Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, by Naughty Dog Studios

Having won several Game of the Year awards for 2009, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is undoubtedly my favorite narrative-heavy game of last year. While it is loosely part of a series started with Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Uncharted 2 is a stand-alone game that someone could dive into without having ever played through the first (although I recommend playing through both).

Cinematic Trailer:



Nathan Drake (descendant of the famous Elizabethan Drake) is a fortune hunter extraordinaire, always combing the world looking for ancient riches. In this episode, Nathan is approached by an old friend, Harry Flynn, and his lovely partner, Chloe Frazer, to help them with a heist in the heavily guarded Royal Museum in Turkey so they can get after a relic from one of Marco Polo's late 13th-century journeys. After Flynn double-crosses Drake at the museum, Drake gets put in a Turkish prison. His friend Victor "Sully" Sullivan and Chloe (who had become his lover since they'd first met months ago with Flynn's initial introduction) come months later to get him out of prison, and they team up to find out what Flynn has discovered about the Marco Polo treasure he and his employer seek. What follows is an amazing story that might possibly be the finest narrative video game every produced.

The first and foremost achievement of this game is the exquisite storytelling. The cinematic cutscenes and gameplay have very similar looks so that the shift between the two is natural and smoothly executed. Because of this, the story spans across the entire game, not just during the cutscenes, as with some games. Naughty Dog Studios used live actors for the motion capture, so all the body movements and talking and especially facial expressions are realistic to distraction. They took the time to painstakingly match the actors' voice acting to the lip movements with extreme attention to detail. Taking these perfectionist measures paid off in the long run, truly making the game feel like one epic, lengthy film. It's games like this one that exemplify why I enjoy the video game narrative so much. They are making video games the new novel or film--that next great thing that captures our imaginations and tells a story with real depth and vivacity.

The gameplay of hopping from train car to train car, defending yourself from gun-toting European war criminals, and (in the opening scene) climbing up a runaway train that is dangling precariously from a sheer cliff never gets old or repetitive. Naughty Dog has been careful to make every scene of the game new and interesting--never a rinse-and-repeat sort of experience. The controls are intuitive and lend themselves to the narrative nature of the game. The "sets" of each scene can be maneuvered through freestyle, where you can climb over a box, take cover beneath a window, etc., making it so you never feel like you're boxed in with only one path you can take.

Some fun surprises turn up in the narrative--old acquaintances from the first Uncharted--and there's plenty of romance in the game for those who like to mix their treasure hunting and gun-toting with a little bit of boy-meets-girl. The game also continues the treasure-hunting mini-game where the player can discover all sorts of "real" treasures throughout the scenes that become part of Drake's collection.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is one of my favorite games ever, and I wish they had a blu-ray film edition I could recommend to all my friends who don't own a video game console.


Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, by Naughty Dog Studio and Sony Studios. 2009. Playstation 3. $54.99 (Amazon).