The Last of Us Part 2 Lost Levels: All Three Explained

Most of what The Last of Us Part II Remastered added is loud about itself. No Return has its own tile on the main menu, its own trophy set and a leaderboard. Lost Levels does not. It sits one submenu down, under a heading that reads like liner notes, and it holds three playable sequences that Sony describes as "not seen in the original The Last of Us Part II".

They are not extra chapters. Naughty Dog's own wording, from the launch feature rundown, is that these are "early-development slices of levels that didn't make it into the final game" — and the studio means slices literally. Here is what is actually in them, where the game hides them, and what survived out of them into the version you already played.

Where Lost Levels lives in the menu

The path is Main Menu → Making Of → Lost Levels, which is how both Push Square and SeekingTech describe it. "Making Of" is the same menu that holds the director's commentary track. The heading reads like liner notes, but what is inside it is playable — this is not the chapter select, and it is not filed anywhere near it.

Pick a level and you get two toggles before you start, per SeekingTech's walkthrough of the menu: whether to play the introduction video, and whether to enable the developer commentary. Leave both on the first time. The commentary is the point — the levels are rough enough on their own that stripping the explanation out leaves you wandering an unfinished map wondering what you are looking at.

Three levels, two names each

The marketing names and the in-game names do not match, which matters the moment you go looking for a walkthrough. PlayStation's product page for Part II Remastered lists the three as "Sewers, Jackson Party and Boar Hunt". The game menu, and The Last of Us Wiki's chapter pages, use a different set. If you are searching for "Boar Hunt" and finding nothing, that is why.

All three cast Ellie. None of them puts you in Abby's boots, which is worth knowing if you came looking for cut Abby content specifically — the Part 2 enemies guide covers her half of the finished game instead.

CBR's rundown of the mode puts each level at roughly ten minutes, so the whole feature is an evening, not a campaign.

Jackson Party: a festival with no voice acting

The wiki's own level description reads: "Ellie nervously attends a party in Jackson." It opens with her drinking alone in an alley, hands shaking, and then hands you control in a courtyard outside the church where the town is holding a festival — bonfires, stalls, carnival games, Crooked Still's "Little Sadie" playing from inside.

Neil Druckmann's introduction video calls this one "the roughest of the three", and the wiki's transcript of the level notes something you will notice inside the first minute: the dialogue is delivered entirely through on-screen subtitles, with no recorded voice lines.

The commentary here comes from game designer Banun Idris. The wiki has transcribed seven commentary nodes for this level:

Two details from that commentary are the best argument for playing the thing. First, the milk bottle stall paid out a toy elephant that Ellie would pocket, and you would find it later at the farm with JJ. Idris says that when the festival was cut, the toy survived anyway — it is the "Ollie" elephant on the tractor.

Second, the kids' game. Because clickers navigate by echolocation, the version of tag they play required Ellie to close her eyes and listen. Idris says the team tried to rescue that idea by moving it to the front of the game as a tutorial, decided that being in a clicker's headspace does not teach you how to fight one, and turned it into the snowball fight instead.

Druckmann's stated reason for cutting the whole sequence is pacing: he calls it "pretty fun and lighthearted" and says "it just slowed things too much as we're barreling towards the end of the story at this point."

Seattle Sewers: the hallucination that got moved

Internally this one was called "Find Nora", per the wiki, and it slots into Seattle Day 2 immediately after Ellie is thrown through a window and swept away by the current. The finished game cuts straight past it. The Lost Level restores what used to be there.

The destination is unchanged — reach the ladder up to the Seraphite-held park — but the route is longer, with more crawling. The wiki documents the beat that matters: Ellie crawls past a dead clicker, her flashlight fails, and the game asks you to shake the controller to get it working. When the light comes back she is looking at a hallucination of Joel's corpse, and scrambles out in a panic. After that the level rejoins the layout you know.

The wiki's behind-the-scenes note says that hallucination was not thrown away. Per the developers, it was moved to the Farm chapter, where it does a better job of showing Ellie's PTSD months after the fact rather than days.

