The End is Nigh: Uncharted 2

By Martin Gaston

‘The End is Nigh’ is a weekly column by Play.tm’s Martin Gaston, pondering the nature of videogame endings and why we do or don’t choose to finish the games we play. This week: Naughty Dog’s effective simplicity in Uncharted 2.

Uncharted 2 tells an excellent tale. Its ending cinematic is probably one of the finest ever seen in games. It’s so good it even makes you momentarily forget about the outrageously duff boss fight you’ve just had to slog through. It’s got it all: it’s joyfully amusing, very charming and it closes the book on the game’s storyline whilst keeping everything nice and open for an inevitable sequel. It’s a textbook execution which, for some reason, seems to be impossible for contemporary big-budget blockbusters to achieve – just compare it to the weak, flimsy endings of Modern Warfare 2 and Gears of War 2.

Much of its resounding success comes from adherence to simplicity. It’s a very conventional narrative in what is, on paper, an entirely ordinary action adventure: the story, and game, stay exciting from beginning to end because of Naughty Dog’s exceptional execution. There’s no unnecessary shock twist or any attempt to fashion the game’s wafer-thin narrative into an impossibly grand trilogy, complete with frequent and tedious cliff-hangers under the pretence of a bold narrative hooks. Instead, Naughty Dog invests their stock into creating a cast of characters and writing fantastic dialog.

The game is commonly described as cinematic, which serves as both a compliment and an unknowing indictment: too often relaying the joy of playing the game has been buried underneath celebrating the whizz-pop of its darling aesthetics. That’s partially due, I think, to the difficulty of tarting up the gameplay with simple words: saying it’s a cycle of simple jumping puzzles interspersed with cover-based shooting sequences make it all sound quite bland and uninteresting.

When you’re playing it’s phenomenal. Uncharted 2’s gameplay relies on its scenes of immense spectacle succeeding, which in turn depends on the player being sufficiently enraptured by its varied and towering ornate structures. I was. The ritzy explosions, car chases and dramatic camera angles are intertwined with the unravelling of the storyline and the act of playing the game itself. It all blends into a glorious, inseparable whole.

Its narrative success can be explained thusly: Naughty Dog deploy an awareness and understanding of pacing that’s generally only explored by periphery indie developers. It starts with a burst of adrenaline – Nathan Drake, the hero, regains consciousness having been shot and must escape from a train carriage dangling over a snowy cliff. After that it brings the action to an abrupt halt and raises it ever-so-gently for the next hour. When it finally bubbles over it stays elevated for roughly two thirds of the game, before, once again, slowing it down for another half hour. That’s not usually something you see in popular game design. Whilst it’s essentially an action game, the component parts add up to far more than a simple shooting gallery.

It all comes back to the ending. These concluding moments are the story’s denouement – many of the important story reveals are made apparent at earlier junctions – and as such it needs to tie all the loose ends together and leave the player satisfied. Uncharted 2 is a longer experience than most, coming in at over ten hours, and I found myself taking the high production values for granted, demanding more from the ending than I normally would. But it delivers, surprisingly, with little more than a conversation about keeping tears in jars and grading worry on a scale. Amazing.

So deep did my affections for its characters run that I strode through the game accepting almost all (clichéd final boss battle notably excluded) of its gameplay conceits. As an action game, Drake spends an awful lot of his time shooting henchmen in the face: I racked up over a thousand kills over the course of the game. For a lovable rogue, Drake seems to be an exceptionally talented and cold-blooded death merchant. Well, he would be, if Naughty Dog hadn’t ensured I was completely smitten.

Uncharted 2 achieves a rare feat: it makes you love its characters. Its comforting ending, providing the right amount of closure, is a rare treat in games and should be enjoyed by everyone.