Both games have been buffed to a 4K finish their action unfolds in sixty frames per second (though you can switch this to thirty, should you wish) and they now crunch in accordance with the DualSense controller. That niceness is up for fresh inspection, with the release of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, which brings A Thief’s End and its spin-off, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, to PlayStation 5. Call it Drake’s deception: our hero may, over the course of his journey, lie, cheat, steal, and kill as many men as Lara, but he will remain, against the odds, a nice guy. Where A Thief’s End succeeds, in a way that Lara’s recent travails ( Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider ) fall short, is in its knack for scraping off the darkness before it dries. And Tomb Raider, which was co-written by Rhianna Pratchett, seemed to prize grime above all else-in an effort, maybe, to convince us of gravity its heroine was battered, covered in cuts, and dragged through the boot-caking mud of an origin story. The 2018 God of War (note the reversion of the titles, as if one were dinging back the carriage on a typewriter) was lauded for the depiction of its star, Kratos, as a pained and past-haunted figure. What is going on here? There is a compulsion, in games as in movies, to hold our lighter pleasures up for interrogation. Likewise, in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, we see Nate chafing against the gunless demands of domesticity, in possession of a pair of greying temples and a long-lost brother who puffs on enough cigarettes to power his own private cloud cover. In the 2013 Tomb Raider (which we might regard as a deboot), we no longer found Lara ensconced in the luxury of Croft Manor, with a crumpet-bearing butler and a baying Range Rover out front instead, we found her on a freezing beach, clutching a wounded shoulder and shooting at mercenaries. Both have felt the need to conduct archaeological digs into their protagonists, hoping to unearth riches-or, at the very least, to create depths. In recent years, it’s been curious to chart the course of these two series. She is, after all, Lady Lara Croft, 11th Countess of Abbingdon whereas poor old Nate can scarcely extract a “Mr.” without it sounding as though he were being told off. Meanwhile, Lara Croft, who, when it comes to our good will, has the bad fortune of being designated a “tomb raider”-despite her noble intention to vouchsafe any findings to the proper authorities-and also of being born into a fortune. and, two, he mostly fails, going home with a priceless story and vacant pockets. He is, as it turns out, a thief, but he retains our fondness for two reasons: one, the title of his series, “Uncharted,” suggests that he is, in fact, providing a valuable cartographic service, mapping those murky spots that have eluded the glare of G.P.S. Is there a nicer guy than Nathan Drake? I know of no other character, in the annals of games, that one could reasonably expect to encounter in a Panamanian jail-slugging it out with his fellow-cons and slumped in solitary confinement-while remaining utterly convinced of his virtue.
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