When I finished The Last of Us, I let out a deep sigh. A fantastic game, for sure, but one caught in the trappings of AAA games to the point of harming its own creative vision. I wished for a shorter, more focused game that played to TLoU’s strengths: its characters, the tense encounters with few but deadly zombies and its beautifully constructed world.
In Left Behind, I found that game.
A DLC eventually made into a standalone expansion, Left Behind takes place between chapters 8 and 9 of the main game, when Ellie scavenges the abandoned shopping mall for supplies. As she does so, she reminisces about the time when she was in military school, weeks before the main game began, and we get to see her last interactions with Riley, a character she mentions by name a few times over the course of the story.
It’s a short but sweet storyline that adds so much to what is already a fantastic character. Ellie is struggling to understand her own feelings as she lives through the awkward phase between childish innocence and adulthood, and mall reflects the clash between these two things at all times: stores selling dolls against beauty parlors filled with cosmetics. Children’s movie posters along images of mature, sexualized women. The Last of Us’s brilliant environment design, which already shone through the entirety of the main game, shines even brighter here.
Even if it didn’t, the pure, budding romance between Ellie and Riley might have carried the DLC by itself, as it is beautifully realized. These are two girls who have never known normal, who have been in this ruined world for their entire lives, yet, in opposition to the world outside, cling on to their hope. A seed that sprouts on the most barren of soils.
I wish more of this Ellie had carried on to the sequel, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. Oh well.
In Left Behind, I found that game.
A DLC eventually made into a standalone expansion, Left Behind takes place between chapters 8 and 9 of the main game, when Ellie scavenges the abandoned shopping mall for supplies. As she does so, she reminisces about the time when she was in military school, weeks before the main game began, and we get to see her last interactions with Riley, a character she mentions by name a few times over the course of the story.
It’s a short but sweet storyline that adds so much to what is already a fantastic character. Ellie is struggling to understand her own feelings as she lives through the awkward phase between childish innocence and adulthood, and mall reflects the clash between these two things at all times: stores selling dolls against beauty parlors filled with cosmetics. Children’s movie posters along images of mature, sexualized women. The Last of Us’s brilliant environment design, which already shone through the entirety of the main game, shines even brighter here.
Even if it didn’t, the pure, budding romance between Ellie and Riley might have carried the DLC by itself, as it is beautifully realized. These are two girls who have never known normal, who have been in this ruined world for their entire lives, yet, in opposition to the world outside, cling on to their hope. A seed that sprouts on the most barren of soils.
I wish more of this Ellie had carried on to the sequel, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. Oh well.