Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (2016) (PS4) (Naughty Dog)
0Nathan Drake was the perfect action hero for an era in video gaming history when developers wanted to create more grounded and relatable protagonists than all those muscular warriors and talking animals which had dominated the industry until that point. As can be seen even more clearly in the case of Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain (another Sony exclusive from the same era), there was a concerted effort to make games become more like movies, which in turn required better mainstream appeal in terms of intelligible plots and charismatic characters.
Earlier commercial successes such as the Tomb Raider games had already tried to capitalize on established Hollywood formulas in some rather obvious ways, but Lara Croft was ultimately both too aloof and aristocratic for the peanut-crunching, Madden/FIFA-playing masses to relate to (not to mention too embarrassingly sexualized to garner the approval of their non-gamer girlfriends). In this context, veteran game director and script writer Amy Hennig’s handsome, wisecracking and thoroughly contemporary adventurer Nathan Drake (expertly voiced by the affable Nolan North) was a much better fit for the target demographic than any of his predecessors or competitors. With him as a solid anchor, Naughty Dog could then launch a successful trilogy of visually stunning PS3 titles which combined impressive set pieces and cutscenes with light platforming mechanics and rudimentary puzzle solving in more sophisticated ways than previous third-person action games like Gears of War.
However, almost ten long years has now passed since the first entry in the series. The cinematic action adventure has certainly lost its novelty factor by now and even good old Nate (or at least his outrageously high body count) has become a bit of a laughing stock. For what’s been billed as the final installment in Drake’s saga, it was obviously never going to be enough just to get back to the well once more. And if the early parts of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (as well as the reviews available so far) are anything to go by, Naughty Dog’s approach seems to have been to bid farewell not just to a well-known cast of characters but also to the entire Indiana Jones-inspired movie escapism which has defined the series (and a generation of console games, for that matter). For this particular developer, it’s hard not to interpret UC4 as an indirect continuation of the harsh anti-hero revisionism which made The Last of Us such a haunting and unique experience. For the industry as a whole, Uncharted 4 - despite being as full of well-directed sound and fury as any video game in recent memory - just might signal a recognition that video games in general have more interesting tales to tell than the adolescent power fantasies which blockbuster cinema is made of. If so, that would be a very interesting development indeed...