Join Joel and Ellie as they travel through Pittsburgh in a house based on Naughtydog’s “The Last of Us” at Halloween Horror Nights 32 in Universal Studios Florida.
The Last of Us
You and your squad will encounter the haunting and overgrown world of the video game in a brand-new, terrifying way. Stay silent if you want to survive a multitude of Clickers, Hunters, and more.
The house takes guests inside the post-apocalyptical world of “The Last of Us” in honor of the 10th anniversary of the 2013 video game. After a fungal infection from a strain of the Cordyceps mushroom causes mass death and transforms Infected into monsters, survivors are mostly held in Quarantine Zones (QZs). Twenty years after the outbreak, Joel Miller is a middle-aged survivor who smuggles and kills to survive. He takes on a mission to transport a young girl, Ellie Williams, to a band of insurgents called the Fireflies. Ellie is immune to the infection and the Fireflies think they can study her to reverse engineer a vaccine.
The house takes guests through the Pittsburgh QZ (changed to Kansas City in HBO’s “The Last of Us” adaptation), a fan-favorite section of the original game when Joel and Ellie meet up with brothers Sam and Henry, and must battle their way past Raiders, Hunters, and plenty of Infected to escape.
Voice actors Troy Baker (Joel) and Ashley Johnson (Ellie) reprised their roles for re-recorded and new dialogue in the house.
The house picks up immediately after Joel and Ellie have crashed their truck in the Pittsburgh QZ and are ambushed—not by Infected but by human raiders. Of course, Infected show up soon after.
Joel appears in the first room, alongside the crashed truck. There’s one live Scareactor as Ellie, too. Later, there’s a projection of Joel and Ellie putting on gas masks to protect themselves from spores, which are realized as snoap in the air around guests (the effect wasn’t on during our first walkthrough). A second live Joel appears during the sniping scene (although you might miss him as he’s 25 feet in the air and a Bloater is right in front of you). At the end of the house, static figures of Joel and Ellie are facing away. In the game, Ellie swears, but she’s cut off before dropping an F-bomb in the house. Brothers Henry and Sam don’t appear.
There was a noticeable lack of guns, which feature heavily in the game, that we appreciated.
Though Clickers are the Infected featured in promotional media for HHN, Runners and Bloaters appear too. Runners and Clickers are featured the most but there are two terrifying Bloaters. One rips the head off of a mannequin. The Clickers spray water. The Infected progress as you go through.
Other than the Bloaters, it wasn’t remarkably scary. Our general feeling is that without the uniqueness of the Infected, it wasn’t significantly different from every other zombie house. Still, it was a decent IP-inspired house. If you’re not familiar with “The Last of Us,” it’s skippable, but if you are familiar, it’s good.
Location
The Last of Us is located at I on the map below, with the entrance near Men in Black: Alien Attack.
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