The Art of the Uncharted Trilogy Book Review
20The Art of the Uncharted Trilogy is a good video game art book. It mostly contains finalized concept art but it also has a fair amount of iteration art. The focus is mostly on the characters and environments, and there’s artist commentary about design decisions on almost every page.
0:00 - Introduction
0:32 - Quality of the Physical Book
0:49 - Content
4:08 - Aesthetics
5:36 - Nostalgia
6:08 - Backstage
8:17 - Closing Remarks
QUALITY OF PHYSICAL BOOK
-9x12 inches.
-It has 189 pages.
-The cover, pages, and printing are of average quality
CONTENT/INNARDS
Variety of images and image types
-There are rough concept sketches, finalized concept art, some storyboard-like sequences, details about objects like traps or puzzles.
-There’s also a few other things like action poses that they used to get the right feel of the environments.
-Through there’s some of everything, the book mostly has finalized concept art, and most of it is about the environments - which I like.
Organization
-The book is organized by game and starts with Uncharted 1, and within each game there’s characters and environments.
-Overall I like how everything is organized in the order that players experienced the games.
Is there writing or insight from the artists and developers themselves?
-As near as I can tell, all if it is from them.
Quality of writing
-The developer remarks are to-the-point and add context to what you are seeing, and help you understand the design process better. So pretty much my ideal kind of writing in a video game art book.
Does it have what you want it to have?
-I think one of the main highlights of the Uncharted games, and what I wanted to be in the book, are the environments. This book really focuses on them, which is great.
-This book isn’t really a comprehensive tome on the games For example, while there’s a few examples of puzzles, each puzzle in the games isn’t featured in the book. I would like to see such a thing, but that’s not what this book is. It’s more like “here’s generally how we approach this sort of thing.”
-I think 189 pages for the first three Uncharted games is a bit too few. Ideally there would be a bit more content overall. They could likely make a book this thick for each of the three games.
AESTHETICS
Artistic/pleasant layout
-As with many video game art books, the art in this book would have benefitted from being in a wide format book rather than a tall one. With this book in particular it’s all the more pronounced because most of the concept art is wide rather than tall. They found a way to put it all in, but I think it would’ve made more sense to just put them in a wide book.
-The layout of the pages is consistent and there are no aesthetic barriers. So it’s pretty average in this regard.
Full pages of art?
-There are not as many as I would hope since so many images are wide, but there are some nice full-page images.
Quality of the art itself
-I think the art itself is probably above average.
Anything else about the book like the cover, binding, feel, etc.
-Though the cover seems to be made of normal cardboard like any other book, the design of it is so convincing that it really looks like it’s made of leather. The debossed/sunken text and compass just adds to it.
-I also think the red gilded page edges are pretty cool and help give the book a unique look overall. It just feels like a fancy book.
NOSTALGIA/AFFINITY EVOKED FOR THE GAME
-As for the nostalgia evoked by the book, I think the games are so well designed and deliberate that they lend themselves to nostalgia naturally, and seeing these images brings me right back to the feeling of playing the games.
BACKSTAGE
-There were a few examples of how art design and game design intersect. For example, you’re probably aware that lighting and colored paint is used in Uncharted to help you to know where to go, but the artists also create more subtle things like unique ruins that tend to attract your attention, and also things like smoke or flapping flags.
-The developers comment on other aspects of art design, such as how they used sharper edges and lines with Chloe’s clothing as opposed to Elena’s in order to reflect the differences in their personalities.
-The forward speaks to the rough conditions of working on a realistic-looking game rather than a cartoony game, having the founders leave, and of working with a new and basically unfinished platform - the PlayStation 3. I found it interesting to see how they discovered they needed a more traditional top-down company organization to deal with this rather than the flat organization that they were used to. They needed increased organization to get everything to flow better (this also might explain why Valve hasn’t made a real game in about a decade).
There are 17 book reviews in Season 1 of my series “Mike’s Video Game Art Book Reviews.” I hope you