Last week I’ve finished “The Last of Us”… and (shocking surprise) it’s amazing!
First impact: the graphics… gorgeous rendering, very nice effects all around, the interplay of light and surfaces is amazing, a great work by Naughty Dog!
Secondly, the story is great… gone are the usual clichés, every single time you thought the story was going cliché, it subtly made a smooth turn that made complete sense (instead of the jarring plot twist that makes no sense whatsoever) and navigated to less-mainstream themes…
The characters are amazing, and Ellie is actually a character that instills a sense of protection, without being the normal overbearing entitled child present in too many games, TV shows and movies…
Joel is a more “common” character, but it’s well written and very believable.
When I started playing, I thought “ok, this is pretty and is well made, but why is everyone so in to it?!”… well, after 3 or 4 hours (the game is surprisingly big for a AAA game nowadays: I clocked in at 17 hours, just for the main campaign), I noticed that I actually cared about the characters… and I’m not a very "”lovey-dovey” guy, I don’t usually don’t get hooked on characters that much…
The only thing that detracts from the game (and it’s not really its fault, maybe it’s the medium’s fault) is the gameplay doesn’t shine as much as everything else… While it plays well, it’s secondary to the amazing story, and besides some key points (very good key points, I admit), it was just getting in the way of me getting my next “story fix”… The gameplay wasn’t simply as interesting as the story, which means that either the story was so good I wanted to focus on that (entirely possible), or the gameplay wasn’t that interesting, which might also be true – the stealth component seemed too random (sometimes the enemies would spot us through crates and walls, sometimes we’d be just next to them and they wouldn’t see us) which made the whole stealth experience a bit trial and error… The shooting was a bit hard and ammo was scarce (which is a good thing, it gives the game that feeling of post-apocalyptical shortage everywhere, and really poked the player to search around for stuff)…
So, sorry Mike Bithell, but “Thomas Was Alone” was just supplanted as my game of the year… it’s still amazing (and the gameplay is probably better), but this one is so nihilist that it speaks into my very soul! 
Good job, Naughty Dog, forget about Uncharted and go for this kind of titles all the way… Or do both, I don’t care!