Coping with The Last of Us on PC has been an adventure

destructoid.com:

Before I begin, let me discuss the article I planned to write about The Last of Us on PC.

I agreed to cover the PC port of this game because, somehow, in 2023, I do not know a single thing about The Last of Us. I’ve dodged all story spoilers, and I deliberately avoided the HBO series so I could play this game completely blind. My logic was this would be a refreshing take, especially with the impending decade anniversary of the original game’s release. I even workshopped some jokes about how I was too busy grinding Pokemon effort values at the time to play one of the most critically acclaimed video games ever made.

I mean, what else was I going to talk about? The performance?

In case you haven’t heard, The Last of Us on PC is a mess. It’s a classic case where a critically acclaimed game debuts on Steam with a negative review consensus. We all know what this means; this article now must unfortunately become a technical analysis of The Last of Us. I am about 5% as qualified to talk about these things as some hardware masters; but I do have a pretty new computer to play with, so I have that going for me.

For context, here’s what I’m working with in terms of specs:

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core Processor NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 1TB WD Blue SN550 M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD 32 GB RAM* (I’ll come back to this)

News of The Last of Us’ nonsense port reached my ears quickly, but I wasn’t too worried at first. Elden Ring was similarly review bombed on launch, but I had still a great time with that port. I’ve also enjoyed the Resident Evil 4 remake on nearly maxed settings, even though the RE Engine has faced criticism for its PC performance.

Maybe The Last of Us will have issues, but I mean, look at my specs! I decided to treat my mid-pandemic