The Last of Us Part 2 Chronological Order: All 46 Chapters

The Last of Us Part II spends its first half locking you into one point of view and its second half taking it away. That structure is the whole argument of the game, and in July 2025 Naughty Dog shipped an official way to take it apart.

Chronological mode re-sorts the 46 chapters you already own into the order the events happen in, and hands you a gold trophy and two Uncharted skins for finishing. Here is the full sequence, verified against two independent listings, plus what actually changes about playing it.

What Chronological mode actually is

It arrived in a free update on 8 July 2025 — PS5 via Patch 2.1.0, PC via Patch 1.5 on both Steam and the Epic Games Store, with Nixxes handling the PC side. The Steam release notes for 1.5 list three lines that matter here, in this order: "Added the new Chronological mode", "Introduced UNCHARTED-themed skins for Joel and Tommy as reward for completing Chronological mode", and "Implemented achievements and trophies related to Chronological mode".

You pick it when you start a new game. It is not a chapter-select toy — The Last of Us Wiki's page for the mode states it is selected at the point you begin a playthrough.

Naughty Dog's own pitch is about proximity rather than clarity. Their announcement post argues you will see "how Ellie being gifted a guitar flows so neatly into her learning to play" and, through Seattle, "just how close they come into running into each other, how their actions impact each other". That is an accurate description of what the table below does: it does not straighten the story out so much as it braids it.

The wiki also carries the one warning worth repeating before you commit: because chapters were built for their original slots, "some of the story's pacing may seem uneven and some game mechanics may be introduced before their tutorials."

The full chronological chapter order

All 46 chapters, in the order Chronological mode plays them. The Playable as column is taken from The Last of Us Wiki's act pages rather than from its Chronological Mode page, for reasons covered further down. Original act is the act number the chapter sits in when you play the 2020 structure, so you can read the reshuffle straight off the right-hand column.

Three structural things fall out of that table before you play a minute of it.

The first chapter is no longer Joel's. Tracking Lesson — Abby and her father in the park in Salt Lake City, dated April 28, 2034 on the wiki's act page — moves from act five to position one. Chronological mode opens on Abby, four years before the 2038 story the game is actually about.

Every flashback is front-loaded into a single block of seven. Seven chapters drawn from five different acts — one each from acts 1 and 5, one from act 2, two from act 3 and two from act 6 — get collected into an opening group, and the wiki's own heading for that block is simply "Flashback". Abby and her father in the park, Abby and Owen at the aquarium, Ellie's sixteenth-birthday camping trip, the patrol with Tommy to find guitar strings, St. Mary's Hospital, Abby's winter visit to Owen in 2037: all of it plays before the game reaches Jackson in 2038.

The final act order is not a straight line even here. The chronological listing puts Santa Barbara's four chapters between The Farm and the Epilogue, which is exactly the original arrangement — the ninth act is the Farm, the tenth is Santa Barbara, and the eleventh is the Farm again. That last stretch of the game was already in timeline order, so it does not move.

What the reshuffle does to the Ellie/Abby split

The interesting number is not 46. It is how many unbroken runs of one character those 46 chapters form.

Count consecutive chapters with the same playable lead and the original 2020 order gives you 11 blocks; the chronological order gives you 26. That is the whole mode in one statistic.

Those figures come from counting the 46 rows in the table above, using the wiki's act-page attribution for each chapter's playable character and treating The Chalet — which the Jackson act page lists as playable for both Abby and Ellie — as its own block.

That 18-chapter Abby run is the structural centrepiece of the 2020 game: Tracking Lesson through The Confrontation, an unbroken stretch that begins the moment the game takes Ellie away and does not hand her back until The Farm, after the theater fight has been played from Abby's side. Chronological mode caps the longest run at five: Eastbrook Elementary, Capitol Hill, Channel 13, The Tunnels and The Theater, all on Ellie's first day in Seattle.

Read rows 14 to 33 and you can see the crisscrossing Naughty Dog talked about. Abby clears the Stadium and goes On Foot before Ellie has even reached the Seattle gate. Ellie takes Downtown, then the game cuts to Abby at the Forward Base, then straight back to Ellie at Eastbrook Elementary. On Day 2 the pattern gets tighter still: Return to the Coast, Hillcrest, The Shortcut, The Descent, Ground Zero, The Seraphites, Return to the Aquarium — five Abby chapters and two Ellie chapters interleaved inside a single in-game day.

One grouping in the mode has no equivalent in the original game. The wiki's chapter-order listing carries a heading called Seattle Day 1 Dusk, holding Hostile Territory, The Forest and The Coast. In the 2020 game those are chapters five, seven and eight of Abby's first act, with the Winter Visit flashback sitting between the first of them and the other two.

What you get for finishing it

One trophy and two skins.

