Don't Cross the Streams -- PlayStation NOW

I couldn't quite ignore this one.

My PS4 had been screaming at me for days: “FREE TRIAL – PLAYSTATION NOW!” Seven days to try Sony's new streaming game service, no strings attached. Now I generally have a hobbit-like disposition toward glitzy ads promising good things for free: keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you. Still, the fine print could not be denied – a trial was a trial, plain and simple. So I signed up. Five minutes later I had laid before me a treasure trove – nay, a veritable reliquary – of selectable games. Not just demos and trailers, mind you; I'm talking full titles, start to finish. The mind boggled. Where to start? Yeegads, almost as much time could be consumed browsing lists as playing! A system was needed; some means of organizing and prioritizing this overwhelming roll of digital distractions. I felt in-over-my-head. What followed was several days of feints and probing assaults at a variety of games that fell into two general categories: games I'd always meant to play but never did and games I'd never heard of but which looked fun. Along the way I learned a thing or two about streaming services, about Sony, and especially about the power of time and nostalgia to soften and blur one's memories of gaming experiences of yesteryear. Some thoughts:

• Selection runs the gamut, but the gamut ain't always great: Here find some shooters, some sports, a few racers, a decent selection of off-brand RPGs (no Final Fantasys, no BioWare titles, no Bethesdas), numerous indies, and bundles of platform-action titles. But so many of them are merely okay, the sort that earned tepid 6s and 7s from IGN and other industry sites. Where are the Far Crys? The GTAs? Dishonored didn't get a spot? To be fair, some cornerstone franchises are there, namely the Uncharted series, the Batman Arkham series (minus Arkham Knight), the Borderlands collection including the TellTale Games Tales from the Borderlands, and all three BioShocks. There is also a healthy selection of the enjoyable LEGO games, including many (most?) of the Star Wars series and other Disney properties. But the no-shows to the party are more obvious than those who did show up, especially when faced with some of the truly pablum junk that made the cut (Dark Void, anyone, and what were you thinking, Nolan North??)
• Better Late Than Never: PS Now is, I suppose, a timely and competitive service in an age when more and more media outlets are ditching hardware altogether and going full-stream. With Xbox breathing down their neck with their silky-smooth Xbox Live, they could hardly be expected to answer the challenge in any other way. But this is also Sony's long-delayed punt on another feature absent from their tech that has been a bone of contention for years: backwards compatibility. While Xbox-ers could play all their old games on current-gen hardware, Sony hard-coded their new systems to only play fresh titles. If you wanted to keep playing your old PS3 classics, you had to keep an old machine hitched to your TV for good. It was a deal-killer for a lot of former PlayStation loyalists two years ago when the new systems made their debut, and Microsoft garnered a whole lot of new patrons as a result. PS Now redresses the backwards compatibility issue by offering a huge catalog of PS3 games, now playable via the PS4. Indeed, this almost seems to be the service's primary function: the vast majority of games offered on PS Now are actually PlayStation 3. The selection of PS4 titles, meanwhile, is much leaner, and most are not what you'd consider hot releases. God of War III Remastered seemed to be the headliner when I first started, and that's been around for a spell already. Sony promises more titles will be coming out in the months to come, but for now the choices are limited to a scant handful of aging titles, not all of them especially stellar.
• The Return of the Killer Menus: oh Sony, why oh WHY can't you make a decent menu system? Alas, if you're delighted by the prospect of revisiting your PS3 faves, your joy will be tempered with the return of another (cringe-inducing) feature of the last-gen system: hideous, god-awful navigation. Like the much-maligned X-Cross system that was the bane of PS3 users, PS Now's main menu interface is a series of long, horizontal icons arranged in dizzying, Sisyphean loops that require constant scrolling to browse. If you find a title you're interested in you have to remember where you saw it or else you'll likely lose track of where it was and have to begin your search anew minutes later. Meanwhile, transitioning to a new category requires scrolling vertically through a plethora of lists not organized in any logical way UNTIL you reach the very end where – finally – you can search alphabetically. Your thumb will have some heat on it before you play your first game thanks to all the forward, backward, up, down, back again and where-was-that-one-thing? you have to do before you finally land on your choice. On top of that, the icons are distractingly huge and consume too much of the interface to allow comfortable searching. You can only see four or five icons at once, which doesn't sound like an inconvenience until you're running through your tenth or twelfth loop of the same list hunting for the right title. Would it have killed them to have used a stacking system, perhaps with folders and sub-folders that break the library into a tree structure so you can narrow your options as you look (e.g. PS4 > RPGs > Fantasy, or PS3 > Shooters)? Yes, genres like RPGs and Shooters do have their own categories, but they are simplistic lists bunched up with two dozen other lists that look exactly the same crammed into the same cluttered screen. Plus, tons of cross-genre titles repeat in multiple lists, adding to the confusion. Ugh.
• Clear (?) as a stream: Streaming is amazing tech. When you consider that you're essentially feeding a 40GB game through your cable and straight into your system without a disc, an install, or a single bit of hard memory being consumed, it's astonishing. Netflix for games – whoa. But there's a price to be paid in graphical fidelity. I won't pretend to know all the science behind it, but it's obvious the staggering volume of data transferred causes the visuals to skew toward lower-res reproduction. Nothing is as crisp and clean as you expect it would be. It's never horrid but it's also never unnoticeable: draw distances are compromised, angles and lines are softened into waxy paste, finer details like water sprays and more elaborate lighting effects are muddled and blunted. BioShock, for example, looks considerably worse streamed than it ever did on PS3, and that's saying something for a game that uses shadows as much as it does light. It's more noticeable on PS4 games like Killzone:Shadowfall, an expansive, open shooter that never quite gets its visuals up to presentation quality. Which leads to a separate-but-related issue...
• Let's (try to) make a connection: Imagine you're in a large room filled with gaming consoles. You walk into the room, select the console with the game you'd like to play, and approach. But there's someone ahead of you in line who also wants to play the same game. And in fact, there are ten or eleven other dudes ahead of him. Might be a while. Maybe try another game? Another line, as long or longer. Plus it's a Friday, late afternoon, everyone's off work, ready to kick back with some gameage...just like you. Now almost every console's got a line queued up halfway out the door. And that room is starting to get crowded. And hot. And maybe you're connection isn't as super as some of the other dudes already in line, the virtual equivalent of needing to pee bad enough you're risking your spot in line. Maybe you end up missing your turn altogether and you'll have no choice but to get in the back of the line and try again. This was my experience with PS Now, minus the miasma of body heat and Dr. Pepper farts. There's only so much bandwidth the servers can handle, more players means more bandwidth, more strain on the 1s and 0s. Often – let's say 33% of the time because I'm feeling magnanimous – I simply could not access the game I wanted. My system would clock and spin and buffer and after several agonizing minutes I'd receive a disconcerting bloop sound and a message telling me my game was unavailable due to traffic. That was when they were kind enough to tell me what happened. As often the app would simply time-out and soft-crash back to the PS menu. Re-upping the same game resulted in a message telling me I was already engaged in a session – imagine my surprise! – and that I'd have to terminate my current session and log in again. To be fair, this happened largely during traditionally high-volume times – nights and weekends – and rarely cropped up during my early Saturday sessions. Lag increased noticeably as play-time elapsed, however, and many times I was treated to the nerve-wracking “CONNECTION” indicator (superimposed directly over the action, nonetheless), warning me I was in imminent danger of being dropped like a bad prom date. Saving frequently is a must, as any stretch of inactivity results in an automatic disconnect to ensure room on the servers for those of us not inclined to take a bathroom break (true story, by the way: pausing a game to take a brief porcelain repast, I returned to find my connection lost and my screen blacked out. This wouldn't have been half so aggravating if I hadn't been playing Bioshock 2 at the time, a game which many of you may recall only saves at the beginning of each stage...those stages which can famously take 2+ hours to finish).
• Everything old is...still old: Ah, nostalgia, that great whitewasher of games. How is it we only remember the good parts of those old titles and forget those things that made us rage-quit at 3am, howling in impotent silence at the TV lest we wake our parents? And have the next-gen systems truly ruined our awe factor at the aging graphics, the smaller sandboxes, the blocky, deformed character models? Yeah, they kinda have. It pains me to admit it, but try as I might, most of these games simply did not – could not – pull me in the way they did when I was younger, poorer, and un-besmirched by the near photo-realism we get from today's top-flight console titles. The original Infamous, such a great time-passer just a few years ago, now seems quaint. The first God of War? It will forever hold a place as one of the greatest action-platformers of all time, but it has aged. And the dearth of titles at your fingertips precludes your having to devote any real time to fighting those old fights again anyway – when it was the only new disc in your collection, you had no choice but to keep working at the one impossible spot until you got past it. Now you can simply throw up your hands and say, “Meh, I've played this before; what else is there?”
  
