This is the first portrayal of a friendship between adolescent girls that I've ever seen in a video game (excepting Gone Home's documented one), and it's wonderfully done. Throughout, you never leave Ellie's point of view. It flashes back and forth between time periods, exerting the same masterful command of tension and pacing (and your heart-rate) that Naughty Dog established in last year's full-length game. The Last of Us: Left Behind is the story of Ellie's relationship with her best friend, Riley, back in Boston, intertwined with a lesser-explored period of Ellie and Joel's journey across the continent years later. The Last of Us played on this theme as well, telling the story of a gruff, reluctant guardian and a 14-year-old girl who doesn't need looking after, but this downloadable side-story focuses on a friendship instead. The one dynamic that games have been most interested in exploring is that between parent and child The Walking Dead, Bioshock Infinite, even Pikmin, all are parenting games to an extent. A lthough there's a slowly gathering flock of interesting individual characters in video games, there is still a dearth of interesting relationships.
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