You’re looking for a replacement, right?
The Last of Us will be remembered as one of the greatest games in history, although it was always mechanically flawed. It’s just a fact. Naughty Dog and Neil Druckmann created a setting and story that was so iconic that we are still feeling the effects today. Gamers never stopped debating whether Joel was right, and HBO’s The Last of Us had pretty impressive ratings.
But what should you play if you’ve already completed both parts of The Last of Us countless times? The question is quite difficult, because different people like radically different things in it: some like the story of Joel and Ellie, some like the gameplay elements, and some like the inventive zombie setting and the atmosphere of the world where you need to be afraid of everything and survive. We tried to find a replacement for The Last of Us to suit every taste.
The Walking Dead (2012 – 2019)
Telltale’s video game adaptation of The Walking Dead isn’t exactly a game, strictly speaking. To a much greater extent, this is a specific interactive movie where you need to make choices and decide which character will live to see the next chapter, and to whom we say goodbye forever. As a rule, this did not play any significant role and was an illusion, which is why many people dislike Telltale’s The Walking Dead. But! One element of it worked well.
During a zombie apocalypse, a grown man named Lee Everett takes responsibility for a little girl named Clementine, who does not know where her parents are. The Walking Dead (especially at the beginning) is their journey. All the other characters, whether they are friends or enemies, just pass in the background, while the real drama unfolds around Lee’s father and Clementine’s daughter. Doesn’t remind you of anything? Of course, The Last of Us is stronger story-wise, but The Walking Dead has some powerful moments. Especially if you came specifically for the story.
Project Zomboid (2013)
A great zombie apocalypse survival simulator and one of the most ambitious indie games in history. At first glance, Project Zomboid doesn’t look like The Last of Us at all. But! Mentally return to the world of Joel and Ellie so that you can look at events from a great height. What’s happening? People are rushing around, trying to escape from zombies, meeting and losing each other.
This is exactly what happens in Project Zomboid. The world is doomed, but you can hold on as long as your skills allow. Skilled players can literally go from searching for rotten apples in someone’s kitchen to creating their own little settlement filled with survivors you meet in a variety of circumstances. And if it works, this world will seem even more alive to you than The Last of Us.
Days Gone (2019)
Okay, this choice may seem strange, but only at first glance. Yes, Days Gone is a game about a biker Deacon who fights hordes of zombies, and, first of all, it is an action game. But did you even consider how many opponents Joel took on in the first part of The Last of Us? His frag counter is definitely lower than Deacon’s, but still quite impressive. Still, that’s not the only reason to try Days Gone after The Last of Us.
The second best thing about the game, after the zombie hordes (and they are very well done), is the post-apocalyptic Oregon setting. The Last of Us has become a cult due to the fact that wherever we look, the ultra-detailed appearance of American landscapes destroyed by cordyceps will catch our eye. Days Gone also runs great on this fuel. Not to mention, it’s just fun to play.
A Plague Tale: Innocence (2019) и A Plague Tale: Requiem (2022)
There are no zombies here, but there is plague and the French Inquisition. Otherwise, both parts of A Plague Tale really resemble The Last of Us in moments, including gameplay. We play as a girl named Amicia, who is trying to save herself and her little brother Hugo. But this is not a sweet story at all. Especially Requiem.
Like Ellie, Hugo is a special child. We won’t reveal the plot twist, but it’s even more special than you think. And the ending of the story of A Plague Tale: Requiem raises no less complex questions than what happened in The Last of Us. If for you the world of TLoU is, first of all, hopelessness, terrible danger and evil people around, here you will get exactly what you like. But from a completely different angle.
Resident Evil 2 Remake (2019)
A remake of a classic of the genre and one of the best parts of Resident Evil. Nominally, a remake of the fourth part would suit us, because there the main character also protects a girl, but Resident Evil 4 is the game where Shinji Mikami went crazy and wrote a rather fun-crazy story. So no, we stay in Resident Evil 2, where Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield try to survive among hordes of zombies.
It’s interesting that all these destroyed structures in the first part of The Last of Us were reminiscent of individual elements of Resident Evil 2 even at release, and the remake of Resident Evil 2 is already more reminiscent of The Last of Us, because you need to take visual references from the best. Both games really seem to borrow some elements from each other. Of course, The Last of Us seems more grounded than any Resident Evil, but there are still a lot of common elements between them.
Death Stranding (2019)
Oddly enough, Hideo Kojima’s courier simulator is one of the best substitutes for The Last of Us. Why? Because this is the only game that convincingly fills in the gaps between individual episodes in the adventures of Joel and Ellie. How do people move in post-apocalypse conditions? What decisions need to be made? What specific distances are covered? This is all Death Stranding.
However, here you need to understand something important. Death Stranding is a game from Hideo Kojima, so the dialogue and interface will torture you more than any enemy in the game. But here’s what no one tells you: the game really begins after ten hours, when it finally lets you go on your own journey and allows you to freely go out, building routes and logistics.
It turns out that making connections between points is the most interesting part of Death Stranding. Much more interesting than the plot. It has a huge scope for decision-making and a cool set of tools to independently understand how to navigate in a dangerous and abandoned world. But this is the part of The Last of Us that we all imagined, but could not experience in practice.