  
  Case in point: I took a trip down memory lane playing Shadow of the Colossus, a stellar title, revolutionary at the time, epic in scope, and utterly original. But I'd forgotten – oh, LORD, how I'd forgotten – about this one spot early in the game on the way to the third colossus, where you must climb a perilous column and wall-jump onto a platform over a vast lake below. Err even slightly and you plummet into the drink and there begin a painfully slow and deliberate swim back up to the pinnacle of this column for another try. Specifically I'd forgotten that spot was conceived and designed by the Devil himself during one of his especially depressed periods and that it is FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to make that jump. How my 23 year-old self ever had the patience to overcome that obstacle I'll never know, but my 35 year-old self was having none of it. I gave it two dozen tries before resigning Shadow to the dustbin of my memories, where it will remain, beaten and conquered at a point and place in my life when time clearly weighed less heavily on me.

Confession time: I lost track of the days for my free trial and ended up being charged for the following month. As such, I had not one week but FIVE to experience PS Now, and my wallet is $20 lighter for the gaffe. In the end, I never finished a single game. Mostly I tried a handful of titles that looked interesting and ultimately decided the best part about most of them was the box art. Other players of a more fickle temperament might find this a plus rather than a minus – flitting here and there moth-like from one title to the next would appeal to the curious, the nibblers and the ADD types, after all – but for a semi-serious completionist like myself, I found I was more interested in finding one or two games that were actually good and working on them exclusively. Alas, I could and would not compromise my iron-clad rules of living a Mature Adult Life, namely I don't game during the week, and a few hours on the weekend is hardly enough to justify the cost of admission to this arena, this theater with a thousand doors. I summed it up best describing it to a friend who also had PS Now for a few months and ended up cancelling his subscription: it's like going to Blockbuster and renting $20 worth of random games (so, like, four or five), playing them all long enough to find the ones that don't suck, then half-assing the rest until it's time to turn them back in. He agreed.

Forever-Bloodied Hands: Castlevania - Season One

I remember countless summer days and first Fridays (dismissal at 12:00, followed by Mass, then freedom!) at my cousin Dan's house playing Castlevania II: Simon's Quest for the NES. It was a more primitive – and yes, more innocent – age, but after naught but Mario Brothers and other tame fare, the shambling mummies, creeping spiders, and gyrating Medusa heads menacing the fog-shrouded town of Wallichia were indeed grim and glorious to behold...even in 8-bit. Turns out it wasn't a very good game, and most critics agree it is one of the more busted and forgettable of the series. There was a spot we could never get past, and in the days before the Internet one had only hearsay and conjecture (or a pricey, time-consuming hunt for the right issue of Nintendo Power) to overcome gaming obstacles. Sadly, by the time the solution presented itself, Dan and I had moved on, and for my part – except for a couple of 2-day rentals of one or two equally forgettable sequels – I never thought much of Castlevania again. Had I known then of the surfeit of vampire/monster/monster-hunter games, shows, and movies looming over the pop culture horizon – and the inevitable defanging (yes, that's a pun) of the horror genre that would result – I might have taken a longer, closer look at Castlevania and perhaps better appreciated its fairly original take on the Dracula mythos.

Once again Netflix, as it has many times in the last few years, swooped in to save me from a lifetime of regret. Castlevania debuted earlier this month as a new animated series, sneaking in the 'Originals' line-up between the live-action allegory Okja and the 80's wrestling satire GLOW. I'll admit I paid it little heed at first – the animation had a distinctly Eastern flair, which itself doesn't bother me, but it was enough to elicit concern it would be too much like the obtuse, labyrinthine anime series that I tried (and tried, and tried, Lord Jesus, how I tried) to like but couldn't. But then I saw four words that changed my mind in an eye-blink: “Written by Warren Ellis”.

