The Last of Us: Left Behind

Extrapolating on the lore of The Last of Us isn’t really something I think is necessary. The game doesn’t hide too much from its audience in terms of its character’s backgrounds that fuel their personalities and role in their calamitous situation. If it did, the game probably wouldn’t be as lauded as it is, but I already drained all the possible vitriol I have for this game while discussing the material in the base game. This is why Left Behind, the additional downloadable content campaign for The Last of Us, feels more like an opportunistic draw to light another match on the roaring hot flame that The Last of Us created rather than any filling any holes in the narrative mold for artistic purposes. Nevertheless, Naughty Dog found it imperative to give the players a closer glimpse into Ellie’s past in Boston before meeting Joel and the period of the base game in Colorado where Ellie is nursing a wounded Joel back to health.

Ellie controls the same way she did the base game here in her solo DLC campaign. She’s physically weaker than Joel in both offense and defense on account of her being an adolescent girl who is still growing (but is probably devastatingly malnourished). However, she compensates for her lack of strength with her youthful scrappiness, making the stealth sections easier by simply plunging a blade into her enemies quickly as opposed to the struggle of snapping their necks that Joel performs. Left Behind features zero new weapons, so the player should already be an Ellie expert for their time playing as her in the main game. I’d argue that the developers should’ve introduced at least one new tool to use against the hostile elements that exist around them, but perhaps it would’ve been nonsensical for Ellie to find a new contraption just to abandon it when the DLC circles back around to the events of the base game.

Left Behind alternates between the relatively recent past before Joel met Ellie and the present predicament of finding Joel medical supplies so he doesn’t bleed out on the cold mattress he’s lying on and leave Ellie on her lonesome. The relevance between the two periods of Ellie’s life is that the past section highlights the last moments she spent with her dear friend (and potential lover) Riley. Riley is summoned by Fireflies leader Marlene to join her on a mission elsewhere outside of the Boston area, so she treats Ellie to one last hurrah of fun in an abandoned shopping mall before she parts to serve the resistance. Either that, or the joyous atmosphere she’s creating for her and Ellie is an attempt to make Ellie beg her to stay so she’ll have a reason not to leave. Using their imagination to reignite the neon sparkle spectacle of a pre-apocalypse shopping mall, the girls have a grand ol’ time together. That is, until they accidentally provoke a horde of infected by playing some music a little too loudly, resulting in both of them getting bit and waiting out the inevitable like MacReady and Childs in the Antarctic. While Left Behind doesn’t add any weapons or tools, the lighthearted gameplay mechanics used during the various sections with the squirt gun battle and Ellie revisioning a boss battle in a defunct arcade fighter with the button combinations are fairly fresh and enjoyable.

Riley being bitten by an infected person is not a shocking gut punch of a conclusion, but that is not the intention. Ellie has mentioned that Riley was one of her fallen comrades at the end of the base game, so those who are crushed by Left Behind’s ending were not paying attention. The purpose that the contrasting sequences have is to showcase that Ellie hurts as much from the effects of the spore infection as Joel does and that she is as afraid of losing him as he is her. The girl’s camaraderie in the most mirthful moments The Last of Us offers is actually infectious, putting the hidden beauty of the apocalypse into a perspective that was not apparent in the base game. We jump back and forth from these cherished memories to times of trouble not only to present a dichotomy between the pleasant past and the perilous present, but how Ellie desperately does not want to endure the tragic pain of losing someone close to her again and is emotionally prepared for the worst case scenario because of it. It makes us respect her decision at the end of the base game even more and resent Joel at the same level for his.

Like the base game it stems from, The Last of Us: Left Behind succeeds on its narrative strengths while neglecting the gameplay. All it offers is character development for the deuteragonist by letting us become privy to her tragic struggles we’re already aware of and not much else. The few quirky moments in the mall slightly mix in some unfamiliar elements, but the game treats these sections as flippantly as the girls do by flatlining the stakes of them. Considering this DLC did not come as a free extension at its initial PS3 release, I’d feel ripped off if I paid for this paltry piece of content (I have the remastered version on the PS4 where Left Behind is included for free). I guess the conclusion is to simply watch all content involving The Last of Us for its full effect. Hey, it seems like what Naughty Dog wants.

