The Last of Us Left Behind Guide: Every Missable and Artifact

Naughty Dog wanted an encounter where hunters and infected tore into each other while you sat in cover and picked at the leftovers. They tried to build it into the Pittsburgh chapter of the main game. It cost too much time to code, so it got cut.

Eight months after The Last of Us shipped, they built the entire thing anyway — in a two-hour DLC about two teenage girls goofing off in a dead shopping mall.

That is Left Behind, and it is the most misunderstood piece of this franchise. People remember it as the sad flashback one. It is also the chapter where Naughty Dog prototyped the three-way combat model that Part II was later built on top of, and it packs more one-shot missable trophies per minute than the entire 15-hour campaign. If you skipped it because it looked like a walking sim between arcade cabinets, you skipped the best-designed two hours in the game.

Left Behind launched February 14, 2014 as $14.99 DLC, went standalone at $9.99 on May 12, 2015, and is bundled into every copy of The Last of Us Remastered and The Last of Us Part I. If you own either, you already own it. This guide covers the game — not the HBO adaptation, which reorders and rewrites large parts of it.

Spoiler warning: this covers all six chapters, including how the flashback ends and where it sits relative to the main campaign.

Two games braided into one

Left Behind is two separate experiences wearing one skin, and the design of each is completely different.

The present-day half picks up seconds after The University. Joel has been impaled, Ellie has dragged him onto Callus and holed him up in an abandoned yogurt store inside the Colorado Mountain Plaza, near Boulder. She tapes her summer shirt over the wound with binding, locks Joel and the horse inside, and goes looking for a suture kit. That is a stealth-survival sandbox with real combat and real fail states.

The flashback half is set in July, roughly three weeks before Ellie ever meets Joel. Riley — gone for over a month, now a Firefly — turns up in Ellie's dorm at the Boston military boarding school and drags her to Liberty Gardens, an abandoned mall. That half is almost entirely interaction: minigames, optional conversations, prompts you can walk straight past.

Both halves are set in a dead shopping mall. That is the whole trick. One is frozen, silent and full of things trying to kill you; the other has the lights on and a working carousel. You play Ellie the entire time in both, which makes Left Behind the longest stretch of Ellie-only play in the first game.

Chapter order, and why it keeps switching

Six chapters, strictly alternating between the two timelines. Nothing is randomised and nothing is optional — you cannot skip a timeline.

The alternation is doing structural work. The present-day column escalates mechanically — one clicker, then a stalker ambush, then a nine-plus enemy three-way brawl. The past column escalates emotionally on exactly the same beat count. By the time chapter five turns into a bloodbath, chapter six has nowhere left to go but the reveal.

That also means your practical problem changes every ten minutes. In the present chapters you are managing ammo and noise. In the past chapters you are managing missables, because once a beat ends you do not get it back without replaying the chapter.

The present-day half: a mall, a helicopter and solo stalkers

Back in a Flash is a locked-door puzzle wearing a horror coat. Weston's Pharmacy has been stripped, but there is a first aid kit visible through the glass of a locked back room. The combination note behind the pharmacy counter gives you the code to the American Princess store next door, and explains the grim part: the pharmacist turned, someone who did not yet understand the infection assumed he was sick, and locked him in there to die.

That store is thick with spores. Ellie walks in without a mask because she is immune — one of the few times the game lets her immunity be a gameplay verb rather than a plot point. The pharmacy key and the pharmacist's note are both on his body. On the way out, a clicker patrols past; a switchblade to the skull handles it and drops a bottle of alcohol.

Then the payoff of the whole chapter: the first aid kit you unlocked the door for is empty. The real objective is the Blackhawk that punched through the mall roof outside.

So Close is the best-designed section in the DLC and the one people forget. The door to the upper level needs power, so you follow the cabling to a flooded shipping room, find a generator with a dry tank, and siphon fuel out of a truck — splashing gasoline in Ellie's face in the process. Stalkers hit you mid-siphon. This is the only time in the first game stalkers appear as a standalone enemy rather than mixed into a runner pack, and it is the fight that made Naughty Dog promote them to a headline threat in Part II.

Once the generator runs, a live cable drops into the standing water. The water is now lethal — it has its own unique death animations for Ellie — and your route becomes the ventilation ducts overhead. Read the infected guide before this one if stalkers keep catching you out; they are the type most players handle badly.

The chapter ends inside the tilting helicopter with a suture kit that actually has supplies in it.

The Enemy of My Enemy is the fight that became Part II

This is the first chapter in the entire franchise to put hostile humans and infected on the field at the same time — the exact thing that was too expensive to build for Pittsburgh.

It opens by showing you the rules rather than telling you. Hidden behind a ledge, you watch clickers take down two of David's men. One dies immediately, the second kills a clicker with a bow before bleeding out, and three more men finish the job. You take the dead man's bow. Chronologically, that is the first bow Ellie ever picks up in this series.

Then the game hands you the same setup three more times and lets you choose your posture each time:

• Force it. Throw a brick or bottle to make noise, drag the infected onto the humans early, then clean up whoever is standing.
• Wait it out. Let the humans mass up, let the fight start on its own, and take the survivors.
• Skip it. Sneak past entirely. This is genuinely viable and worth doing at least once for how strange it feels.

