The Last of Us: The Story So Far

We’re just a couple of days from the release of The Last of Us Part II, the anticipated follow up to Naughty Dog’s critically acclaimed, post-apocalyptic game The Last of Us. 

The Last of Us released exclusively for the PlayStation 3 in 2013, and in the way that game rounded out the era of PlayStation 3 exclusives, The Last of Us Part II will be one of the last major PlayStation 4 exclusives coming out this year (with the exception of Ghost of Tsushima), and will effectively bring the PlayStation 4-exclusive era of gaming to a close.

In order to prepare you for the release of The Last of Us Part II this Friday, and to hopefully offer you a refresher, we’re going to take you through the story of The Last of Us so far, highlighting some of the major characters, places, and important story beats from the first game, from beginning to end. This article is full of spoilers, so if you’re still interested in playing through the first game (or are currently playing through it to prepare for Part II), read at your own risk. 

The events of The Last of Us take place across multiple cities in the United States over the course of one year. The four sections of the game are broken into the four seasons, with the game beginning in earnest in the summer and ending in the spring. With that in mind, here is everything you need to know to catch you up with the story so far. 

Notable Characters: 

Joel: Deuteragonist. Survivor. Playable character
Ellie: Deuteragonist. Survivor. Playable character 
Marlene: Leader of the militia group, the Fireflies 
Tommy: Brother of Joel 
Tess: Joel’s partner in crime. A smuggler.
Henry & Sam: Brothers. Survivors.  

Notable Locations:

Boston, MA 
Pittsburgh, PA
Jackson County, WY
Colorado (setting: University of Eastern Colorado)
Salt Lake City, UT

The Beginning – A Few Hours Before the Outbreak

The Last of Us begins in (or very close to) Austin, Texas in 2013, just a few hours before the outbreak of the infected, which will come to define the world of the game. Joel comes home late from work to find his daughter, Sarah, awake on the couch. The two chat, share a couple of jokes, and Sarah gives Joel a watch for his birthday, which he still wears during the main events of the game.  

A couple of hours pass, and when Sarah wakes up, the world is, quite literally, on fire. She becomes the first playable character in The Last of Us, and it’s through her eyes that we experience the fear and confusion of those first crucial moments of the outbreak. Sarah wanders the house for Joel, and upon finding him, the two are nearly attacked by their infected neighbor, who Joel ends up shooting. Both Joel and Sarah are picked up by Joel’s brother, Tommy, and during their attempt to leave the city, we learn that whatever’s going on is spreading fast, with reporters already citing cases from coast to coast.

On their way out of the city, Joel, Sarah, and Tommy are in a car accident that leaves Sarah unable to walk. On foot now, Joel runs with Sarah in his arms, trying to get to safety.

Sadly, and in a completely unexpected, jaw-dropping moment that will come to define the bleak tone of the game, Sarah is shot and killed by a military solider.

Summer – 20 Years Later

Following Sarah’s death, the game makes a pretty substantial time jump and picks up in the summer, twenty years later, in the year 2033. The opening credits of the game provide more details about how the world fell to its knees in the wake of the outbreak, mentioning how major cities have been placed under martial law and that quarantine zones have been established. It’s in the opening credits that we hear our first mention of a militia group called the Fireflies, who fight back against martial law and are determined to reinstate the traditional branches of government.

Somewhere in the last twenty years, Joel made his way to Boston, where he’s been living and working as a smuggler, alongside his smuggling partner, Tess. There’s no mention of Joel’s brother Tommy, or what exactly happened to him in the last two decades, but Joel is noticeably hardened by the past and moves through the world under the impression that he owes it nothing. It’s this outlook that ultimately leads to Joel making a morally-ambiguous decision in the final act of the game.

Back to Tess.

She informs Joel that she’s tracked down a smuggler and weapons dealer named Robert, who owes them guns but has been avoiding them. Joel and Tess set off to find Robert, and upon cornering him, Robert reveals he sold their guns to the Fireflies. Tess shoots Robert over this news and suggests to Joel that they go to the Fireflies to get their guns back.

Enter Marlene, leader of the Fireflies.

Marlene won’t give up the guns willingly, and instead she offers Joel and Tess a deal: she’ll give the weapons back, if they smuggle something out of the city for her.

That something…is 14-year old Ellie.

If Joel and Tess can transport Ellie to Boston’s capitol building and hand her off to a team of Fireflies, no questions asked, their job will be done. Eventually, though, it comes to light that Ellie is infected but immune to the virus, and the Fireflies believe they can use her to develop a cure out west.

It’s a long journey to the capitol building, one where players can already see the relationship developing between Joel and Ellie, through a series of sarcastic quips, jokes, and even saving each other’s lives. They arrive at the capitol building to find the team of Fireflies dead, and it’s revealed that Tess has been bitten on her neck.

Tess buys Joel and Ellie time with the soldiers, but before they leave her to die, Tess makes Joel promise that he will get Ellie to his brother Tommy, who lives out west. It’s revealed that Tommy was a former Firefly, who was close to Marlene, and if anyone knows what to do with Ellie, or how to get her to the Fireflies developing a cure, it’s him. Joel initially resists, reminding Tess this was her smuggling job and he wants no part of it, but he reluctantly agrees out of obligation to and his feelings for her.