Too much of the weight of The Last of Us concerns its storytelling and "acting" (voice-acting, but I like the character animations in cutscenes as well). It's only natural the DLC expansion would be heavily story-/character-focused. Unfortunately, the tight gameplay isn't frequently praised as highly as the story of the main game, so it's even sadder to see this DLC downplays combat quite significantly.

I've owned the base game since 2015, but took so long to get to the DLC, quite simply because I could not decide whether I wanted to start it on Normal or Hard, or if I wanted to play Hard or higher on the base game first, and I eventually benched my PS3 for some years to focus on PS4 (on which I do not have the remaster). I intended to replay the game because the TV show just started on HBO (at the time of writing, we're half a day away from the second episode airing), and wanted to play the DLC first, mistakenly believing it to be 100% prequel. Things kept happening to piss me off, which carried the consequence of skewing my judgment, poising me to dislike this a bit more; 1) apparently, I hadn't bought the DLC yet, and I needed to jump through hoops to add funds to my PSN wallet, as the website kept shitting itself, and ultimately I bought a digital gift card on Amazon to transfer those funds; 2) the ~6gb download took for-fucking-ever, when I was hoping to knock the whole DLC out in a couple hours before bed on a worknight, but I had to just give up 57% of the way through and do something else; 3) "something else" turned out to be "start the main game again, on New Game Plus, and I played continually without feeling like I wanted to "stop" and switch to the DLC, until I finally took a break to go to bed; 4) the game seemed to make me download the DLC again(?) from the main menu, which took another hour or two. God damn....

But it may have been worth the frustration, as the expansion was good enough. Well, good enough for the wait, especially as I was dicking around on my phone to kill time. Maybe not quite worth the $9.99, especially as the PS4 remaster occasionally gets as cheap as $8.99 for the whole thing. But oh well....

I feel bad giving this a middling score, as I did very much appreciate the story, but I just wish there was a bit more "game" than "movie." Riley's cool. This new vulnerable side we see of Ellie is cool. I guess I don't care too much for how the story switches between the "present" and past - I mean, I "get" it, I think, thematically (Ellie struggles to keep Joel alive because she wasn't able to save Riley, as one layer), but I don't know. The climaxes of both timeframes are cool.

I had to restart the final battle tons of times because I'm dumb -_-"

And I'm also slightly mad at myself for not doing anything with the Rifle after picking it up.

I also feel like the joke about Jak X: Combat Racing is a little disrespectful to Naughty Dog's own roots, but I also think that's true for everything from the PS3 era onward, so....

EDIT: I went back to play this game after completing the main game again (in the middle of which I first played this DLC). I was after miscellaneous Trophies, namely the one or two "Optional Conversations" I missed. Feeling like it shouldn't be "too hard" because of the small amount of combat sequences here, I decided to go Survivor, which I hadn't yet attempted on the main game. It was... well, kind of really fucking fun! I feel like the mode encourages stealth a lot more than combat, but I learned pretty soon that I will not be successful in sneaking around the Stalkers any time soon, so I did this thing where I'd open myself to die while making sure I could find all/most Bricks scattered around the arena, to plan for my final attempt, in which I just ran around to juke the enemies while grabbing Bricks as necessary. I felt I'd accomplished something there. Later encounters were more touch-and-go, teaching me I could just avoid combat where possible, which also allows me to save all four bullets I had.

As I'd very recently played the DLC for the first time, I skipped any cutscenes I could. Because I'm unused to Survivor Mode, and, frankly, not good at shooting games, I died a lot in the final battle, necessarily having to restart from checkpoints, and I imagine spending more time in that fight than in the entire rest of the DLC beforehand, at least in this run. With a "better" (to me) ratio of story:play, I grew to appreciate this DLC quite a bit more. Unfortunately, it also kept bugging out in the final battle, including despawning all enemies sometimes when I died, making it impossible to progress , so I'll hold back on bumping it to a 4.0.

