An investigation into The Last of Us remake showed that Naughty Dog fixed the windows and extra balls, but hid the moon and forgot about the turbine on the dam

In the dockside industrial zone from the opening of The Last of Us, there's a brick building with five second-floor windows arranged in a two-one-two pattern. Each window is nearly square and divided into 16 panes, with the side pairs hanging almost flush against each other. Inside, though, the second-floor layout doesn't match the facade at all.

That's the observation that kicks off a new video from YouTuber Any Austin. The 2022 remake fixed the mismatch between the facade and the interior, and while they were at it, developers redid the entire bakery where the player stands. It now has a believable number of ovens for a space that size, smoke detectors, and properly placed emergency exit signs.

To check things out, Austin played through the entire 2013 original and flagged seven highly specific details in the most recognizable locations. He then compared each one against the remake.

The first spot shows up in the very first mission. In the alley next to Joel apartment in the quarantine zone, there are suspiciously many sports balls scattered around, a collection that doesn't repeat anywhere else in the first chapter. The remake removed almost all of them, leaving just a single soccer ball in the corner.

The second location actually exists in real life. The Old State House in Boston, built around 1710, was recreated fairly loosely in the original – missing the round windows, with an incorrect pattern around the clock, and a balcony that's too wide and made from the wrong material. Austin even checked whether architectural copyright might explain the changes, but ruled that out since the building is too old to be protected.

The remake closed some of that gap. The round windows are back, the clock pattern got fixed, and the balcony is now white, though its width remains unchanged. That last part makes sense practically, since a fight breaks out inside the museum just minutes after you get a look at the facade, and the extra space gives players room to maneuver.

The third check involves Jane's bakery from Bill's chapter. In the original, ketchup and hot sauce sit on the counter, and the menu on the wall advertises ice cream, despite the building having no freezer cases or refrigeration equipment of any kind. The remake added a refrigerator and a walk-in freezer, swapped the condiments for coffee pods, and cut ice cream from the menu entirely, leaving only various cupcake fillings.

The Pittsburgh hotel marks the first failure. The room you climb into from outside is barricaded with five mattresses and is laid out so large that the TV sits roughly six meters from the bed. One floor up sits a room with no door at all, accessible only through a hole in the floor, and none of that changed in the remake.

In the suburbs, Austin broke down the markings painted on house facades, known as Katrina crosses. The top section shows the inspection date, the left indicates who conducted the search, the bottom shows the number of people found alive or dead inside, and the right lists hazards like rats. Neither the original nor the remake actually matches house interiors to these markings, even in cases where the interiors were heavily redesigned.

Tommy dam earns the third strike. A real hydroelectric setup needs a generator, a flywheel, and a housing with flowing water running through it, but the game only includes the first two parts, with the turbine itself missing entirely. The remake added detail to the water intake grates and included a sign marking the intake system, but the core structure of the machine stayed the same.

The final check turned out to be the trickiest. Using the wiki, Austin determined that the final hospital mission takes place on the night of April 28, 2034, in Salt Lake City. He compared the game's skybox against Stellarium and couldn't find a single matching constellation. Based on the moon position, he calculated the in-game time at around 11:33 PM, and also noticed the game shows a full moon, even though reality would call for a waxing gibbous moon on that date.

The remake sidestepped the whole issue. Developers swapped the clear starry sky for an overcast, rainy one to match the emotional climax of the scene, so now the moon only shows up as a faint glow behind the clouds.

Final tally – three successful upgrades against four misses.