The Last of Us: Left Behind (2015, Playstation 4) Review

POST-APOCALYPTIC SHENANIGANS

Also for: Playstation 3

Released both as a story DLC and a stand-alone short game, The Last of Us: Left Behind plunges into a couple of the untold events that the main game skipped or briefly mentioned: What happened in the interim between the "Fall" and "Winter" chapters of the main game? And what led up to Ellie realising that secret thing about herself?

The game jumps back-and-forth between these couple of storylines, leaving us with a few cliffhangers before a dramatic ending decides we've had enough. If you haven't played the main game first, you should. You control Ellie in both of the storylines, and one of them contains what must be one of gaming's worst kept secrets - that she's gay. I guess the sensation that the LGBTQ-crowd got one of the most well-written, well-acted video game characters ever on "their side" was too worth celebrating to keep it under wraps. After all, why hide it away as if it's something shameful?

The love story developing between Ellie and her best friend Riley is sweet. It feels like young love - innocent, hesitant, fumbling - and a dose of escapism from a depressing reality. But when reality bites back in this world, it bites hard. This mostly expository storyline is also a little interesting because it introduces some playful, new "gameplay" features, like a car-demolition contest, an imaginary fighting mini-game and a stealthy watergun-spraying segment. It portrays two juveniles trying to recreate happier times one last time before they grow old and need to learn about responsibility. And above all: it explains how Ellie got her awesome book of puns.

If the other half of this story is cut content from the main game, I'm glad they left it out. It has Ellie looking for antibiotics in another shopping center. Its inclusion here is a stretch, but better here than elsewhere. Since both of Left Behind's storylines has Ellie rummaging through shopping centers, at least they have the location in common. It could reflect on Ellie's premature growth from girlhood into maturity, as her reasons for risking her neck goes from self-exploratory to pure selflessness.

The controls are the same, as are the enemy and weapon types, which make the gameplay segments a replica of the main game. Ammo is severely limited, a fact that forces you to make the most of bricks and empty glass bottles - the only resource that seems to exist in abundance in this world. The one brand new situation is where you get to face off against infected and human opponents simultaneously. This could be a curse or a blessing, depending on your ingenuity.

Apart from that Joel is sorely missing in both storylines. I don't particularly enjoy The Last of Us, or Naughty Dog's cinematic adventures in general, without good character interaction. The gameplay itself is not good enough to sustain long-lasting interest. But at least we get Riley - and that stuff is good - but she's only around for the better half of the game. And when it all comes around it's like a short film: no matter how good, they always end just as you get into them.

Left Behind is no longer than a couple of hours and overall, I find it good but a little underwhelming. The broken, back-and-forth narrative works well enough this time, which is quite a feat because I rarely appreciate these kind of intrusive narratives, especially not in an immersive video game. It reveals some events I don't particularly feel the need to see, but it does it well enough that I don't regret seeing them. The storyline with Riley is touching, but the other one feels inserted only to spice things up with excitement, and in the greater scope of things Left Behind feels like something told in parantheses.