The Last of Us dev diaries and first impressions

Sony and Naughty Dog have given us a behind-the-scenes look at its upcoming post-apocalyptic title.

The Last of Us is Naughty Dog's first new IP title after the wildly successful Uncharted series, and will, once again, be a PlayStation exclusive.

The game takes place after an apocalyptic fungal infection has wiped out much of Earth and infected most of its remaining people.

Hush is the first of Naughty Dog's video developer diaries, and it looks at how the studio came up with the appearance of the infected throughout the game.

We got some hands-on time with a pre-alpha build of The Last of Us earlier this week, and were quite impressed. Naughty Dog has kept a very similar control scheme to the Uncharted series, but managed to keep The Last of Us feeling very different.

There's a remarkable tension to the game, which, along with the extremely quick, brutal and dangerous combat, feels a million miles from Nathan Drake's roguish adventures.

Inventory management happens in real time, as does crafting. Collected materials have multiple uses — rags can be used to bandage or create Molotov cocktails, for example — and you'll need to make tough decisions on where to use your resources.

Upgrading items, like melee weapons, is also possible, and the results can be oddly terrifying, such as when we gaffer-taped a few pairs of scissors to a piece of metal pipe with lethal consequences for the next infected people we encountered.

It's too early to make any real impressions about the final product, but if Naughty Dog can maintain the tone and gameplay that we saw, we'll be very keen to get a copy when 14 June rocks around.