I know most people probably wouldn’t even put The Last of Us in the same category as Splinter Cell, Thief, Hitman or Metal Gear, but after replaying both games I genuinely think the stealth is better than in any of them.
A big part of it is the resource scarcity. The games don’t force you to use stealth, but they constantly give you reasons to. Ammo is limited, crafting materials are limited, silencers break, arrows can disappear. You can go in shooting, but there’s always that thought in the back of your head that you might really need those bullets later.
I’m currently doing a playthrough where I try to take down as many enemies as possible with bricks, bottles and my fists, and it’s honestly some of the most fun I’ve had with the game. A brick isn’t just a distraction. You can stun someone with it, rush them, throw it at another enemy, use the chaos to escape, or turn the whole encounter into a messy fistfight.
That’s probably my favourite thing about the stealth in these games: your approach is heavily influenced by whatever you happen to have in your backpack at that moment.
Sometimes you have arrows, a silenced pistol and enough crafting materials to clear an area without anyone noticing. Ten minutes later you’re out of everything and have to come up with something completely different. Maybe you sneak past half the enemies. Maybe you lure two of them into the same place with a bottle. Maybe you deliberately start a fight because there’s no realistic way to quietly kill everyone.
The game keeps pushing you out of your usual routine.
I also really like how low-tech everything feels. Listen Mode obviously gives you an advantage, but it still fits the world much better than having drones, cameras, enemy markers and a minimap full of icons. You get a vague idea of where someone is, but you still have to pay attention to footsteps, voices and movement.
The enemy AI is a huge part of it too. They spread out, search rooms, check hiding places, call out your last known position and keep looking for a surprisingly long time. It often feels like they’re actually trying to find you rather than just running through a short “alert” animation before going back to normal.
They also behave differently depending on what weapons they have. Someone with a melee weapon might suddenly rush you when you think you’re safe, while enemies with guns are more likely to stay in cover, flank you or try to keep you pinned down.
And they have actual personality. They talk to each other, call each other by name, react when they find a body and sometimes sound genuinely scared. It makes a massive difference. You’re not just clearing a room full of anonymous guards.
Something else I don’t see mentioned enough is how much the different enemy senses affect your tactics.
Clickers can’t see, but they hear almost everything. Dogs can follow your scent. Stalkers are so quiet and unpredictable that Listen Mode often isn’t much help. Then the game starts mixing those enemy types together, so suddenly you’re not only thinking about lines of sight. You’re thinking about sound, smell, movement and which enemy is capable of noticing what.
That makes the encounters feel much less repetitive than they probably should.
The games also keep adding little twists. Sometimes there’s a sniper covering the whole area. Sometimes an armoured vehicle is hunting you. Sometimes infected appear in the middle of a fight with humans and the entire situation changes. Even when the basic mechanics stay the same, the circumstances keep changing.
And then there’s the atmosphere, which is probably impossible to separate from the gameplay.
The human enemies often feel more threatening to me than the infected because they’re so similar to the player. They’re scared, desperate and trying to survive, and they’re using the same kind of improvised tactics you are. It doesn’t feel like sneaking through a level full of guards. It feels like being hunted by other survivors.
The ruined buildings, overgrown streets, abandoned homes and all those little notes you find also give the locations a sense of history. You understand what happened there, who lived there and how everything fell apart. It makes the world feel like an actual place instead of a series of stealth arenas.
Other stealth games like MGSV or Dishonored are also really really good. But none of them combine improvisation, resource management, enemy behaviour, atmosphere and tension this well.
At least for me, nothing else comes close.
