all the way until December 11, 2011 when it was announced during the Spike Video Game Awards. This was a game from one of the most respected video game studios on Earth, a game that dozens of people were working on, a game that somehow didn't leak to Kotaku or any other outlet. Except that it almost did and, if it happened, it would have been Naughty Dog's fault. That's the short version. The long version, about how Naughty Dog put a Last of Us easter egg in Uncharted 3, thought The Last of Us would be announced before Uncharted 3 came out and then... forgot that the easter egg was in there!... can now be told. Let's go back to 2011. Let's go back to Naughty Dog's big November release of that year and take a look at this little easter egg that was posted online on December 8: Seems subtle enough, right? Someone found a newspaper in Uncharted 3 that mentioned a fungus. Viral advertising for a mystery game called The Last of Us had been making the rounds. It seemed to involve a killer fungus. A connection! And a complication: Naughty Dog, though, was obviously a studio that only made one game at a time. Couldn't be them, right? Here's IGN's Greg Miller back then, trying to work the same rumor and thinking the same things the rest of us were: Got all that? Then get this exchange I had with Druckmann and The Last of Us game director Bruce Straley a couple of weeks ago. Now it can be told! Kotaku: Can I ask—given all the secrecy behind this game—are you able to tell me the story about how it is that the easter egg or teaser for this game got put in Uncharted 3? What's the origin of that? Neil Druckmann, creative director: [laughs] Originally we were going to announce The Last of Us at E3 of that year [so June, 2011] and then we ended up... Kotaku: The year of the [December 2011] VGA trailer announcement... Druckmann: Yeah. So we said, 'Okay, it would be cool. The game will be announced and then Uncharted 3 will come out afterwards. So the designer [of the November 2011-scheduled Uncharted 3] came up to us and said, 'Do you mind if I put in this Easter Egg? So after somebody played Uncharted 3, they'll be like, oh, they're talking about The Last of Us.' 'Cool.' And then we ended up pushing when we announced it and forgot about the newspaper. We just completely forgot about it. Kotaku: When did you remember you had it in there? Druckmann: [laughs] When it was found. When it was discovered, a week before the VGAs. Bruce Straley, game director: [laughs] When it was online. Druckmann: We were in a meeting and we get a text from one of the designers saying, 'Cat's out of the bag.' We were like, what f...? We've held it this long! Druckmann: I'm like, 'Oh no, we've been found out.' Straley: We didn't know. What does 'cat's out of the bag' mean? We get over there and there's just this energy. Druckmann: We walk back to the design pod, and the designer who put it in comes up to me and he's like, 'I just want you to know, you approved it! You approved it.' And I'm like, 'Approved what?' And then we went on NeoGAF or something and someone's like, 'There's the newspaper there.' I'm like, 'Oh no, we've been found out.' And then the awesome things is... we don't know how it happened, but everyone was like, 'It can't be Naughty Dog, because they just shipped Uncharted 3.' Straley: 'They only have one team.' Druckmann: 'They've got to be doing a favor for someone. It's Sony Santa Monica!' Straley: 'It's Guerilla Games. It's got to be Guerilla Games!' Kotaku: It's the new Killzone! Straley: One guy posted something like, 'No guys, I think it's Naughty Dog. For real!' And everyone else is like... Druckmann: 'Don't be an idiot! They're a one-game studio.' Kotaku: Was that you? Was that you in there posing? Straley: I don't have an account. Yeah, that was luck. Kotaku: You had approved the easter egg? When the designer showed it to you, did that come flooding back to you? Druckmann: Yeah. We forgot about it. We should have taken it out. We screwed up. Straley: These games are so big, right? They're several hours long. Every single pixel has to be touched. Every animation is created from hand. It's overwhelming. You can't look over every detail. So this one little thing in the background, nobody's thinking about that. Well, that's one that they wouldn't have been able to blame on us. The game was subsequently announced on December 11, shocking plenty of people. And we'll finally all be able to play the game on PS3 on June 14. To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo.

Naughty Dog is venturing into single-player DLC for the first time with The Last of Us. The Uncharted developer announced the season pass for its latest PS3 project this week, revealing it'll entitle buyers to three pieces of The Last of Us DLC, including one for single-player. The other two feature maps and other additions for the multiplayer, a mode which Naughty Dog has been very coy about. The studio promises more info about The Last of Us' multiplayer later this week - which is handy, since the game is out in just over two weeks.

The game's season pass is priced $19.99, and Naughty Dog says that equates to a 30 percent saving on the individual pieces of DLC. In addition to the DLC, the season pass includes some 'Day 1 Bonuses,' namely a number of in-game upgrades and an "exclusive" 90-minute making of documentary called 'Grounded.' Which you probably won't watch on Day 1, seeing as you'll have just gotten the game.

The Last of Us arrives in just a few weeks. We’re happy to let you know you can pre-order the full digital edition of the game starting today on the PlayStation Store. The game will be a Day 1 Digital download — this means you can get it at midnight on June 14th. The digital edition features a unique download installer which will allow you to start playing the game once the game data is a little over half way downloaded.

The Last of Us is a universe rich in character and story with many facets that we could potentially explore for years. We’re getting started by announcing that there will be three packs of downloadable content for The Last of Us available after the game launches.

If you want to lock in all three of those DLC packs at discounted price, step up now and grab the Season Pass. The Last of Us Season Pass DLC is available for pre-order now on PlayStation Store — only $19.99 for three DLC Packs. This is a 30% savings over the pricing of the DLC packs individually. The Season Pass will be available at your local GameStop when you pick up The Last of Us, as well. Unique to Season Pass buyers are the following Day 1 bonuses:

Day 1 Bonuses

• Increased Crafting Speed
• Increased Healing Speed
• 9mm Reload Speed Upgrade
• Rifle Clip Capacity Upgrade
• Grounded – exclusive 90min “Making of The Last of Us” documentary

These Day 1 bonuses will help you get a head start and an edge in Joel and Ellie’s struggle to survive through the single player campaign of The Last of Us. The documentary, Grounded, is an in-depth look at the making of The Last of Us throughout its development by Area 5.

For the first time ever we’ll be offering single player DLC. The journey and cast of characters in The Last of Us lends itself to thorough narrative exploration and we’ve got more of the story to tell. The two other DLC packs will feature multiplayer content in the form of additional multiplayer maps and other expansions. You’ll be hearing about our multiplayer over the next couple of days. It’s an experience that continues the themes, tone and tension from the single player campaign and we can’t wait to tell you more about it.

Pre-Order the full digital edition of The Last of Us as well as The Last of Us Season Pass now on the PlayStation Store. Not going digital yet? Look for the Season Pass when you get your game in retail stores on launch day, June 14th, 2013.