Druckmann's introduction video for this level is the clearest statement of intent in the whole mode:

"Ultimately, with a lot of these levels and these sequences, the reason why we cut them more for pacing purposes. But here it is for you in this very, kind of, raw form, that part of it will feel finished, parts of it will feel like assets are missing as far as audio, animation won't be final, but it's a glimpse into what a game looks like when it's months away from finishing."

The Hunt: the boar and the blood trail

The third and last one. The wiki's level description: "Ellie follows a trail of blood to an abandoned general store." Its chapter infobox dates it to 2039, places it near Jackson County, Wyoming, casts Ellie as the only playable character, lists a boar as the level's enemy, and lists Joel as appearing in flashback.

That is genuinely most of what is documented. The Last of Us Wiki has full transcript pages for Jackson Party and Seattle Sewers; the equivalent page for The Hunt has not been written, so there is no public transcript of its commentary the way there is for the other two. CBR's guide describes it as an extended lead-in to the Farm, tracking a wounded boar to a mini-boss fight, and attributes the cut to trouble getting the boar's AI to land the intended effect. Treat that last part as a secondary report rather than something Naughty Dog has said in its own words — the studio's public statements about these levels stop at pacing.

What unfinished means here

Druckmann front-loads the caveat in the Jackson Party introduction, and it is worth quoting because it sets expectations better than any review did: the levels were "months away from being finished", and what you are getting is "rough, missing audio, missing animation, missing gameplay tweaks, missing dialogue, but pretty representative of what it would've been."

So: no voice acting in Jackson Party. Placeholder-grade animation. Interactions that are, in his phrasing, "first or second pass". If you go in expecting a fourth act you will bounce off it in five minutes. If you go in wanting to see what a Naughty Dog level looks like before the polish pass, this is that, shipped by the studio itself with commentary attached.

No trophy attaches to Lost Levels

Worth stating plainly. The original The Last of Us Part II carries 28 trophies, including the two the Grounded update added. Part II Remastered added 13 at launch, three more in April 2025, and one more on July 8, 2025 alongside the Chronological Experience update. That is 17 additions: 16 of them are No Return trophies, and the seventeenth is the gold I Would Do It All Over Again, which asks you to complete the story in chronological order. Nothing in that list touches Lost Levels.

That comes to 45, which is exactly what Steam reports for the PC release — 45 achievements, I Would Do It All Over Again among them. Worth flagging if you are checking the maths yourself: The Last of Us Wiki's trophy page still says 44 in its summary paragraph while listing all 45 in the tables underneath it, because that sentence was written before the Chronological update shipped. The 16 No Return trophies are not required for the platinum — our No Return guide covers what they do ask for, and the Part 2 difficulty guide covers the two Grounded trophies that sit outside it.

Which versions include Lost Levels

Lost Levels is a Remastered feature, full stop. The 2020 PS4 release never got it.

Naughty Dog's PC announcement post is explicit that the April 2025 PC release "brings with it all the new features the PS5 version introduced", naming the Lost Levels among them. The Last of Us Complete, the $99.99 PS5 bundle of Part I and Part II Remastered that went out digitally on April 10, 2025, likewise gets them through the Remastered half — Naughty Dog's announcement lists Lost Levels by name.

If you own Part II on PS4 digitally, the upgrade to Remastered was $10 at launch and imports your saves. Disc owners need a PS5 with an optical drive and have to insert the PS4 disc each time. The versions guide has the full ladder of releases if you are working out which one you actually own.

Quick Action Checklist

• Main Menu → Making Of → Lost Levels. Not the campaign chapter select.
• Leave the introduction video and developer commentary on for a first pass.
• Search for "The Hunt", not "Boar Hunt", if you want wiki coverage of the third level.
• Expect roughly ten minutes each, per CBR — budget an evening for all three.
• Jackson Party has no recorded voice lines. That is the build, not a bug.
• In Jackson Party, look for the toy elephant at the milk bottle stall, then go look at the tractor at the farm.
• Zero trophies here. Do not open Lost Levels expecting platinum progress.
• PS4 owners: this is a Remastered feature only. PS5, PC, or The Last of Us Complete.

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