How to earn The Last of Us Part 1's hardest trophy

The Last of Us Part 1’s hardest trophy shows Naughty Dog’s designers at their most wicked. Here’s our advice for getting the trophy without ruining your gameplay experience.

The Last of Us Part 1’s hardest trophy asks you to do the unthinkable: be needlessly mean to Ellie. The trophy in question, Left Hanging, asks players to fight all their instincts and ignore Ellie’s request for a high-five. Don’t fear, though: here’s our guide for how to earn The Last of Us Part 1’s hardest trophy.

You wanna walk home with the bronze, you gotta be a beast.

How to earn the Left Hanging trophy in The Last of Us Part 1

On the face of it, Left Hanging is a fairly simple trophy to earn: near the start of the chapter at Tommy’s Dam, you will craft a makeshift bridge across the lip of a dam after helping Ellie across with one of the game’s convenient wooden rafts. Once Joel crosses the bridge, he’ll receive a prompt to give Ellie a high-five; ignore this and walk past her and you’ve got the trophy.

Harder than Dark Souls.

However, the trophy is easily the most technically demanding trophy in the entire game, simply because it demands ice-cold, terminator-level put-down skills designed to push you, the player, to the utmost limit of social convention and emotional reason. In context, this moment comes mere minutes after one of the most trying, heartbreaking scenes in the entire game — Ellie’s attempt to stay hopeful and continue building her relationship with Joel all but demands the player to return that high-five.

Hardest trophy strategy breakdown.

Luckily, there is a strategy that allows you to earn this near-impossible trophy while only doing minor psychic damage to yourself that also doesn’t require you to perform a full second, Undertale-like genocide playthrough of The Last of Us Part 1. The trick is simple — once you ice-cold betray Ellie, you’ll see the trophy pop on-screen. When you see this, immediately hit pause, scroll down to the Restart Checkpoint option, select, and voila — jerk no more.

Consider this little trick akin to using the dagger in Prince of Persia The Sands of Time, and think not of the ill-gotten means by which you achieved this harrowing, brutal bronze trophy. If the toll to your mental health has already been paid, you’ll have the chance to recover later this same chapter with the game’s easiest trophy — Who’s A Good Boy? — which asks you to simply pet a tired, trusty dog.

It wasn't for nothing! Hooray!

We knew once The Last of Us Part 1 trophies leaked that this would be a relatively easy time, especially compared to earning all of The Last of Us Part 2 trophies, or The Last of Us Remastered trophies via PS Plus Essential, but we really didn’t expect this curveball in our playthrough. Check out our full The Last of Us Part 1 review for more trophy tactics, read up on whether the game is worth the price of admission, and scrutinise whether Joel looks more like Pedro Pascal in Part 1. Then let us know in the comments down below whether you were able to bear the brunt of this emotional onslaught.

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Written by Lee Brady

Staff Writer Lee keeps one eye on the future (Astro Bot), one eye on the past (PS1, PS2, and PS3 games), and his secret third eye on junk he really likes (Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Sonic). A PlayStation fan for over 25 years, he loves replaying classic games via PS Plus.