Two things worth knowing before you get cute with it. First, there is a hard fail state at the yogurt store: the cannibals hear Callus behind the door, and if you do not engage them fast enough, a cutscene plays where they break the lock and shoot Joel off-screen. That is a game over, and it is one of the few in the game that fires from hesitation rather than from taking damage.

Second, Part I added a trophy called Live Bait — use bricks or bottles to lure an infected into attacking a human. This chapter is where you get it. Throw the brick somewhere between the two groups, not at anyone.

The final stand outside the yogurt store is close to a dozen men arriving in waves while infected pour into the lower concourse. You pick a side, help them win, then kill what is left. It is messy and readable and it works, and it is the template Part II runs on.

The flashback half hides five missable trophies

Nothing in Mallrats or Fun and Games can kill you. That is exactly why people lose trophies here — you are relaxed, and every one of these is a prompt you can walk past.

Brick Master (Mallrats). On the balcony over the two display SUVs, Riley challenges you to a window-smashing race. Riley takes the blue car, you take the red one. Winner gets to ask the loser a serious question. Win it. There is a bonus if you do: later, in Fun and Games, Ellie can climb onto the red car for a hidden conversation where she brags about it.

Nobody's Perfect (Fun and Games). In Raja's Arcade there is a Jak X: Combat Racing cabinet — an actual Naughty Dog game, sitting in a Naughty Dog game. Get close and an interact prompt appears. Ellie sits down, mimes driving, then declares shooting at race cars is stupid. That is the whole trophy, and it is trivially easy to walk past because the plot is pulling you toward the fighting cabinet.

Angel Knives (Fun and Games). The Turning is broken, so Riley narrates the fight and teaches you the controls while Ellie plays it in her head. The trophy requires beating the boss, Black Fang, without taking a single hit. Play it as a rhythm test rather than a fighting game and watch Riley's callouts, not the screen.

Skillz (Fun and Games). The water gun fight. Both girls have a Soak Level bar and the first to fill it loses. R1 on PS3 or R2 on PS4 pumps the gun, and each pump restores 20% of capacity — so pump between bursts rather than emptying yourself dry and standing there defenceless. After that comes a best-of-three game of cat and mouse where a single connecting shot counts as a kill. Win the soak fight for the trophy.

BFFs (original and Remastered only). All optional conversations in Left Behind. Treat every yellow prompt as mandatory and stop moving whenever Riley starts talking.

One detail worth slowing down for during the water gun section: Ellie's summer shirt is hanging on a rack in that area. It is the same shirt she tears up in chapter one to plug the hole in Joel. The game never points at it.

And the ending, plainly, because the DLC is built to land it: the music from the dance draws runners into the store, the escape through the scaffolding goes wrong, and both girls are bitten. Riley lays out the two options — end it now, or be poetic and lose your minds together. Ellie's immunity starts here, and so does everything the ending of the main game is arguing about.

All 14 artifacts, chapter by chapter

Left Behind has one collectible type: artifacts. No pendants, no comics, no training manuals, no workbenches. Fourteen of them across the six chapters, and the final chapter has none — so if you are cleaning up, everything must be done by the end of The Enemy of My Enemy.

The four notes in the Colorado Mountain Plaza are a complete self-contained story about a Blackhawk crew from the Denver quarantine zone, and they are better written than most of the artifacts in the main campaign. If you generally skim collectibles, read these. Our collectibles guide covers the main game's much larger pile.

Part I vs Remastered: the trophy lists are different

This trips people up constantly, because guides written for one version list trophies that do not exist in the other.

Original and Remastered treat Left Behind as separate DLC with its own 10-trophy list: four completions (Easy, Normal and Hard as bronze, Survivor as silver), plus BFFs, Picked Clean, Nobody's Perfect, Angel Knives, Skillz and Brick Master. None of them count toward the base game's platinum.

Part I folds everything into one merged trophy list. Left Behind gets a single gold trophy — Don't Go, for completing it — with no difficulty tiers at all, alongside four returning bronzes (Nobody's Perfect, Brick Master, Angel Knives, Skillz) and the new Live Bait.

The practical difference: on Remastered you need a Survivor run of Left Behind for that silver, and on Part I you do not — any difficulty completes it. If you are chasing the Part I platinum, do Left Behind on whatever setting you like and spend your suffering budget on the main campaign difficulty modes instead.

Quick Action Checklist

• Win the brick-throwing contest in Mallrats. Red car is Ellie, blue is Riley, and winning unlocks a hidden brag conversation later.
• Sit in the Jak X: Combat Racing cabinet in Raja's Arcade before the plot pulls you toward the fighting game.
• Beat Black Fang without getting hit for Angel Knives. Listen to Riley's callouts instead of watching the cabinet.
• Pump the water gun between bursts — each pump is 20% of capacity — and win the Soak Level fight, not just the cat-and-mouse round.
• Grab all 14 artifacts before The Enemy of My Enemy ends. The final chapter contains none.
• In So Close, stay out of the water once the cable drops. It kills instantly and has its own death animations.
• Deal with the cannibals at the yogurt store quickly. Hesitate and a cutscene fires where they shoot Joel through the door.
• Throw a brick between the humans and the infected in The Enemy of My Enemy for the Live Bait trophy on Part I.
• On Remastered you need a Survivor completion for the silver. On Part I any difficulty earns the gold.
• Read the four Colorado Mountain Plaza notes in order. They are a complete story about the helicopter crew.