The Last of Us: Left Behind review

Left Behind is a blazingly intelligent and thoughtful addition to The Last of Us franchise, finds Tim Martin

The Last of Us: Left Behind 

Format PlayStation 3 Developer Naughty Dog Publisher Sony Computer Entertainment Released Out now

“Negative space is very important in the game.” That comment was part of a series of notes-to-reviewers that Naughty Dog sent out with promo copies of The Last of Us in June last year, though I’ve only just come across it, tucked into the disc box I had to exhume before playing through the new downloadable episode Left Behind. It’s a lucky find, since it crystallises almost everything I admire about Naughty Dog’s audacious and radical rewrite of the computerised zombie blastathon.

Without exception, the writing in The Last of Us is striking not because of what it reveals to the player but because of what it holds back. Almost all its narrative beats come alive in the possibilities that coalesce around bare fragments of suggestion. Think of the dark unspoken history of the protagonist Joel, his link with the smuggler Tess, the relationship between the scavenger Bill and his partner, the journey of the survivor Ish or the real intentions of the villain David. All of these are signalled only through hints, gestures and clues, but at the end of a playthrough no players will be in doubt of how they understand them. The Last of Us tells by withholding.

Left Behind skips back and forth in time to dramatise two of these missing links. One segment follows the 14-year-old Ellie as she ventures into the snowy wilderness to find medical supplies for her wounded companion Joel. The other catches her a year before the events of the game, as she escapes the quarantine zone in post-apocalyptic Boston for a final adventure with her friend Riley. Anyone paying attention to the events of The Last of Us will already know how both these stories end, so it’s doubly impressive that the development team should manage to do something so fresh and interesting with them.

Left Behind’s two strands show the character at very different stages of her life, emphasising a contrast that's essential to the game’s best effects. The Boston strand follows the two young teenagers on a trip through an abandoned shopping mall, and focuses on exploration, wholly removing the opportunity for violent action from the player. This leads to some brilliant subversions of the game’s central sneak-and-shoot mechanics. One scene involves the pair playing a hunter-killer game with non-lethal weapons, while another joyous moment -- and I never thought I'd see myself writing this -- consists of a quicktime event, which asks the player to press buttons in response to prompts on the screen. It’d be a shame to ruin the surprise, but the weirdly poignant use of this hackneyed mechanic reaches out to the player through the fourth wall in as clever a way as I've seen anywhere in the medium.

The character writing, too, is superb. I can’t think of any big-ticket games that feature adolescent girls as the protagonists, except bits of the sadly wooden Beyond: Two Souls, but there are certainly none that do it this well. The interplay between Ellie and Riley in Left Behind is pitch-perfect, catching the luminous, pressurised, conflicted truth of adolescence with such infectious exactitude that you almost lose track of the game’s grim setting. It also dramatises a relationship that puts a whole new construction on several events in the main game — but anyone who’s managed to avoid spoilers on that so far deserves to go into the experience blind.
Then there’s the combat. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed this experience in The Last of Us, a game which made me feel both the physical heft and the moral weight of violence more strongly than anything has in years. That, too, is due to Naughty Dog’s attention to the context in which the fighting takes place. With the difficulty set to Survivor (which also turns off the almost game-breaking X-ray vision mode), players are forced into a terrible awareness of the environment and the protagonist’s vulnerability: you steer Ellie from shadow to shadow, cover to cover, eyes peeled for adversaries and ears pricked for the tell-tale glissando that signals an enemy’s line of sight.
Mechanics, here, reflect character. Ellie’s advantage in this environment is that she’s smaller, quieter and faster than the hulking enemies she faces, and the context of each fight in Left Behind encourages you to exploit this to the full. Some enemies can be circumnavigated; others can be set on each other; others — particularly in one gut-wrenching fight scene that sees you pinned down in the central atrium of an abandoned shopping precinct — have to be faced down, an experience that requires you to exploit all the limited reserves the game offers. This means a focus on sonic cues and an attention to player vulnerability (negative spaces, again) that has almost vanished from the contemporary gaming landscape. Most video games kit you out with an arsenal and encourage you to expend it on whack-a-mole armies that poke their heads out from cover every few seconds. The Last of Us pits you against small groups of watchful, mobile and intelligent enemies that pad noiselessly about and rush you without warning. The result is nightmarishly tense.
I’ve tried to stay as far away as possible from revealing plot details, because every aspect of this short journey deserves to be experienced fresh. Be in no doubt, though: if you enjoyed The Last of Us, Left Behind is a more than worthwhile proposition. When I finished the base game for the first time, I wondered where on earth Naughty Dog would fit in their promised DLC without damaging the delicate structure they’d created. This blazingly intelligent and thoughtful addition makes me absolutely certain they could do it again if they tried.