Ellis, the mad Scotsman. Author of groundbreaking original comics series like The Authority and Transmetropolitan (still one of my favorites of all time) as well as two deliciously entertaining crime novels Crooked Little Vein and Gun Machine. And only four episodes at 25 minutes a piece? How bad could it be?

Turns out, not bad. Not bad at all. Traditionalists who know only the Bram Stoker story will find it a poor frame of reference for navigating this show, it's true, and only cursory lip service is paid to the pseudo-historic 'character' of Vlad Tepes – the legendary impaler. But complete strangers to the video game series should nonetheless find it watchable, thanks largely to stellar voice acting and seamless, Swiss-watch pacing that neither glosses over the good stuff nor tarries needlessly. Perhaps the most jarring thing is that it is a Dracula story with almost no Dracula in it. After a chilling, tragic prologue that explains the origin of Dracula's enmity toward mortals, the action shifts entirely to human characters dealing with his black rage. The once-thriving city of Wallichia has been transformed into a walled plague town, heaped with corpses and carrion flies and beset nightly by winged demons that eat babies out of their cribs and flee only with the coming of morning. The God-fearing peasants stay because...well, because they are indeed God-fearing, and the Church has maintained an iron grip on the populace by convincing them their lack of piety that is the real cause of the vampire's wrath. 

 Alas, Dracula's ire actually stems from an incident one year before, when his mortal wife – a scientist and healer – was burned at the stake for practicing advanced medicine which the local bishop deemed witchcraft. Thus ol' Vlad, who ironically had no quarrel with the short-lived sheep down the hill from his spooky castle, decides the only good human is a dead one and dedicates the remainder of his eternal life to ensuring we all die screaming. Not losing a wink of sleep in all this is the Bishop (played by Max Headroom's Matt Frewer), who, like Dracula himself, utterly believes in the righteousness of his cause, believes he occupies the moral high ground, and cares not a wit for the innocents lost along the way. Staunch Catholics beware: this series is not kind to the faith, or rather it very effectively employs the motif of religious extremism as anathema to common sense (especially in the Dark Ages) and absolute power enjoyed by the bejeweled 'leaders' at the top, tyrants in everything but name.

Castlevania, of course, is only tangentially about Dracula. The series has always really been about the Belmonts, the ancient clan of monster-hunters who have served as the protagonists of (nearly) every Castlevania game since the series' inception in 1987. The show starts at the beginning of the timeline with Trevor Belmont (Simon would come generations later), here a wandering drunk who doesn't exactly shun his family name but doesn't advertise it, either. Despite drifting from ale stein to hangover and back again in true anti-hero fashion, the blood of the ancient crusaders still thunders through his veins and he has the fighting skills to prove it. Armed with his handy short sword and consecrated whip – the game's signature weapon – he brawls with Church thugs and slavering bat-demons with equal aplomb and looks damn cool doing it. He's also, under his unshaven exterior, a decent person who doesn't want to see ordinary folk get hurt. Thus, for showing kindness toward the nomadic Seekers – a kind of medieval Doctors Without Borders – he is rewarded with a dangerous quest that pits him against a savage cyclops and almost drawn and quartered by a zealous mob. Along the way he meets two more characters from Castlevania III: Sypha, a Seeker priestess with magic powers, and Alucard, Dracula's half-breed son who possesses much of his father's darkling powers but remains pleasantly neutral toward mortals. The latter finds common ground with Belmont in a his singular desire to kill Dracula “because it's what my mother would have wanted.” A trio for the ages is born.

And that's it. Four episodes and we're off...but not before what promises to be a lengthy interlude whilst more episodes are produced (at the time of this writing, Netflix has already confirmed 8 more are on their way). But the groundwork has been laid for a delightfully gothy romp through all manner of game-inspired environs, and unless I've read it wrong (or don't know Ellis as well as I think) a more multi-dimensional take on Dracula, one that looks to be morally gray and provocative rather than one-sided and simplistic. Here, amazingly, is a Dracula who really isn't wrong per se, and in many ways is more sympathetic than the fleshy humans who fear him. I don't doubt that before the final stake is driven, Trevor and Company will find themselves wondering if their single-minded quest isn't a wee bit tunnel-visioned and whether peace in this violent age can really be bought at the business end of a crucifix. Still, I'm game...and waiting for more.

(Non) Future Shock: Horizon-Zero Dawn

Horizon: Zero Dawn is a 'once in a while' kind of game. As in, once in a while a game comes along that surprises the Hell out you, reawakens that child-like sense of wonder, and winds up being way better than it has any right to be. It is sharply written and cleverly plotted, and it ticks all the boxes technically, but it is also a revelation and a joy. It will elicit many a 'whoa' during its quiet moments and leave you utterly breathless during its loud ones (plenty of those!). It is that exceptionally rare third rail of platform gaming, a title that feels crafted rather than mold-pressed, patiently realized instead of pumped out. It is a redemption, of sorts, for this jaded gamer, and it has kept me riveted from the moment I first hit 'New Game'.

It's so easy to be cynical: Triple-A titles cranked out with assembly-line regularity, plots as recycled as the dungeons themselves, 'sequels' that offer nothing new, generic dudes, sex-bomb dudettes, oodles of uber-violent pap jammed into padded discs indistinguishable one to the next. I've said it before. It's unlikely I won't ever be saying it again. Sure there's innovation and sure there's still a host of creative voices out there working hard on the next generation of thumb-based distraction, but increasingly those are found in the indie publishers and companies lurking on gaming's lunatic fringe, not the big studios. Then we have Guerilla Games, without a major release is nearly a decade, ever straddling that line between indie and biggie while they worked on this Faberge egg of a title. They took a chance of H:ZD and their patience and faith has been rewarded in spades.

Set in a verdant mountain valley cleft by trilling brooks and loomed over by snowy peaks, the game follows Aloy, a scrappy huntress of the primitive Nora, a matriarchal tribe of hunters, warriors, and shamans. We follow her from her formative years as an outcast, shunned by her people for reasons unknown, to the bloom of adulthood, her lion's mane of fiery red hair underscoring her fearsome will and hero's heart. Aloy seeks the answers to her lifetime of banishment, and the identity of the mother she never knew. Her chance comes at the Proving, a grueling test of brains and brawn that will allow her formal entry into the tribe and a boon from the ruling council who guard the secrets of her origins. But when the Proving is attacked by a band of masked savages, Aloy finds herself thrust into a much larger conflict, one in which her personal quest becomes intertwined with larger mysteries and much, much graver consequences.

