The Last of Us Part 1 made its PC debut on Steam, but it seems like Naughty Dog’s survival horror remake needed a bit more time. The game received mostly negative Steam reviews within hours of its release, with players citing crashes, poor framerates, strange graphics glitches, and horrible Steam Deck optimization – despite series co-creator Neil Druckmann suggesting it would work on Valve’s handheld platform.
The game has high minimum and recommended specifications, though many of the negative reports are coming from users with high-end PCs that meet or exceed these requirements.
I would avoid Last of Us part 1 on PC right now until it's fixed. Lots of reports of crashes and 60+% of reviews on Steam are "mostly negative." It also takes an hour to build the shaders on the Steam Deck and runs at under 30fps even on low / med settings as it's not verified pic.twitter.com/UNUY0oR2vW
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) March 28, 2023
The launch comes after PlayStation ported several of its first-party games to PC with far fewer issues. Horizon Zero Dawn, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and God of War launched with few or no substantial problems, though Returnal suffered from a series of random “fatal error” messages.
When The Last of Us Part 1 does run, it’s not exactly at its best.
Joel Last of Us on Steam Deck is SENDING me pic.twitter.com/TUq1F0zPEa
— Kyle Campbell (@Levit0) March 29, 2023
this is one of the funniest bugs i've ever seen: The Last of Us (PC port) characters "get wet during a cutscene for no reason" 💦😓https://t.co/tlI4F51a0q pic.twitter.com/suq5aD2FOq
— Dan Nguyen (@dancow) March 29, 2023
The Few of Us dropped on PC 🔥 pic.twitter.com/599iCzJzjB
— Mols ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) | RE4r (@MollyDaTrolley) March 29, 2023
Several players reported Joel looking odd in different ways thanks to what seems like a problem with light rendering. The Steam Deck takes several hours just to load the shaders, which it has to do every time it launches the game, and once it does start, some players reported only getting framerates in the single digits – before it crashed completely.
One user said you can fix the shader loading issue by installing an older version of Oodle decompression library to bypass the bugged, newer version the game ships with. That seemingly won’t fix the framerate, graphics, and crashing issues, though.
Naughty Dog said on Twitter that the team is aware of the game’s issues and will work on addressing them in a series of patches. The studio didn’t mention a timeline for when these updates might launch or what problems will receive higher priority.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
