Playing The Last of Us Part 2 Chronological mode feels surprisingly logical

I’m a big fan of both The Last of Us games. The first game is easily one of my favourite games ever, and the second game is up there somewhere too. Combat is a real highlight for me, specifically its scrappy, improvisational nature alongside all the attention to detail that Naughty Dog lavished these games with to make each situation incredibly intense, but if I’m honest a huge part of why I love these games is the story. My only real issue with The Last of Us Part 2 is that the narrative pacing constantly drags me out of all the artfully built up tension with flashbacks and diversions. With the recently released Chronological Mode, I was very interested to see if that could improve, to my mind, the flow of the storytelling.

BEWARE: As we’re going to discuss the story of The Last of Us Part 2, there will be spoilers for both The Last of Us games… and the TV show. Shocking, we know.

So what is chronological mode? Well, it does exactly what it says on the tin: you play through the entire game but, instead of flashing forwards and back wildly, it’s all in strictly chronological order. That means that the experience of playing the game, particularly towards the beginning, is drastically different. You actually start here playing with Abby in a brief fifteen minute intro to the character where you’re also introduced to her zebra-saving father… only to see how he’s so cruelly wrenched away from her and Joel’s role in this – it cuts to Joel cleaning his guitar whilst telling Tommy about it. Before you get to shoot a gun, you’ll be seeing all the big revelations that were saved for later parts of the game, including that incredible dinosaur/space museum scene, Owen and Abby finding an aquarium, and more.

So much of The Last of Us Part 2’s early narrative was hung around this mystery about Abby and her motivations for killing Joel so close to the start of the game, those revelations being held back to be revealed in flashbacks later on. Seeing everything laid out in order bring so much more depth and understanding to Abby’s character that was, for many players, masked by the same kind of instant, uninformed hatred that Ellie felt. There is, of course, an artistic link to having players so aligned with their character, but the end result was arguably too visceral for many.

After the introductory scenes, as the game moves on to Seattle, the chronological reordering helps to eliminate the pacing issues that I felt with the original game. Instead of the long stretches where you see just one character’s story, where the story builds up to a huge climax, only to be sent back in time and have to wait for it to build up all over again, the two sides of the timeline are interwoven. The experience of playing two characters in opposition to each other like this is quite unique.

There are a few oddities that are a result of this, though I’m not sure they could have really been avoided. Specifically, because Abby and Ellie are both in the same storm at one point early in the game, you witness that storm starting up twice in quick succession, but from each perspective. It’s chronological, but there’s nothing being cut, so some of the bits overlap each other anyway, and that can be a little strange.

It’s also fair to say that this story and the game was not designed with a chronological telling in mind. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said you don’t fire a gun for a good two or three hours and there’s lots of stuff that was saved for the latter half of the game that take up the beginning. It’s all incredibly emotional, it looks gorgeous, and contains some of the best performances in any game ever, but it’s definitely a much slower start.

By contrast, recutting a film or a TV series to would be much easier, but for a more natural feeling video game, the ebb and flow of gameplay would also need to be considered and adjusted, which this mode doesn’t do. Had this game been designed with a chronological story in mind, it would have been stitched together very differently, and perhaps still have had space for some of the flashbacks, like the museum visit, to be kept in place. This is an imperfect solution to an imperfect problem, and it does mean that it is still better to play The Last of Us Part 2 as originally designed for the first time through, with a Chronological Mode playthrough being more rewarding as a second play.

I do still prefer Chronological Mode so far. I haven’t finished it – it’s a long game after all – but I’m planning to just to see how different its finale hits like this. The pacing issues were my only real issue with the standard campaign anyway, and this has improved the game for me once you get passed the slower start, seeing how both sides of this conflict react to each other’s movements in sequence. I do applaud the ambition of Naughty Dog to cast Abby as a villain for the original release and then unwrap her motivations and backstory to make her sympathetic, narratively speaking, but that’s a huge undertaking to redeem a character after seeing them only through their enemy’s eyes and one that didn’t land for a large part of the audience. I can’t help but feel that the game suffered because of that angle. Perhaps doing things in the “proper” order would’ve been better?