Sounds simple, right? Hell, I just described most movies starring Channing Tatum. But here's the catch. Horizon: Zero Dawn is set hundreds, perhaps thousands of year in the future. Civilization as we know has long since run its course, the only hints of our once-mighty presence a handful of vine-encrusted skyscrapers and automobile husks. In the ruins of our failed society, hardscrabble clans like the Nora have struggled on, reclaiming a few scraps of the Earth which has otherwise been reclaimed entirely by nature. Or has it? For the Nora, and all humans in this distant time, war daily with machines, metallic automatons that mysteriously mimic an entire cross-section of the animal kingdom both present and prehistoric. Mechanized horses, elk, bulls, crocodiles, hawks, even T-Rex's all stalk the landscape, jealously guarding their territory and attacking any human they chance to encounter. Where did an entire genus of animal-like robots come from? Are they following some ancient programming, or, perhaps more frightening, are they merely in a kind of 'stand by', waiting to rise up in earnest and destroy what remains of humanity? It is just one of the mysteries Aloy must solve if she is to get the answers she so desperately seeks and avenge her tribe.

I won't even compartmentalize my impressions of the game's various qualities, for the game is such a marvelous case study of seamless melding of play mechanics, challenges, and surprises it seems an injustice to break it all down into static layers. Aloy's journey is equal parts exploration, combat, platforming, puzzling, and storytelling, every component slipping effortlessly one to the next, forming a kind of tapestry that is more experienced than simply played. In this it shares many of the same qualities as Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Thanks to this versatility, as well as a massive and gorgeously rendered map, players can guide Aloy in any fashion they choose: play it cool and stealth your way through most encounters, wandering on the fringes of the wilds like the outcast you are, or go full Xena, shredding any foe dumb enough to cross you and harvesting their metal carcasses for literal scrap. Plow through the main missions on an arrow's path to ultimate victory, or lose yourself for countless hours exploring the ruins of old human cities uncovering the mysteries of what destroyed us. This last element provided me with a particular thrill, and massive props to the developers for their patient, breadcrumb-trail style of filling in the intriguing backstory that is at least as interesting as anything happening in this far-future 'present'.

A clever crafting system that combines on-the-fly weapon swapping with specialty ammo types (freeze arrows, sticky bombs, the ubiquitous fire-tipped...everything) means you can dish out a huge variety of punishment to the machine monsters, or utilize some more specialized tools like rope casters and trip wires to lure the metal beasts into a clever trap. Every encounter teaches you more about your foes, such as the vital weak spots to strike for a convenient explosion or which elemental type to use for maximum effect. With a little practice you'll soon be stalking the wilds like a true badass, which is good because this game is never short on challenges. For an added thrill, make constant use of the 'Override' ability, which allows you to take command of the various machines, turning them against one another or just mounting a cyber-horse for faster transition across the plains.

Aloy's journey takes her from the snowy valleys of her home to the soaring mesas of the desert on the other side of the mountains and eventually into the wintery hinterlands of the mysterious north. Along the way she encounters the new cities of man – often wedged up against rusting radar dishes and desiccated office parks – and here and there the ominous black structures of unknown origin that dot the landscape, hinting at a lost future where vast machines loomed over the Earth, as Kyle Reese once ruefully observed, “...hooked into everything, trusted to run it all.” Did they rebel against their creators? Even if they did, how did we manage to survive in any form at all? And what was the mysterious 'Project: Zero Dawn' that reset humanity back to an almost-literal stone age? 

The tale grows in the telling, or in this case, the playing, and we are so very fortunate to have such a marvelous protagonist as Aloy for a companion. The writers eschewed all the Amazon chic stereotypes and cliched girl-power tropes in favor of well-rounded and wholly real person whose graceful savagery with a spear is matched only by her lightning flashes of sardonic wit and charming bluntness. At times her penchant for sarcasm and tented eyebrows seem almost to probe the Fourth Wall, as though she is aware there's a kind of “second dialogue” occurring between herself and the player to which no one else is privy. It is a quality that makes you root for her all the more as she unlocks the conspiracy set against her, and it is the key to taking a great sci-fi game over the line into the realm of truly exemplary.  

The Boogeyman Cometh (Again) - John Wick: Chapter Two

Revenge tales come in all shapes and sizes, but none more stylized or satisfying than John Wick. The first one came out of nowhere, banishing the doldrums of 2014 with a slick take on an old story: killer retires from the life to brood, killer's dog gets iced by n'er-do-wells, killer un-retires to take revenge in the only way he knows how. What John Wick did better than anyone before him was make the kill. Here was a man not only possessed of a certain set of skills, but a dapper wardrobe and a balletic, beautiful fighting method that mixed martial arts with impossible gun play (“gun-fu”, if you must). It was violent and funny and over-the-top and exactly what you needed to cure the winter blues. That Keanu Reeves lent all of his trademark intensity and still-impressive physicality to the role made the experience all the sweeter.

Chapter Two finds Keanu Reeve's titular killer picking up mere days (hours?) from where he left off: plowing through an army of Russian gangsters to avenge his stolen car and belated pooch. We didn't need it – if you're watching Two, odds are you've already seen One – but the opening sequence offers a another primer into Wick's character (“He is a man of singular focus”, “He killed three men with a pencil...a fucking pencil...who DOES that?”) and a hint or two how he earned the nickname “the Boogyman”, often leaving hardened criminals too petrified to even run at his approach. Despite a tiger stare and lethal moves, his trademark gray suit is hardly ruffed, his collar is still crisp, and his cuffs are only cosmetically bloodied. He looks in most respects like a simple businessman, which is fitting given how, once the personal stuff is out of the way, Chapter Two becomes all about business. Even when the film's odious new nemesis earns Wick's ire, it starts as a simple bad deal, a scuffing of the accepted rules of killers and criminals that leaves both parties aggrieved. In this case, Wick's emergence from retirement draws out Santino D'Antonio, a rising-star crime lord who helped Wick disappear the first time and now wants recompense for the favor. Wick is bound to honor the request, even though it involves assassinating D'Antonio's own sister and ensuring the unscrupulous turd ascends to the upper reaches of syndicated crime. A savage gunfight and deliciously predictable betrayal later, Wick becomes hunted by his retainer, the victim of that pesky “you're a loose end” rationale. Blood-drenched hijinks ensue.

