The Last of Us Part 2 Guitar Free Play: Every Unlock

Ellie picks up a guitar in the first act of The Last of Us Part II and the game never really puts it down. Part II Remastered went further and turned that mechanic into its own standalone extra, buried in the Extras menu — a full instrument-and-effects rig that has nothing to do with any story chapter.

Here is what Guitar Free Play actually contains, how it's different from the guitar scenes you already played, and how the unlocks work.

Two different guitars: story mode and Free Play

There are two separate things called "playing guitar" in this game, and mixing them up is the fastest way to end up confused searching for a mode that isn't where you're looking.

Story guitar is the mechanic built into the campaign itself. It exists in the 2020 PS4 release, the 2020 base game on Remastered, and Part II Remastered on PC — it is not new to any of those. You find it at specific points in the story, playing specific songs, sometimes under a soft time limit and sometimes freely.

Guitar Free Play is a standalone menu mode Naughty Dog added for Part II Remastered. It reuses the same chord system but wraps it in extra instruments, audio effects and backdrops, and it is not tied to the campaign at all — no unlock requirement, no story progress needed.

The versions guide covers Free Play as one line in a feature table; this is the whole thing broken out. If you're choosing which release to buy, our versions guide has the full comparison.

Where the campaign hands you a guitar

Story guitar shows up in five places, confirmed independently by Game8's and Gamepressure's walkthroughs of the mechanic:

The Valiant Music Shop scene is the one to know: it's a full song — Ellie plays a cover of a-ha's "Take On Me" for Dina — and completing it is what opens practice mode for the rest of the campaign. Story guitar sections can't be skipped once started, so budget a few minutes if you'd rather push forward.

Controls in every one of these scenes are the same: tilt either stick toward one of six chords arranged in a circle, then swipe up or down on the touchpad to strum the highlighted chord. Tapping a specific spot on the touchpad instead of swiping plucks a single string — lower on the pad for lower notes, higher for higher ones.

Starting Guitar Free Play

Free Play is available from the moment you boot Part II Remastered — no unlock, no story progress required to open it. Per Twinfinite's walkthrough of the mode: from the main menu, select Extras, then Free Play Guitar Mode.

That's the entire access requirement. What you can actually do inside it is where the unlocks live.

The controls: chord wheel and touchpad

Free Play runs on the same input scheme as story guitar, just with more to switch between:

• L1 / R1 — cycle between chord sets
• Left stick — pick a chord from the radial wheel
• Touchpad swipe — strum the highlighted chord
• Touchpad tap — pluck an individual string at that position

It takes a few minutes to get the muscle memory for swapping chord sets mid-strum, but once you have it you can chain progressions into something that sounds like an actual song rather than isolated chords.

Six instruments, and how they unlock

Free Play ships with six instrument types, confirmed by both Twinfinite's guide and The Last of Us Wiki's Guitar Free Play page:

None of them are locked behind a story beat or a purchase. Per Twinfinite: "The instruments need to be unlocked with points, which you'll accumulate naturally as you just play through the story." In other words, just playing the campaign earns whatever currency unlocks the alternate instruments — nobody covering the mode has published the exact point cost per instrument, so treat "play the story" as the requirement rather than a specific number.

Eleven FX pedals

Once an instrument is selected, a second tab lets you apply an FX pedal to reshape its tone — everything from a clean, dry sound to heavy reverb. The Last of Us Wiki lists eleven named pedals, each built from two or three named parameters (the wiki also lists a numeric default for each parameter, not reproduced here since the page is flagged incomplete and doesn't explain how those defaults map to in-game settings):

The pedal names track the game's own geography and seasonal structure — Seattle, Firefly, Santa Barbara are all places or factions the story visits — which is a small confirmation that this is genuine shipped content rather than a placeholder list, even though the wiki page itself is flagged for cleanup and doesn't explain how each pedal is unlocked.

Three characters, four backdrops

Free Play isn't locked to Ellie. Per Naughty Dog's own feature rundown for the Remastered launch, you can also play as Joel or as Gustavo Santaolalla — the real composer of the series' score — modeled and playable inside the mode itself.

Four backdrops are available to strum in front of, each one a real location pulled from the campaign, per The Last of Us Wiki:

Every backdrop is a place you've already been in the campaign — the mode reuses these sets rather than building new ones, which is consistent with how small a feature this was relative to No Return or Lost Levels.

Why it exists: the design story

The instrument depth here isn't an accident. In a 2021 PlayStation Blog piece on the original story-guitar system, Naughty Dog game designers Grant Hoechst and Mark Burroughs explained the philosophy behind the whole mechanic: they deliberately avoided rhythm-game scoring in favor of something built around "introspection and expression, rather than high-skill riffs, combos" — the point was never to test reflexes, it was to let a scene breathe.

The touchpad-as-strings idea was inspired by smartphone music apps, which is why swiping and tapping both do something musically sensible instead of one input dominating. And per that same piece, the practice/free-play concept wasn't originally planned — it emerged once the team was building multiple in-game songs and needed a way to test chord transitions, and they kept it in because it let players create original material after finishing a scene.

That practice mode is the direct ancestor of the standalone Free Play menu Remastered shipped years later — the wiki and Naughty Dog's own launch rundown both describe Free Play as an expansion of the same underlying tool, not a new build from scratch.

Which versions have it

The story chapters that hand you a guitar are identical across every release, because they're part of the same campaign. The standalone Extras-menu mode is exclusive to Part II Remastered, on both PS5 and PC — it's part of the same $10 upgrade bundle that adds No Return and Lost Levels, which our Lost Levels guide covers in full.

No trophy is attached to Free Play in either release — the 17 trophies Remastered has added across all its updates are 16 for No Return and one for Chronological mode, a full accounting our Part 2 Lost Levels guide breaks down. If you were hoping this unlocks something toward the platinum, it doesn't.

Quick Action Checklist

• Story guitar and Guitar Free Play are two different things — story guitar is in every release, Free Play is Remastered-only.
• Story guitar appears in five places: Prologue, Downtown (Valiant Music Shop — the one that matters, it unlocks practice mode), The Theater, Hillcrest, and Road to the Aquarium.
• Free Play is open from the main menu → Extras → Free Play Guitar Mode, with no story progress required.
• Controls: L1/R1 to cycle chord sets, stick to pick a chord, touchpad swipe to strum, touchpad tap to pluck a single string.
• Six instruments — Guitar, Banjo, Nylon, Jazz, Rock, Steel Resonator — unlock with points earned by playing the story.
• Eleven FX pedals reshape the tone once an instrument is selected.
• Play as Ellie, Joel, or composer Gustavo Santaolalla, across four backdrops: Music Store, Jackson, Theater, Farm.
• No trophy is tied to Free Play in either release.

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