We’re closer now than we’re ever been to Iram of the Pillars, and to rescuing Sully. It’ll just take one more push until we stow away on the plane to the Rub-Al Khali Desert.
Hopefully, there aren’t any more irritating combat sections between us and that plane.
I used the word “pretentious” to describe this scene where Drake wanders the desert on his own, and that word tends to be over- and misused in the sphere of gaming criticism, but I want to defend its use for what is going on in this scene.
There’s nothing inherently wrong about a 10-minute montage of a character experiencing a brutal trial to survive in harsh conditions without the support they realistically need to keep going. That’s fine on its own. Sure, it’s filler in much the same way but it serves a purpose of giving us a sense of what Drake is willing to do for Sully, now that his life is in danger.
What throws it into the category of pretentious in my mind is the use of TS Elliot’s poetry. While the events of the sequence do mirror the words of the poem, those words don’t tie into the overall themes of the game’s narrative. It feels like the writers are invoking the work to put on the airs of deep thought and philosophy without doing the work to back that up with themes and narrative work to support it.
It rubs me the wrong way, and I’m surprised that it took me up until now to examine why that was the case.
Leave a Reply