The original Wick offered us glimpses of a shadowy underworld where a vaguely-defined society of stylish killers did business under our unsuspecting noses. It was one of the coolest and initially jarring things about the film, which began as a simple Taken-style “shouldn'a fucked with him, mate” flick, only to veer into a pseudo-fantasy with Illuminati-style assassins moving about, garroting marks and sipping barrel-aged bourbon undetected. But it ended up working perfectly in the context of the larger world it presented – one in which a lone man can emerge unscathed from a 40-1 gunfight and bodies can pile up in public without mass law-enforcement presence – and I loved the less-is-more approach that left us guessing at the inner workings of the society's rules. Wick 2 took a calculated risk by going deeper into this nether-realm, exploring their rules and regs a bit more thoroughly without ever pulling the curtain completely aside. We only know both Wick and his client are bound by centuries-old conventions, deviation from which results in excommunication at best, death at worst. The catch is that D'Antonio's ascent guarantees bad times for Wick's home turf of New York, a place he hoped to live in quiet obscurity before things went tits up. It proves an effective ploy for keeping a man who has nothing left to lose appropriately motivated once the bullets start to fly.

And boy do they fly.

Reeves is an accomplished (amateur) martial artist and prides himself on rarely using stunt men. His dedication – and endurance – shows in Chapter 2's protracted combat scenes, which often see-saw from firefights to close-quarters fisticuffs and back again in the span of seconds. The camera stays on the action the whole time, rarely cutting away, never resorting to tricksy jump-cuts and a multitude of cheap angles. The result is a selection of utterly top-notch action scenes that leave you out of breath and deeply impressed at the same time. You don't go to these kinds of movies expecting to see artistry, but the care and attention given to the fights truly can't be called anything else.

Credit where it is due to the slow moments, too, few and far between though they may be. Wick takes all of its 2 hour 2 minute run time to lead us into a deep enough place where we feel genuine concern how our hero is going to get us out again. Reeves, who in his advancing age (52 and not looking a day over 30) seems to know his strengths better than ever, plays Wick as a man of very few words, and delivers his lean dialogue with a queer, slightly too-deliberate affectation, like a man awkward with speech and wholly unused to the sound of his own voice. Only Australian beauty Ruby Rose, as a mute villain-lieutenant, has fewer lines, which does not prove a problem to any heterosexual male in the audience, though her charisma still manages to fairly fly off the screen during her too-few scenes. Rounding out the cast are two venerable vets, Ian McShane as the exposition-spewing commissioner of killers and Lawrence Fishburne as an eccentric overboss who offers Wick a moment's respite. It was a joy to see the two Matrix alums sharing the screen again (and can you believe they made that movie almost twenty years ago?!).

So does Wick get his revenge, set the universe to rights once more? It's a question that will likely spawn plenty of barroom conversations post-credits. Inevitably the question is asked of him, “What are you fighting for?” For a guy with no home, no wife, no car and no – well, he's got a new dog, and he's sooooo cute, but nothing else – it seems a fair question. If Wick still had demons to exorcise at the beginning of the film, the only thing abundantly clear by the end is that he hasn't managed to purge them all. Like all good second acts, the finale of this one burns the whole village down and leaves us with nothing but ashes and clean slates. Should a third Wick come along – and here's hoping – our hero will find himself in a very dark, very desperate place indeed.

But I think he's up to the task.

2016 Year in Review

I'm trying to be better this year. I promise. It's January as I write this, and the keyboard has accumulated only a slight layer of dust since the onset of the holidays. But in the spirit of new beginnings, I have resolved to be more attentive to my Muse earlier and not wait 'til the coming of spring to resume a truly serious writing regimen. I have already resumed work on the novel, edited an old story, started a new one, and submitted an even older one to not one, but two prestigious horror mags. Momentum is key, gentle readers. Though you probably could have told me that all along. So to get going, some highlights from the last 365...

MOVIES

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Not a prequel, but exactly what ALL prequels should strive to be: a standalone, slice-of-life tale woven seamlessly through the fabric of a larger universe. Sure, this wasn't a story that needed to be told (we already got the gist, y'know, from the seven other movies), but it was an entertaining bit of connective tissue between two major Star Wars epochs, as well as an eye-opening taste of Disney's future plans to mine the unswept corners of Lucas-verse for additional money, er, content. I found the look and feel immensely satisfying; the filmmakers went about every shot like historic re-creationists, ensuring that – with rare exception – every frame might have come from a forgotten reel of the 1977 film. This was especially true of the concluding space battle, which managed to recapture the electric, hand-flexing thrill of the original Death Star assault (and resurrect some famous Rebel pilots, to boot!). I was less thrilled with the cast and the characters they played, particularly the leads. Kudos to extending the Daisy Ridley winning streak by again making the hero a girl, but Felicity Jones simply was no Ridley, evidently preferring vacant, cow-eyed stares off-camera and flat delivery to anything close to real emotion. In fairness, I strongly suspect much of the rumored 'major reshoots' resulted in her character's best stuff being left on the cutting room floor. As proof, consider how even after a 150 minute movie, it feels like we hardly got to know her. But it was volumes and degrees worse whenever Antonio Banderas – cough, excuse me – Diego Luna showed his face and proved it is possible to be Spanish, passionate, intense, and boring as a second coat of primer.

Captain America: Civil War

I liked this much more than I thought I would, chiefly because they kept Captain America the strong moral center of the film despite the huge roster of supporting super friends. Expediency, money, and adherence to the mighty Marvel Movie Plan precluded them really diving into the Civil War of the comics – no mass divide between literally hundreds of heroes and villains, and only a tacit nod to the Registration Act that was the impetus of the conflict in the books – but it was an effective punt that still managed some respectable philosophy on the nature of loyalty and friendship. That it was crammed into a film that also featured Black Panther, Spider-Man, and Ant Man (with a cameo as Giant Man!) in a furious dust-up with the main cast was some deliciously geeky icing.

Deadpool

No, I still haven't seen it. Quit bugging me!

