Uncharted: Golden Abyss arrived in 2011 as a launch title for the PlayStation Vita, a spin-off of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series built by SCE Bend Studio and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. It is a prequel, set before the events of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, and it sends adventurer-treasure hunter Nathan Drake into the river basins, temple ruins and karst caverns of Central America after the lost city of Quivira.
It is also, by some distance, the most interesting thing that happened to the Vita at launch.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
A Panama Dig Site and a Poisoned Expedition
The story opens at a Panama dig site headed by Marisa Chase, the granddaughter of an archaeologist named Vincent Perez. Drake arrives with his old friend Jason Dante. At the site the group finds the bodies of poisoned Spanish conquistadors and a grave marker carrying a Visigoth symbol.
Dante leaves to take a phone call. Marisa then shows Drake an amulet she had hidden from Dante, inherited from her grandfather, and the two agree to team up. The alliance forms in the gap Dante leaves behind, and the game never pretends the gap was accidental.
Nathan and Marisa are attacked and captured by Dante’s real partner, the warlord Roberto Guerro. They escape. They go to Perez’s house, where they learn that Perez hired Dante to continue his research after a terminal cancer diagnosis. Dante paid off Guerro for access to the site in return for a share of the treasure, which Guerro intends to use to fund his conflict. Marisa went there to finish her family’s work.
The Sete Cidades and Friar Marcos de Niza
The marker, the pair learn, refers to the Sete Cidades, an ancient Christian sect dedicated to finding the Seven Cities of Gold. Friar Marcos de Niza, a member of that sect, had been part of a failed expedition led by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado to find the city of Quivira.
Following further clues, including one referring to a “Sword of Stephen,” Nathan and Marisa track Perez’s trail to a ruined Sete Cidades retreat. They find Perez, who has succumbed to his illness, along with evidence that leads Nathan to suspect de Niza deliberately misled Coronado.
The ruins lead to a crypt holding the Sword of Stephen, the personal sword of Esteban, de Niza’s guide. Dante and Guerro interrupt. Guerro takes the sword and Marisa after pushing Dante off a balcony for insulting him. Nathan and Dante then ally reluctantly to escape the ruins and Guerro’s army, and they fail to stop Guerro from escaping.
That is a lot of plot, and Golden Abyss carries it at a clip. The de Niza material is the sharpest thing in the script: a historical lie, a sect hunting seven cities, and a family trying to finish what its patriarch started. It gives the shooting a reason to exist beyond the next room.
Cover-Based Shooting and a Canoe
Golden Abyss is an action-adventure game played from a third-person perspective, with platforming and puzzle elements. Players control Nathan Drake through a series of linear levels across jungles, temple ruins, caverns and encampments.
Platforming means climbing ledges and jumping between environmental platforms. Some levels include multiple paths and hidden areas with collectible treasures. In some sections Nathan swims through bodies of water and rows a canoe down a river.
Combat offers stealthy takedowns and cover-based third-person shooting against groups of enemies, with either precise aiming or blind firing. The weapon set runs pistols, machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers and grenades.
Controls mix traditional joystick and button commands with the Vita’s motion and touch functions. Motion controls handle weapon aiming and balancing on a tightrope. Swiping the touchscreen guides Nathan through and around the environment and is mandatory for melee attacks. Some melee sections play out like quick time events. Some puzzles use the touchscreen to reveal clues or adjust mechanisms. The back touch panel zooms the weapon camera and takes pictures of the environment.
The mandatory touch melee is the weakest idea in the game.
Forced input gimmicks age faster than anything else on a handheld, and this one was already creaking in 2011. The rest of the touch and motion work is optional, which is the correct call.
Bend Studio, Naughty Dog and Nolan North
Concept work on Golden Abyss began in 2007, when Sony asked Bend Studio to develop a new Uncharted as a console launch title. Because the Vita’s specifications kept changing, much of the early development was done on PlayStation 3 hardware.
Naughty Dog oversaw the entire project. Bend received assets from the first two Uncharted titles and access to their motion capture facilities. John Garvin served as both director and scriptwriter, the latter under the supervision of main series writer Amy Hennig. Hennig also ensured the return of Nolan North as Drake and Richard McGonagle as Sully.
That supervision shows. North’s Drake is the Drake of the main series, not a soundalike, and the script keeps the series’ habit of letting a joke land before the next firefight. A spin-off that gets the lead voice right has already cleared its biggest hurdle.
Strong Sales and an 8.1/10
Golden Abyss was revealed in January 2011 alongside the Vita. It debuted to strong sales, and it drew a published 8.1/10 from five outlets, with journalists praising its graphics.
The graphics hold up better than the design around them. The Vita screen made the jungles and caverns look like a console game in your hands, which was the entire pitch of the hardware. The problem is what the game asks you to do inside those environments.
Too much of Golden Abyss is a corridor with a shooting gallery at the end. The multiple paths and hidden treasures exist, but they are decoration on a linear spine. The puzzle design leans on touchscreen gestures rather than on the kind of mechanical invention that made the mainline games feel clever. And the cover shooting, while competent, is the least distinctive version of a system the series had already run several times.
What Golden Abyss Actually Proves
Here is the part worth weighing. Golden Abyss is a prequel made by a studio that had never shipped an Uncharted, on hardware that was still being finalized while the game was in production, under the eye of the original team. It should be a mess. It is not.
It is a real Uncharted game with a real Nathan Drake, a story that connects the Sete Cidades, Marcos de Niza and the Coronado expedition into something coherent, and a combat loop that works. The failures are failures of ambition, not of craft: the touch gimmicks, the linear levels, the sense that Bend was told to prove the Vita rather than to push the series.
The de Niza twist is the strongest argument for the game’s existence. A friar who deliberately misled an expedition, a crypt holding Esteban’s sword, a warlord funding a conflict on a share of treasure: that is Uncharted plotting at full strength, and it is buried in a launch title most people played once and traded in.
Golden Abyss is a confident, well-acted, occasionally gimmicky prequel. Bend got the voice, the tone and the treasure-hunting rhythm right on the first try. What it did not get was the freedom to make something stranger.
That is the verdict this paper lands on: a game that does right by Nathan Drake and does right by the Vita’s screen, then settles for competence where it could have reached.
KEY FACTS
– Release: 2011, launch title for PlayStation Vita
– Developer: SCE Bend Studio
– Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
– Director and scriptwriter: John Garvin, supervised by Amy Hennig
– Cast: Nolan North as Nathan Drake, Richard McGonagle as Sully
– Perspective: third person; modes: single player
– Concept work began: 2007
– Score: 8.1/10
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