The trophy name and grade come from The Last of Us Wiki's Part II trophy list, where it sits in its own "Chronological" section and is the only entry in it. Both announcements write "trophies" plural — Naughty Dog's post says "new trophies tied to completing the narrative experience in chronological order", and the Steam notes say "achievements and trophies related to Chronological mode" — but the wiki's list carries one, and the totals in the next paragraph reconcile with one. The skins are described by Naughty Dog and by Nixxes in the same words: unlocked for completing the narrative in Chronological, usable in No Return. Both Joel and Tommy are already playable characters in that mode, so the skins drop straight onto a roster slot you may have unlocked long ago — our No Return guide covers how those two unlock and what their traits do.

Naughty Dog tied the skins to the studio's 40th anniversary, which is why the reward for replaying a Last of Us story is a pair of Uncharted costumes rather than anything from this game.

Worth knowing for trophy hunters: this trophy sits outside the platinum. The wiki's summary states the original Part II carries 28 trophies, of which 25 are required for the platinum, and that the trophies featured in the original game remain untouched in Remastered. Everything Remastered added sits on top of that 28: sixteen No Return trophies — thirteen at launch and three more in April 2025, per the same wiki page — plus I Would Do It All Over Again. 28 + 16 + 1 is 45, which is exactly the achievement count Steam's store page lists for the PC release, so one chronological trophy is the number the totals support. Our Part 2 collectibles guide covers the twelve find-it trophies that do count toward the platinum, and the Part 2 difficulty guide covers the two trophies the Grounded update added, which also sit outside it.

Where the sources disagree

The chapter sequence above is solid: The Last of Us Wiki's Chronological Mode page and a community Chronological playthrough guide on Steam list the same 46 chapters in the same positions, with one difference — the Steam guide's index skips Return to the Coast entirely and runs 45 entries. It is a collectibles guide, so a chapter with nothing to pick up is a plausible omission rather than a contradiction, and the wiki's own chapter category confirms all 46 exist.

The character attribution is where the wiki fights itself, and it is worth being explicit rather than quietly picking a side. Three chapters are labelled one way on the Chronological Mode page and another way on the act page that describes the chapter in detail:

The act pages win here because they carry the plot detail that settles it. The Seattle Day 3 (Abby) page describes The Confrontation from Abby's side, right through to her chasing Ellie backstage and putting her through the floor — that is the fight played as Abby. The Jackson act page names Joel as playable in the Prologue and lists The Chalet under both Abby and Ellie.

One smaller wrinkle for anyone searching: the wiki spells chapter 23 The Theatre on its Chronological Mode page and The Theater on the chapter page itself. The Steam guide uses the -re spelling too. Same chapter.

Which versions can run it

The update is free on both platforms. Naughty Dog's post notes the PS5 patch requires a PlayStation Network account and an internet connection, and that the PC patch requires an internet connection.

If you are still deciding which copy of the game to own, the differences between the 2020 release and Remastered are laid out in our versions guide, and the other menu-hidden Remastered extra — the three cut sequences filed under Making Of — is covered in the Lost Levels guide.

Should you play it this way

Not first. Naughty Dog says so themselves in the announcement — they "recommend players still new to the game to play through Part II's story as was originally developed" — and the table above is the reason why. Half the chapters in the flashback block are answers to questions the 2038 story has not asked yet. The game now opens on Abby and her father in a park in 2034, four years before anything the plot has given you a reason to care about, and Ellie's sixteenth-birthday flashback lands before the theater scene it was written to interrupt.

What it is genuinely good for is a second run. The 26-block interleave is not a smoothing-out, it is an alignment: the mode's best trick is showing you which Abby chapter was happening while you were playing a given Ellie chapter, and the Seattle Day 2 stretch at rows 27 to 33 is where that pays off hardest. It also makes the Farm and Santa Barbara land differently, because by then you have spent the whole game switching every few chapters rather than absorbing one long perspective swap at the midpoint.

And it costs a full replay, because the trophy asks for the story completed in chronological order rather than for switching the option on. If you were going to run the game again anyway, this is a better reason than New Game Plus.

Quick Action Checklist

• Chronological mode is chosen when you start a new game in Part II Remastered — it is not a chapter-select option.
• Free update, 8 July 2025: PS5 patch 2.1.0, PC patch 1.5 on Steam and Epic. Not on the 2020 PS4 release.
• The order runs 46 chapters, opening on Tracking Lesson (Abby) and closing on the Epilogue (Ellie).
• All seven flashback chapters play first, in one block, before the game reaches Jackson.
• The 2020 order gives you 11 unbroken single-character blocks; this one gives you 26, and caps the longest run at five chapters.
• Finishing it pops the gold I Would Do It All Over Again and unlocks Joel-as-Nathan-Drake and Tommy-as-Sam-Drake for No Return.
• That trophy is outside the platinum, same as the No Return set.
• Play the 2020 order first. Naughty Dog recommends it, and the flashback block spoils its own setups otherwise.

More Last of Us breakdowns live on the The Last of Us coverage hub, and everything else is over on the Mythras blog.