The Secret of Kells

This was an impressive little animated film I caught on Netflix. It is the story of a young monk cloistered in an Irish abby in Dark Age-Ireland who must brave the vast forest beyond his protective walls to complete the Book of Kells, the extravagantly illuminated gospel renowned for its meticulous calligraphy. He encounters a minor Celtic deity in the form of spritely, ash-haired girl who shows him the vastness and beauty of the world beyond his scriptorium and helps him get back to his people ahead of the terrifying Northmen who ravage the countryside. Animated using enhanced 2-D overlays, deformed lines, and exaggerated perspectives (so the entire movie resembles a moving Bayeux Tapestry), the filmmakers mimed the Kells gospels themselves, using art to tell the story as much, if not more, than the words. It was a quick, deeply satisfying departure from the glut of blockbusters and uber-serious TV out there, and a delight.

BOOKS and COMICS

The Name of the Wind

The best novel I read all year: a rich, deep, emotionally fraught tale-within-a-tale chronicling the life of a bard/prodigy/maybe-hero named Kvothe, whose childhood learning magic as a street urchin seems almost too fantastic to believe...perhaps because he's the one telling us. Newcomer Patrick Rothfuss writes with the confidence of a man twice his age, patiently exploring the minutiae of Kvothe's troubled life while immersing us in a detail-drenched world that seems almost boring on the surface, but conceals a vibrant, alluring mythos beneath. All the idiomatic fantasy conventions are here, but seasoned with an off-kilter flair and spiked with flashes of peril in many guises from street bullies to ancient demi-gods. Best of all, the hero – if he really is one – is just so damn likable you'll find yourself rooting for him even as the veracity of his tale makes you playfully crook your eyebrow. I've heard some Hollywood heavyweights have already put this one on the fast track for the big screen. Well and good, as long as we don't George R.R. Martin poor Mr. Rothfuss into writer's block while we eagerly await his next volume.

The Windup Girl

The Hugo winner a few years back, this near-future tale set in a dystopian Thailand is more of a quiet character piece disguised as science fiction. It follows a handful of vaguely connected individuals each pursuing their own (often veiled, frequently complicated) agendas, all orbiting around a synthetic, lab-grown girl named Emiko, a deferential servant who defies her programming and acts of her own accord with devastating consequences. Like all good speculative pieces, it borrows from today's headlines and extrapolates a world of tomorrow that – let's face it – could be just around the corner. The greenhouse effect has ravaged the world's climate, sunk many of her greatest cities, and plunged the Earth into a food shortage of biblical proportions. In the wake of the great Contraction, when fossil fuels were exhausted and humans reverted back to the age of sail, uber-wealthy “calorie companies” took control of the world's governments by monopolizing all untainted food supplies. Only Thailand remains isolated, struggling to maintain its independence even as it is poisoned from within by radical factions and scheming bureaucrats. Plainly inspired by the likes of Blade Runner and Neuromancer, it is a smart bit of writing and nicely plotted, even if you'll have the damnedest time finding anything to like about any of the characters.

Imperialism: A Study

I confess, I read this one on a dare, and I took my time with it. Whether the subject of imperialism fascinates you or bores you silly, it is eerie reading a treatise on the topic written a mere handful of years before World War I and seeing just how many of the carefully considered theories on the future of globalization – before that term existed – actually came to pass. At its heart, Imperialism is an elegant rant, a cultured polemic, a politely scathing, brutally good-natured indictment of Great Britain's centuries-long doctrine of empire-building. Using reams of meticulously cited facts, charts, graphs, and a bibliography of sources that constitute fully 10% of the total weight of the book, it shakes the pillars of White Man's Burden, the March of Civilization, and Glory of Progress and reveals them all to be a load of bullocks. It is also a patriotic piece, penned by a Brit who seeks to do nothing less than redeem the soul of his lost nation, to break her addiction to foreign soil and wasteful excursions to the lost corners of the globe in favor of vigilance, stability, and prosperity closer to home. Alas for author John A. Hobson, the damage was already done, and though his warnings went unheeded, his lessons still ring true today.

The First Law Trilogy

What if Gandalf had been a total dick, and he and Saruman were actually just playing a continent-wide game of chess with the lives of millions of people whom they manipulated for their own selfish reasons? That is certainly one way of interpreting Joe Abercrombie's excellent First Law series, a trilogy of novels set in a fantastical world beset by not one but several wars of dubious origin. Starting off as a pretty plain-vanilla sword-'n-sorcery joint, it morphs into a sort of a Middle Earth with a middle finger, reveling in our own discomfort as it upends cartloads of dung on every fantasy convention in the known world, a Westeros where the reader is slowly let in on the joke even as the characters twist in the wind until the very end. Abercrombie's style is punchy, crude, and violent, but he's clearly enjoying himself as he holds a cracked mirror up to sacred fantasy tropes, even filling his story with cookie-cutter archetypes straight out of Golden Axe: the barbarian, the thief, the wizard, the knight, etc. But then, in the midst of this intentionally ironic menagerie, comes one of the most original characters in recent popular fiction: Colonel San dan Glokta, a half-crippled inquisitor who tortures and philosophizes in equal measure, putting daggers into unsuspecting backsides yet seeming the sanest player on the stage. These were easy reads and a great study in how an author can enjoy himself writing 'serious' fiction.

The Dream Cycle of H.P.Lovecraft

I'd dabbled in Mr. Lovecraft up until now. This was a weightier effort altogether: an anthology of related tales, separate in subject and character yet linked by the common geography of an otherworldly dreamscape, a vast universe populated by real people and unspeakable horrors accessible only through sleep...or waking madness. This thematic tether precluded dabbling, the usual pecking away I do with anthologies, lest I forget some critical detail from earlier stories and miss the point of the later ones. Thus, I spent an uninterrupted month in ol' H.P's headspace, and the stay was a trippy one, to say the least. But it was worth it, particularly when the common roads of various stories suddenly and unexpectedly joined up. It was especially gratifying to see how some of Lovecraft's protagonists became adept at sleep travel, even accustomed to the fantastical things they witnessed, while others – some of them contemporaries of the 'professional' dreamers – described their tangential encounters with the same worlds only in terms of soul-shattering horror. Above it all, however, was the startling conviction only hinted at in my earlier readings that finally cemented itself with this series: Lovecraft was a damn fine writer, and for all his reputation as the John Waters of Gilded Age horror, he was actually a very whimsical dude, constantly ruminating on the power of imagination, the unabashed wonder of childhood, and the heart-rending loss of both that comes with advancing age. In that sense he was much more like J.M. Barrie than Stephen King, and no set of stories in his impressively huge lexicon proves it better.

