MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW.

Since I played through The Last of Us: Left Behind on Valentine’s Day, then immediately watched my partner play it again right afterwards through tear-streaked eye make-up (mega romantic, right?), I haven’t been able to get it off my mind. It really feels like a watershed moment for games, and for my own relationship with them. It is perfectly pitched, funny, sad, emotionally devastating, and amongst the most relatable stories I’ve ever seen a game tell. I think it’s a beautiful and important thing, and I wanted to elucidate why.

This is probably going to get a little gushing, which is most uncharacteristic of me. Let’s just go with it.

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Statistically, if our audience metrics are remotely accurate, it is unlikely that you, the person reading this, will have first-hand experience of being a teenaged girl. Left Behind shows just what it’s like, post-apocalyptic military state and deadly fungal outbreak notwithstanding. It’s unbearably intense, confusing, frustrating and conflicted - much like being a teenage boy, I’d presume. It’s about finding who you are in amongst the broiling turmoil of adolescent emotions and chemicals within you, and reluctantly giving up stuff you used to love as a kid. It’s also about trying to maintain your friendships when all of you are changing so quickly. Left Behind is mostly about that last part.

“ Being a teenager is about about finding who you are in amongst the broiling turmoil of adolescent emotions and chemicals within you.

Ellie and Riley have clearly known each other for a long time. Their friendship has that intensity that comes from growing up together. But they have started to go in different directions; Ellie is training with the military, whilst Riley ran off to join the military resistance, the Fireflies. Riley’s been away for months, but as soon as she arrives back in Ellie’s dorm their friendship picks up where it left off; immediately you can see their shared sense of humour and rebellious spirit. Riley goads Ellie into revisiting one of their old haunts, the abandoned mall.

What they get up to there is an echo of the childhood they presumably shared; the silly games, the water-pistol fight, the puns, their mockery of the quarantine-zone’s stern pronouncements (“Inaction… costs lives!”). But something’s changed. Riley is planning to abscond with the Fireflies, and can’t figure out how to tell Ellie. That scene in the arcade is almost unbearable the second time around. You see Ellie straining to believe in the game, as they both try to avoid the truth that they have changed. Their horsing around on the merry-go-round and in the photobooth is a retreat, a regression back to childhood to avoid facing the realities of growing up: separation, change, probably pain.

When she eventually tells her, there’s a fight - a fight that reminded me so strongly of the ones I used to have with my best friend when we were teenagers. There’s the rejection, the sense of betrayal, the explosion of unrefined anger and cruel words that you immediately regret. You see Ellie desperately trying to hide the fact that she needs her using those adolescent weapons of mockery, sarcasm and misplaced aggression. Remember those?

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Left Behind is not the first game I’ve played that depicts a meaningful and believable relationship between two adolescent girls. It’s the second. Gone Home does it too, and very well indeed - you learn about the growing friendship and blossoming attraction between Sam and her friend Lonnie through the artefacts of their friendship: notes, diaries, mix-tapes, Polaroids, zines. But in Left Behind you are one half of that friendship. It’s active, not passive. It is also the first mainstream, big-budget game I’ve ever played that’s done it, and that feels really significant to me. This is a moment I didn’t even know I’d been waiting for until it happened.

“ This shows that Naughty Dog's talents extend to different parts of the emotional spectrum.

It’s not just significant because it’s about the kind of relationship other games are terrified to explore, either - it’s significant because it does it so well. The Last of Us was already a masterclass in interactive storytelling, in my opinion, but this shows that Naughty Dog’s talents extend to different parts of the emotional spectrum than The Last of Us’ campaign, and that it can write all sorts of characters. Characters that I can relate to more than the usual gruff men whose shoes I’m asked to step into when I play video games. Not just because they’re female, but because they feel like real people.

Then there was the kiss, a moment so beautiful and natural and funny that I was temporarily dumbstruck. “I’m sorry,” Ellie says straight afterwards, in a fit of teenaged awkwardness. “For what?” Riley replies. For what indeed.

Suddenly, Left Behind is not only the first mainstream game to depict an authentic friendship between two girls. It is the first mainstream game to depict a friendship between two girls that could be something more.

Is Ellie gay? Maybe. Maybe she’s bisexual, maybe she’s straight but loves Riley and just went with the moment. When you’re a teenager you don’t know these things about yourself. The labels don’t always fit, and your feelings don’t always obey your will, and so much of what you feel is confusing and conflicting. I spent years figuring that stuff out. So did we all, queer or not.

I found a beautiful ambiguity in that kiss. Either way, they loved each other. It could have been that Ellie and Riley’s friendship would turn into something more, given time. For me the tragedy was that they never got to find out.

There are people who wonder why having more female characters in games matters. This is why it matters. It broadens the kind of story you can tell, and it makes things more interesting. It also gives people like me a character in whom we can see aspects of ourselves that just don’t exist in video games. I didn’t fully acknowledge, until I played this, just how disappointingly rare it was.

Keza MacDonald is IGN’s Contributing Editor and has very distinctive hair. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter