Combat fatigues: How Uncharted is a walking simulator in action game's clothing.



On paper Naughty Dog's Uncharted series is as generic as it gets. It's about a good looking white, heterosexual man going on exciting globe-trotting adventures, killing bad guys and wooing a spunky blonde reporter. On this level, it's functional at best and banal at worst. But dig deeper and it becomes clear that Naughty Dog's bombastic blockbuster series quietly had a profound effect on the medium's development over the past several years.



The first Uncharted wasn't particularly revolutionary, though it did feature some snappy dialogue and stunning visuals for its day. It was really 2009's Uncharted 2: Among Thieves where Naughty Dog really went off the rails (literally in the case of its seminal train sequence) and managed to subtly provide a proof of concept for a type of video game that was still in its embryonic stage. The genre has since come to be labelled somewhat derisively as "walking simulators" - a video game with precious little interactivity and no game-over state.



Of course The Uncharted games do have a failure state and you spend most of their running time engaged in third-person combat. On that level, they're still fairly traditional action games. But Uncharted 2 and its successors only dedicate a little over half of their running time to such mechanics. So what do you do the rest of the time?



Not a lot, interactively. Sometimes you simply watch cutscenes and have zero input whatsoever. The rest of the time you're being funnelled through intentionally frictionless scripted puzzles or button-tapping your way through automated platforming sequences. Technically you're still "playing" the game, but your agency is left out of your hands.

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