Darth Vader

Hey, didja know Disney owns Marvel, too? And can you believe some crackpot shyster actually proposed resurrecting Star Wars in comic book form? Well, they did, and Lord, was this a long time coming. A universe as visually bombastic as Star Wars was always a natural fit for the comic medium, and consequently hundreds of comics spanning several dozen titles from the 70's and 80's now fill dusty storage boxes in the local comic shop (and collector's walls). I've read a lot of them, and most of them are fairly schlock-soaked and corny. Now with the Mouse making a clean sweep fore and aft of the Expanded Universe and resetting the canon to “0.0”, the artists and writers not lucky enough to score a job working Episode VIII are drinking deep of the vast, nearly empty space between the major movies and pouring out narrative gold. And some silver. And a bit of lead, too. Fun-but-forgettable offerings include Obi-Wan about Kenobi's time in the Tatooine desert (as Ewan MacGregor slowly transforms into Sir Alec Guiness), a buddy-Jedi pair-up about Obi-Wan and Anakin set shortly after The Phantom Menace, and the main arc focusing on the classic trilogy heroes Luke, Han, and Leia between Empire and Jedi. But in the 'gold' category we have Darth Vader, a slickly-penned limited series centering around our favorite Dark Lord of the Sith. Set in the months after the destruction of the first Death Star (and Vader's perceived failure), it posits a scenario in which a seriously peeved Emperor tries to replace his apprentice with a number of Force-powered upstarts, all the while sending Vader on a series of increasingly difficult face-saving missions to recoup the Empire's devastating losses. Vader fights, stalks, stomps, and suck-hisses his way through every foe and pretender, all the while becoming increasingly fixated on the identity of the young Rebel pilot who fired the proton torpedo heard 'round the galaxy. Fixation turns to obsession when he learns said pilot sports the surname 'Skywalker'. When the Dark Lord goes AWOL, he is pursued by a relentless Imperial intelligence agent convinced they key to Vader's ruin lies in discerning his true identity. The inside look we get into the Empire's day-to-day grind is worth the price of admission alone. Watch, for example, as a small but vocal minority within the Imperial inner circle quietly gloat over the destruction of the Emperor's glass-jawed super weapon and speculate how many conventional Star Destroyers might have been built with those resources instead. It is a feat orbiting an entire series around a character such as Vader, who in addition to being evil is always lean on dialogue (and we reader's have naught but our imaginations to hear James Earl Jones' peerless baritone in every speech bubble), but the writer's do themselves proud.

Preacher

I'm only halfway through Garth Ennis' 10-volume graphic novel of the dark side of the American heartland, but you'll forgive me if I have to take frequent breaks. It is a shitstorm of a comic, so awash in blood and whiskey and gallows humor it sometimes leaves a film on your skin. What a story, though: clever, subversive, funny as hell, and brought to life with the steady drawing hand of the (recently departed) Steve Dillon, whose art can rightly be called “plainspoken” and be considered a compliment.

Classics I Finished

The Decameron

Gulliver's Travels

The Sonnets (Shakespeare)

GAMES

It was a light year for gaming, as anyone in the industry would tell you. This is the deep breath before the plunge, a sort of hurricane's eye in preparation for what promises to be a massive 2017. The highs weren't too high this year, and thanks to IGN and other gaming sources, I had sufficient advance warning to stave off the worst of the lows.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Lara Croft's return following 2014's stellar Tomb Raider was less spectacular than I would have wished, though really that's only because the first game set the bar extremely high. You shouldn't fix what ain't broke and no attempt was made here: this was more of the same, just longer and with a whoooole lot more padding. Inventive platforming mixed with some frenetic run-'n-gun segments and some respectable environmental puzzles all made for a good time-killer, but the strength of the first Tomb Raider was Lara's personal, intensely single-minded struggle: she simply had to survive. She's a veteran now, and relegated to more standard stop-the-madman-before-he-corrupts-the-ancient-treasure fare ala Indiana Jones and every other adventurer who followed him. It was also egregiously bloated with scavenger hunt-style distractions: hidden extras, collectibles, side missions, optional tombs, fetch quests, and to-do lists so numerous they diverted you for hours before you finally found the story again. By then it was difficult to remember what the hell the plot even was, much less why you should care. In short, a fine 15-20 game trapped in a 40-hour title. Perhaps this had the misfortune – at least as far as this reviewer is concerned – of coming out the same year as Uncharted 4, another action/archeology game with a bigger sandbox, better characters, and a much more compelling story.

No Man's Sky

I gave this one a fair shot, but as virtually every significant sphere in the gaming world will – and did – tell you, this one was a lot of hot air. I really looked forward to No Man's Sky, eagerly devouring the pre-release press, and even took to social media to defend creator Sean Murray after he was reviled for a (slight) delay in the game's release. But in the end, it was Murray himself who damned his work, promising us the world – hell, a whole universe – and delivering something hardly better than pixelated table scraps. Or as one reviewer put it, “You mine shit so you can fly to another planet so you can mine shit so you can fly to another planet so you can mine shit.” Pretty much. While Murray and crew get credit for ambition – they did, after all, create a sandbox bigger by an almost incalculable degree than any attempted before – they failed to populate their procedurally-generated galaxy with anything even remotely interesting to do. Many contend they flat-out lied about the game's content by claiming Sky was actually a massive-multiplayer where Users could encounter each other (gamers proved in a frighteningly short spot of time that you could not), and giving bobble-headed nods in the affirmative when asked about features that turned out never to have existed. After an enormous debut, Sky made another dubious bit of history by experiencing the most prodigious drop-off rate of almost any game in history. I predict years from now it will have a place in the annals as a pathfinder title, a game whose reach exceeded its grasp but which pioneered new titles that learned from Sky's mistakes and made something truly special.

