To say that Naughty Dog has botched the PC launch of The Last of Us Part 1 would be very kind. It started out with players becoming increasingly irritated regarding constant crashes and lacklustre frame rates, which led to an avalanche of negative reviews on the game's Steam page. However, now that more and more people have started playing, we're starting to see a whole bunch of weird and baffling glitches that are only growing in variety as time goes on.We'll start out with the texture glitches, and there is a whole lot of those flying around at the moment. Not only has Joel's new look - something that people are now referring to as "Steam Deck Joel" - gone viral and swiftly become a meme, but there are other characters also affected by these strange texture issues. Ellie hasn't been able to escape the dreaded texture glitches, and neither has Sarah, whose hair has been turned white and had a plate of spaghetti dumped on her head. One person even had some nearby buildings turn into a massive neon pink wall.If it was just texture issues, then maybe the launch could've been forgiven, but the glitches are coming thick and fast, some of them completely unexplainable. For instance, one particular clip has been doing the rounds on Twitter, as Joel, Ellie, Tess, and Marlene are speaking with each other in a room. Everything seems to be running perfectly fine, until both Ellie and Joel suddenly get drenched from head to toe with no warning, as drops of water continue to drip off of their character models throughout the scene.
There are also quite a few issues with the game's character models doing unexpected things as well, the most notorious clip being one from Twitter user CaseyExplosion that shows Tess t-posing and twitching inside of a mailbox while Joel looks on, probably very concerned and confused. Another clip from u/ArgumentNo6281 on Reddit shows Joel using his daughter Sarah as a weapon to try and fend off an approaching infected, while another from u/a7x- shows both Joel and Tommy rotating wildly in the car as the family tries to drive to safety in the game's opening.
We'll probably see even more bizarre videos surface over the next few days, or until Naughty Dog issues some substantial patches. The developer has released a statement regarding the rough state of the game and is actively looking into the situation. A hotfix was rolled out earlier today that focused on performance and stability, though it doesn't seem to have fixed some of the weirder issues that have been surfacing. Hopefully, the game will be in a playable state sooner rather than later.