Thus begins Joel and Ellie’s journey out west.

It’s during the summer months that we see the initial growth of Joel and Ellie’s relationship, as they both have to rely on and trust each other in some pretty dicey situations against the infected and humans. Because of this, Joel’s demeanor begins to soften towards Ellie in this first part of the game, as he indulges her jokes a bit more, engages her in general conversation, and answers her questions about the world pre-outbreak. It’s also during the summer that we learn Ellie has never been outside of the Boston quarantine zone and is, in a sense, experiencing the world for the first time.

Because Tommy lives out west, Joel decides that he and Ellie need a car. Joel enlists the help of an old acquaintance named Bill, who helps them scrounge parts to fix up an old vehicle.

Vehicle in hand, Joel and Ellie make their way from Boston to Pittsburgh. It’s in this city that Ellie makes her first kill to save Joel’s life and is finally given a gun of her own. It’s also in Pittsburgh that Joel and Ellie meet brothers Henry and Sam.

Henry and Sam become a pretty significant part of the game near the end of the summer season. Henry reveals the two were separated from their group when they entered the city to search for supplies and are trying to make their way to a mutually-agreed upon meeting spot. Joel and Ellie tag along with the brothers, fighting alongside them through bandits and infected, and after a while it feels as though the four of them could become a permanent group, helping each other to survive. Giving each other a reason to live.

Things quickly change, though, when it’s revealed that Sam has been bitten. As he attacks Ellie and begins turning into one of the infected, Henry shoots and kills his own brother. Then, overcome with sadness and guilt, Henry kills himself.

His suicide is the end of Summer.

Fall

The next section of The Last of Us picks up a couple of months after the deaths of Henry and Sam. It’s fall now, and Joel and Ellie are closing in on Tommy’s home of Jackson County, WY, which turns out to be a community surrounded by a power plant and a dam.

(Naughty Dog has revealed Jackson County will be one of the settings in The Last of Us Part II.)

It’s here that players get a bit more backstory as to what happened between Joel and Tommy after Sarah’s death and in the early years of the outbreak. We learn that Tommy quit the Fireflies and that his and Joel’s relationship is intensely strained, with Tommy having said that he never wanted to see Joel’s face again.

Despite them parting on bad terms years ago, Tommy welcomes Joel into the Jackson County community, and the two (much to Tommy’s disbelief) discuss Ellie’s immunity to the cordyceps fungus that turns humans into the infected. Joel tells Tommy that Ellie needs to be taken to the Fireflies, so that he can return to his life (or what’s left of it without Tess) back in Boston. Tommy initially denies Joel’s request to deliver Ellie to the Fireflies’ lab, but he eventually has a change of heart and agrees to transport her the rest of the way.

Tommy tries to explain the situation to his wife and that Joel needs his help, but the two get into a brief argument. Ellie, overhearing Tommy and his wife, steals Tommy’s horse and runs away.

Joel and Tommy manage to find Ellie in an old ranch, where Ellie finally confronts Joel about wanting to abandon her from the start of their journey. Their conversation intensifies, as Ellie mentions Joel’s daughter, Sarah, reminding him that he’s not the only one whose lost someone he cares about. She reveals to Joel that everyone she’s cared for has either died or left her. Everyone except for Joel. Despite this vulnerable admission, Joel is firm in his decision that they’re going their separate ways.

On the way back to Tommy’s community, however, Joel has a change of heart. He agrees to take Ellie to the Firefly lab himself, and the two head for University of Eastern Colorado.

Upon their arrival at the UEC lab, they find the Fireflies who were supposed to be leading the search for the cure, dead. One of the researchers left behind a voice recording, though, revealing the remaining Fireflies are in Salt Lake City, still trying to find a cure. With this new information, Joel and Ellie battle their way out of the UEC building.

They’re almost out, when Joel is pushed against a railing and attacked by a bandit. While trying to fight his attacker, the railing breaks, Joel falls to the ground floor, and is impaled by a rusted pipe. With the screen fading in and out of darkness and Joel losing a lot of blood, it’s up to Ellie to get the two of them out of the building and back to their horse.

Though Ellie manages to get them outside and up on the horse, Joel is in pretty bad shape. Once there is some distance between them and the attackers from the University, Joel falls off the horse and Ellie is unable to get him back up. Joel’s eyes close and the Fall section of the game ends.

Winter

Winter picks up a couple months later and begins with Ellie as the playable character, hunting a deer. At first, there is no mention of Joel or if he survived the end of the fall season, but it soon becomes clear that Ellie has been looking after him and his injuries since the accident. Ellie manages to track the deer to a shack and meets two men named David and James. They claim they’re from a settlement full of hungry women and children and want the deer that Ellie has been tracking. Ellie only agrees to trade the animal for antibiotics, and James leaves to retrieve it for her. With James gone, Ellie and David take shelter in the shack and defend it from infected that try to break in.

In a conversation that quickly put players on high alert, David reveals that some of his men were killed, and his description of the killers match Ellie and Joel perfectly. Ellie manages to leave with the medicine and returns to Joel.

