The Last of Us Poster Collection review

The Last of Us was a fantastic achievement in storytelling and art direction – in fact, we liked it so much that we named it 2013’s Game of the Year. It was a triumph, a marriage of narrative, gameplay, characters that, while seeming to tread familiar ground, took us on a journey rarely seen in video games. And while it was released on rapidly aging hardware, the developers at Naughty Dog pulled off some amazing tricks, and helped make The Last of Us one of the best looking games of the last generation of hardware.

If anything, the poster set by Insight Editions only serves to highlight that.

Insight Editions’ The Last of Us: The Poster Collection features 40 different 12 x 16 posters for your wall-hanging approval. Like the Elder Scrolls poster set, each of the posters in this set are made from heavy-duty cardstock, easily removable, and feature impressive color quality. And while not every single image is one you’d likely frame for posterity, there are enough in here that make it worth the plunge.

Some of my favorites include a few comic-book inspired title cards, a whimsically cartoony depiction of Joel and Ellie, replete with a word balloon containing a singular picture of a giraffe, as well as posters for the fictional teen romance Dawn of the Wolf. There are also a lot of brilliant pieces of concept art – a desolate highway overrun with broken-down cars and swaths of foliage, or Joel shining a singular light in an abandoned subway station. There are some really jaw-droppingly stunning pictures in here, all serving to highlight the destroyed beauty of the world of The Last of Us.

Unfortunately, the rest of the collection is filled out with bland, black and white headshots used from the press materials. They’re not bad images, but I doubt anyone would specifically choose those over some of the other far more interesting pieces included. Luckily, these images only make up about a third of the collection, so there’s plenty of good stuff here.

And just like the Elder Scrolls collection, each of the included posters are double-sided. It’s unfortunate, because it means you’ll likely have to decide on whether or not you’ll want to display one particular image over its B-side. It likely made economic sense, but it’s still disappointing when you have a collection of 40 images that are ostensibly supposed to be all mounted up for the world to see, and then being forced to decide on half of that.

Still, at $24.99, this collection of high-quality posters will fit the bill for anyone looking to spice up their home or work space with some absolutely stellar video game artwork. The Last of Us was second to none last year in its beautiful apocalypse, and this collection makes that readily apparent.

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