The first time I did Ellie's joke book Optional Conversation in the main game, it was the funniest shit I'd ever heard. The rest kind of wore on me. In the DLC, I guess I "fat-fingered" my controller and accidentally hit Circle after only two puns, so I made sure to play them all in this second run. While I was otherwise skipping cutscenes and streamlining the experience by avoiding other optional content (i.e., the extra masks in the Halloween store), I feel I've "improved" my experience with the story by seeing all the puns play out. A mild irony to my otherwise gameplay-focused run!

Arguably the best moments of this are the flashback sections with Ellie and Riley. The dialogue is superbly written and acted - it is just purely enjoyable watching two kids mess around in an abandoned shopping mall..

The combat parts are unnecessary and tame - playing as Ellie is more interesting than playing as Joel all thanks to her switchblade - removing any need to craft shivs - a part of the main game I despised. Joel could learn a thing or two from Ellie and actually have a knife in an apocalypse.

These combat sections are pure filler and I wish they had the whole DLC dedicated to Ellie and Riley.

Left Behind is pretty unsubstantial but worth playing regardless. the sections with Riley are great, and flesh out Ellie's character while providing some pathos of their own. unfortunately, this is a AAA game so it has to have killing in it. the Ellie/Joel section is fine but isn't anything that wasn't done better in the main game. I like that all of the collectibles told one continuous story and I'm glad that we finally got some infected/human action, even if it's not very dynamic. a shame this couldn't have been halved

I'll admit, when first playing this I was expecting something different maybe. The Last of Us was a game that took 2 playthroughs to grow on me, maybe due to the fact that my first playthrough of the game was in my college apartment on a shitty old TV and I was borrowing the game from a friend since we he already beat the game and didn't want to play it together with our friend group. Either way Last of Us is a good game and probably the best Naughty Dog game since Crash 3 on PS1, however it still had flaws and was far from the amazing masterpiece everyone was raving about. Still I liked it and even bought it on a Black Friday sale this year for my collection, but Left Behind is pretty much back story that Ellie briefly references in the game. Its essentially her remembering her past before she was bit and found out she was immune and living a somewhat normal life, which apparently took place 3 weeks before the events of the main game. Its pretty much a walking simulator but they randomly throw in combat scenes in the present (which takes play when Ellie is looking for medicine to treat Joel during the Winter after he got impaled). To be honest that's part of the problem the DLC jumps between the past and present and the only reason it does that is so the DLC has an excuse to say it has gameplay but to be honest I wouldn't have minded if this were 100% walking simulator. The gameplay parts just feel tacked on and since Ellie isn't really experienced in combat like Joel you mostly sneak around infected and bandits and later on you get a gun but it feels kind of awkward using Ellie like this.

As for the story its decent, its basically backstory we already knew, but it does give you insight to Ellie and what she went through right before the events of the game. There are some interesting and memorable moments in this since you do so many things you normally wouldn't do in any other game, but at the same time it did feel like it didn't really have a purpose other than to make us feel even more guilty and bad for Ellie. The DLC is too short and the only big revelation in this that we didn't know already in the main game is that Ellie is lesbian, which to be honest isn't even a big deal since the apocalypse basically forced her to mature and grow up faster than an average teen (but credit where credit is due Naughty Dog didn't push Ellie's sexuality or make it an issue in the main game, and that shows they can pull off mature topics without pandering). When I play a DLC I either want it to add something new to the story that we already don't know or to add interesting locations and gameplay. Since this is mostly story there is hardly any gameplay and the gameplay just feels tacked on and like its there to artificially add padding, while the story segments either don't go deep enough and really only explore a single event in Ellie's life, plus don't add any new revelations we already don't know. Yeah the DLC has sad moments and it does make you feel bad but hell the first 10 minutes of Last of Us made me feel bad and it had more going for it than this. Its not a bad DLC, but it just feels like it was a bit unnecessary, this actually might have made a better short book or even comic than game but maybe that's just me.