The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival—a Switch-exclusive budget game that many called a knockoff of Sony’s The Last of Us—has been removed from the Nintendo eShop. Meanwhile, Sony has started removing the game’s trailers from YouTube.
In late June, The Last Hope – Dead Zone Survival appeared on the Switch eShop. The game was a horrible-looking Nintendo Switch exclusive that seemed to come out of nowhere with a trailer that caught the attention of the internet for all the wrong reasons. In the viral trailer, The Last Hope looked like a blatant (and cheap) copy of Naughty Dog’s award-winning post-apocalyptic franchise, complete with its own Ellie-like companion and gruff dad-like figure. Most agreed it looked bad, and once people actually played it, we learned that it was probably the worst game of 2023, being both highly buggy and only about 15 to 20 minutes long. Now, this viral knockoff seems to have caught the attention of Sony, which doesn’t seem to be a fan of The Last Hope.
As reported by Eurogamer, trailers and other videos of The Last Hope are being removed from YouTube. If you look at our own story about the game, you’ll notice the videos we included have both been removed and replaced with a message saying they were removed due to a copyright claim from Sony Interactive Entertainment. Other videos and trailers for The Last Hope have been scrubbed from YouTube, too.
The Last Hope is no longer for sale
While this is happening, the actual game itself has been completely removed from the Nintendo Switch eShop in both the UK and the U.S. If you try to visit The Last Hope’s store page you’ll only get a 404 error message. At this time we don’t know if Sony requested the game be removed from the eShop, if Nintendo took this step itself, or if the developers behind the game removed it out of caution.
Kotaku has contacted all involved parties about the removed trailers and the game’s removal from the eShop.
While I can’t be sure who removed the game from the store or if it will return, what I can be sure of is that until companies like Nintendo and Valve put in place any kind of quality checks, digital stores will continue to be polluted with cheap, barely playable knock-offs and clones of higher-quality games. Let’s not forget, this happens on the Xbox store, too, such as with that crappy God of War clone.