That takes care of the hard missions in this chapter of my campaign. Now, let’s take it easy for a spell.

And definitely not panic. Nope. Definitely not doing that.

I was genuinely surprised that I managed to get away with a double murder in front of all the guards and kitchen staff. Feels like I cheated but in a good way.

The campaign continues!

This treasure we’ve all been searching for turns out to be a biological weapon that turns people into ravenous mutant zombies.

Yeah… We should probably stop the evil British dude from taking it off the island.

At least the terrible final boss has the decency not to take too long. Once stream chat had the decency to remind me what its gimmick was, we were wrapped up in the span of a few minutes.

While Drake’s Fortune appeals strongly to my sense of nostalgia, there’s no denying that it’s more a rough proof-of-concept than anything else. That’s not necessarily anyone’s fault. It was a new console generation, with new hardware and a new franchise.

A lot of the criticisms people had about that game, even the one about killing an uncomfortably high number of ethnic minorities, are addressed in the sequel. Rather than dive straight into it, I’ll take a brief detour back to the PS2 era, to Naughty Dog’s earlier work with the Jak and Daxter franchise in Jak 2.

But first, we have extras to look at, next time.

We’ve finally made it inside the treasure vault, even if poor Sully had to get left behind. The treasure is within sight. I wonder… What other dangers are left to guard it?

This chapter sets up something of a tradition that will be a throughline for the Uncharted franchise going forward. Though all of the games will take inspiration from myths and legends about real-life explorers, Naughty Dog adds a supernatural element to each tale, taking creative liberties to tell their own exaggerated version of it for their fiction.

As an adult, these monsters don’t frighten me at all. Back when I first played this game in the late 2000s, these guys scared the ever-living daylights out of me. I was awful at fighting them because I kept panicking.

But it turns out that nazi zombies are as inept and stupid as regular nazis.

The second Showdown is complete, and we’re onto the next Syndicate on our list. Let’s make some waves in the criminal underworld.

If I had any criticism of Freelancer mode as it currently exists, it’s the in-game economy that IO is intending to foster basically doesn’t exist.

By completing optional and prestige objectives, we get the currency of this mode, Mercers. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much of note worth getting with them. Even in this new mode, bringing in a big assault rifle or shotgun to a Hitman map feels like a big mistake. Spending money on them feels like an even bigger one.

Unfortunately, since I have a way of consistently getting silenced weaponry, I also don’t have anything else to spend my money on. It just lingers on the top right of my screen, begging to be spent. If anything, I’ve gotten better at relying on as little as possible aside from one silenced gun and a ton of tools I can find in the home base.

It’s an odd system, and I don’t know if it meshes well with the Hitman mechanics we know and love.

At last, the trio is back together. Nathan, Elena, and Sully. And at last, we’re finally back on the trail of the lost statue of El Dorado.

The hunt continues!

I’m so used to AAA games taking 20+ hours that I’m still a little surprised that we’re almost 80% through the campaign after only 4 hours. At this rate, we’ll be finished next week with time to spare to look over some of the extras and behind-the-scenes footage.

That’s the stuff I love sifting through, so I’m excited for next time!

Our old pal Sully is still alive! But why is he working for the bad guys? Let’s find out!

It’s easy to criticize Naughty Dog for the cinematic quality of their games and how it fails to truly capture what the medium is capable of, but one thing I will give credit to this style is the way it helps the natural chemistry between actors shine through.

Instead of recording their lines in a voice recording booth, the actors are set up in motion capture suits and act out the performance on a stage, where their mannerisms and voice are recorded for use in the game. Since all of the actors, and the writing team, are together in the same room, they have the capacity to work together in a way other more traditional video game recording setups don’t allow. What that does is add a layer of authenticity to the characters that can’t be recreated any other way.

As critical as I can be of their style, I can’t deny that there are strengths to it as well, this being chief among them.

I continued that last campaign off-stream, and sadly it didn’t go well for me. But that’s to be expected of a roguelike. It just means we start over.

Fortunately, I was able to get past the first showdown before I hit Record.

I’ve hit the point in this roguelike where I haven’t beaten a campaign yet, but I feel like I have the skills and tools necessary in order to do that. Part of that was built in with my map knowledge from all the time I’ve spent in the World of Assassination trilogy, but the rest is coming from the many runs I’ve made both on and off stream.

For example, I didn’t know about the guard in the security room of Dubai that always holds a silenced SMG until I realized that guards weren’t being alerted by the gun I stole from him. These days, I try to start off in Dubai if at all possible simply because I want a silenced gun and I know that’s always available.

It’s a feature of the genre, and part of what I love about it.

We’re packing it in. Drake’s done with this adventure, and he wants to go home. I have no doubt that it will be as simple as stealing a boat and running off.

What do you mean we still have hours of the game left!?

I miss the days when we used to cheat like Weapon Select, Infinite Ammo, or Invincibility by beating video games. Looking at the Extras menu here in Uncharted 1 brought that thought back to me.

I remember replaying this game with Eddy’s Golden Gun and the Dragon Sniper, having access to both over the entire adventure. It made going for treasures and beating the game on the hardest difficulty worth doing.

Achievements are nice, but they aren’t the same.

Well, that didn’t go quite as planned. No matter, on to the next round!

As an interesting “side effect” to the way I played Hitman, I never grew terribly well acquainted with non-silenced weaponry. That means that I’m learning how far gun noises travel, and what guards do when alerted by loud gunfire live only now, despite playing missions in this engine since the 2016 Hitman game.

It’s honestly fun to realize even after all this time there’s a whole layer of systems and interactions that I haven’t yet mastered. It’s going to keep me coming back for sure.

Our progress through the fort is going smoothly. Hopefully, we’ll be able to catch up with Elena soon!

I like the minor detail that Nathan Drake is fluent in Indonesian, especially since we’re about to introduce a character in the next batch of episodes that he has a history with. It’s yet another way the writers communicate details about him without having to explicitly spell them out. Whoever this person is, he’s well-traveled and can handle himself in difficult situations as if he has some experience doing so.

And fun fact: When I tried to search “Buka Pintu” to double-check the translation, Uncharted was the first result. I suppose it’s become a minor meme in the Uncharted fandom.