Left Behind DLC – (A Quick Interlude)

Left Behind was the only DLC released for The Last of Us and came out in 2014. The events of the DLC take place three weeks before the start of the main game, and it’s actually presented to the player in the form of flashbacks that Ellie has during the “Winter” section of the main game, when she is searching for medicine in order to keep Joel alive.

Left Behind reveals how Ellie and her best friend, Riley were bitten. The DLC begins with Ellie in her room, in the Boston quarantine zone. Riley breaks into Ellie’s room, having been gone for a couple of months, and reveals that in that time, Marlene made her a Firefly. The two leave the confines of the quarantine zone and enter an abandoned mall, hoping to have one last moment of fun together before Riley is relocated to another Firefly team, in a different region of the country. Players get a strong glimpse into their friendship, which turns out to be something more toward the end of the DLC, when Ellie kisses Riley and asks her not to leave Boston.

The mall is quickly overrun with infected, and Ellie and Riley are bitten while trying to escape. Riley mentions that she and Ellie should just wait it out and turn into infected together, saying “we can be all poetic and just lose our minds together”, a line that Ellie will be holding on to until the end of The Last of Us.

Winter, Cont’d…

Once Ellie makes it back to Joel and administers the antibiotics, she soon leaves again on the horse, in order to draw a group of bandits away from their hiding place.

Her attempt to throw them off doesn’t last long. The horse is killed and Ellie is taken by David. Ellie wakes up behind bars and David assures her he wants to help her and will even let her live if his group can trust her. Ellie isn’t having it and breaks David’s finger. Before he leaves, he threatens to chop Ellie into tiny pieces.

From here, the game shifts perspectives a couple of times.

Cut to Joel, who finally wakes up and notices that Ellie is nowhere to be found. He leaves their hiding place, still severely injured, but determined to find Ellie, all the same. Joel comes across David’s men during his search and tortures a couple of them for information. They tell Joel what he needs to know, and he shoots them.

Cut back to Ellie, who is about to be butchered by David and James. She blurts out that she is infected and tells them to pull up her sleeve, if they don’t believe her. While they’re arguing over whether her scar is real, Ellie snatches the machete, kills James, and rolls off the table. Later, Ellie and David end up in an abandoned hotel, trying to kill each other. Ellie struggles to take him down, and David eventually overpowers her. Joel shows up just in time to see Ellie finish David off herself. The two leave, but Ellie is extremely shaken up from what just happened.

Their departure from the hotel ends the Winter section of the game.

Spring

We enter the final stretch of The Last of Us, with Joel and Ellie finally reaching Salt Lake City and making their way toward the hospital the Fireflies have occupied. It’s in Salt Lake City that Joel finally tells Ellie they don’t have to go through with this plan to deliver her to the Fireflies.

When Ellie asks what other options do they have, Joel mentions they could go back to Tommy’s community and just be done with “the whole damn thing.” To this, Ellie delivers some of the most memorable lines in the game, saying, “After all we’ve been through. Everything that I’ve done. It can’t be for nothing.”

As they near the hospital, Ellie nearly drowns. Joel attempts to save her, but two Fireflies appear and knock Joel out with the gun.

Joel awakens in the hospital, with Marlene next to his bedside. She informs Joel that Ellie is being prepped for surgery. When Joel asks to be taken to Ellie, Marlene denies him, revealing that they need to remove the mutated cordyceps (the fungus that’s responsible for the infected) from Ellie’s brain, in order to reverse engineer a vaccine.

In other words, the surgery will kill Ellie.

Marlene tells her men to get Joel out of the hospital and to shoot him, if he tries anything. Joel refuses to cooperate and goes full John Wick in this last section of the game. He demands the Firefly tell him where the operating room is and then kills him on the spot. Joel battles his way through the hospital, ultimately finding the operating room.

He kills the surgeons in the room and takes an unconscious Ellie off the operating table. Joel finds an elevator and takes it to the parking garage on the lower level, where he finds Marlene waiting for him with a gun. She pleads with Joel, asking him to think twice before taking Ellie from the hospital and says that this [the surgery] is what Ellie would want. Joel pauses, as though considering what Marlene says, but he shoots her. Marlene begs for her life, asking Joel to just let her go. Joel says Marlene would just come after Ellie, and ruthlessly shoots her in the head.

On the drive away from Salt Lake City, Ellie wakes up in the backseat, and Joel lies about everything that happened at the hospital. He tells Ellie there are others like her who are immune, but the Fireflies still weren’t able to find a cure and they’ve stopped looking for one.

The last moment of the game cuts to Joel and Ellie coming up on Tommy’s community back in Jackson County, WY. Before they enter it, though, Ellie makes Joel swear that everything he said about the Fireflies is true. Joel swears it’s true.

There’s a moment of silence as Ellie contemplates his answer.

Finally, she says, “Okay.”

The Last of Us Part II releases on Friday, June 19th exclusively on PlayStation 4.

Tori Morrow

Tori is originally from Rapture but now she lives in Chicago. She enjoys open world RPGs, a good narrative-driven game, and is probably the only person still watching The Walking Dead.