Finished the game yesterday night.
You know what this games problem is? It's been too influenced by Super Meat Boy.
Remember when you first played Resident Evil 1? The only time you felt safe was when you just saved and you're close to a Save Room - Other than that, you constantly shat your pants about the possibility of a Zombie jumping through a window, coming out of a closet, etc.
Killing a zombie with a knife in Resident Evil 1 took tons of skill - Yes, the inaccurate controls (Last of Us has those too, btw, combat feels worse than Uncharted to me) were part of it, but that was the beauty behind the design: After knifing a Zombie, you took a deep breath to calm your nerves again.
What they're missing is the feeling of LOSS. Dark Souls - or hell, even ZombiU, shows how to make the player shit his pants: You're SAFE near a save room and then you shit your pants until you reach the next safe room because a lot of time, nerves and effort are at risk every second. Die in The Last of Us and you're just asked to try the last minute of gameplay again until you do it. The constant hand-holding makes sure you're never ever scared about Zombies at all. In Super Meat Boy, the instant-respawn makes sense, since it's JUST ABOUT THE GAMEPLAY - figuring out how to make this or that jump. TLOU isn't. It has a lot of gameplay/control issues and this instant-respawn system makes sure you just never really give a shit about failure.
Story-wise, it's not as well written as Walking Dead was - even though it lifts some ideas straight from that game. It also didn't really end properly, in my opinion, but I won't spoiler anything here.
All in all, I think it's still a 'very good' game - but it's a far cry from the phenomenon the press is making it out to be.
This is the same press bullshit that Bioshock Infinite got: A good game plagued by tons of issues is being praised as the second coming. Hop aboard the hype train everyone!