Skyrim Remastered

Once more into the breach, dear friends. I'll note with no shortage of pride that I resisted the seductive glut of remastered titles peppering the landscape this last year: I avoided Return to Arkham, God of War Remastered, and even the rerelease of Bioshock, one of the greatest games I've ever played. But I caved when Bethesda Games announced they had given their magnum opus a facelift. I've already logged more hours in this open fantasy realm than I will ever willingly admit, but it is precisely because of my preferred member status I felt I would truly appreciate the special edition. Skyrim was, and still is, a stunningly ambitious and startlingly detailed RPG, but it was always a twitchy kid, prone to bugs, crashes, glacial load times, and a host of technical foibles. Patching the damn thing had become a full-time job, and it was always while waiting for the latest fix to load and install I found myself thinking, “It's a great game. Man, if only they could port this thing to next-gen and just clean it the Hell up.” Ask and ye shall receive. At last, non-PC gamers like myself have an Elder Scrolls that fires on all cylinders: lightning fast loads, clean frames, glitches gone, and topping it all, gorgeously buffed and polished graphics, with a nigh-limitless draw distance that ensures we can finally see the countryside as its supposed to be seen. This silver platter includes all 3 of the DLC add-ons plus the long-awaited ability to mod for Playstation. The only drawback is the inability to resume existing characters from old save files, meaning the entire tale had to be begun again from Level 1. Boo hoo; I had been looking for an excuse to create an Orc alchemist/archer. Skyrim is starting to show its age, of course, but it has retained its heroin-like penchant for devouring your waking hours. Now if only they could work on that voice acting...

Dishonored 2

No, I still haven't played it. Quit bugging me!

TV

I went even lighter on televised fare this year, to the point where individual profiles are unnecessary. I am fully two seasons behind on Game of Thrones, my enthusiasm for which has diminished steadily with each year of trumpeting fanfare for the show and virtually no news of the next book. Alas, we bibliophiles have been all but forced to admit the original 'plan' of avoiding spoilers and waiting until the next print volume has become an untenable farce. Mr. R.R. Martin has given no signs of an impending release (or even that the next book is even close to done), and the spoilers, meanwhile, are pervasive, utterly saturating popular news feeds and digital headlines such that only a deaf ascetic could hope to dodge them all. Sadly, I expect The Winds of Winter, if it ever finds its way to store shelves, will arrive with a whimper, as many impatient, fair-weather fans will be reluctant to part with their $30 for a story they already know. See my comment on The Name of the Wind – finish the damn source material before you commit the thing to the screen. Jeezus, have you seen how fast they can film these things?

I enjoyed both Jessica Jones and Daredevil: Season 2, though ol' Hornhead veered awfully dark this go-around, thanks to the inclusion of the Punisher (a fantastic performance by Jon Berenthal) and I found the second half rather predictable. I seasoned the heavy stuff with a dose of sweet and watched Supergirl, which I liked entirely more than I should have, and The Flash: Season 2, which remains good company while I fold my laundry or eat dinner. I also housed Justified Season 5 (best since Season 2), Pacific Heat, and Dana Carvey's Straight White Male, 60.

Stranger Things: No, I haven't watched it yet. Quit bugging me!

Some things I'm looking forward to in 2017:

Mass Effect: Andromeda, Horizon:Zero Dawn, (new) God of War

Ghost in the Shell, Star Wars Episode VIII

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

Here At the End of All Things - Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

Swan songs are a bitch.

Done wrong they can be bloated, messy, disjointed, contrived, and deeply, tragically unsatisfying. When it's time for a beloved character to exit stage left, the sense is there's a sacred responsibility not merely to bring him full circle, but to do so with such zeal and flourish as to leave no doubt his tale is done, done right, done best, done for the ages. Often as not this results in the final chapter being overloaded with symbolic 'lasts', a checklist of Things That Have to Happen to wrap the package up all neat-'n-tidy lest a thread be left to dangle. It's a noble sentiment, but it's also a hell to a high-wire act, trying to close the book on an entire franchise without dragging down the story that's in front of you at the moment. I imagine it's even harder when your departing hero is no less an icon than Nathan Drake, video game explorer extraordinaire and the face of Sony Playstation for the last decade. A Thief's End, as the title suggests, is indeed his last adventure (please swallow your grain of salt now), but the good people at Naughty Dog avoided virtually all the pitfalls of a standard denouement to give their signature hero one hell of a sendoff. Once more into the breach, my friends. It's treasure huntin' time.

It's been five years since Drake's last adventure, which is several eternities in the gaming world. In that time the industry has enjoyed a technological leap ahead with the next-gen platforms, as well as a massive expansion of game libraries that include, amongst the thousands of shooters, RPGs, indie start-ups, and open-world sandboxes, several franchises showcasing the same brash run-'n-gun third-person adventure format that is Uncharted's trademark. Since 2011's Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception there has been not one, but two new Tomb Raider games starring a revitalized (and slimmed down) Lara Croft, who pre-dates Drake by a wide margin, as well as seventy-one new Assassin's Creed titles, which are now being released in time with the phases of the moon (and still selling like gangbusters, a fact which continues to confound this writer). Both series incorporate the same trio of platforming, puzzle-solving, and cinema-style combat that is Uncharted's stock and trade, and both have enjoyed the fruits of the new system's beefed-up processors and graphics cards for huge, explosive set pieces and epic presentation. Neither Lara nor the mopey bores with the queer hoods are showing any signs of slowing down. After five years, is Nathan Drake still relevant? For that matter, is it still possible to frame in a story that can compete with the younger, more distilled children his franchise helped create?

Tall order indeed, but Naughty Dog has never been one for half measures. The company that once claimed Crash Bandicoot as its mascot has enjoyed a prime spot on the critic's mantlepiece thanks to 2013's The Last of Us, a masterpiece of a game that blurred the line between video game and first-rate drama. That pivotal effort led to a shakeup in Naughty Dog's top brass, including the departure of Amy Henning, the company's erstwhile Creative Director, Uncharted's head writer and virtual creator of the Nathan Drake character. For a while it seemed that move spelled a inglorious doom for Drake and his future adventures until it was announced the team that filled Henning's absence would take over and give their hero a proper sendoff. I was ambivalent about the notion, for it was no secret that Henning's ousters would be taking the helm and the thought that the same folks who did The Last of Us would be penning a new Drake title filled me with trepidation. The Last of Us was a tour de force, no question, but it was also the single most depressing thing I've ever done, ever. I feared we'd pop the next Uncharted into our consoles to find a haggard, aging Drake not unlike the haunted Joel from TLoU: brooding, morose, and dark as hell. I wanted another poppy frying-pan-to-the-fire bonanza, not a winding commentary on the futility of hope.

So as not to keep you in suspense: my fears were unfounded, and I was wrong. Uncharted 4 is a brilliant piece of game-making, not only a worthy successor to the original trio of games, but a gorgeous effort in its own right, and a deeply satisfying end to one of my favorite game series of all time. In deference to the new writers, it is unquestionably a more mature work, one that favors choice-consequences and character growth over explosions and gunplay, but it is presented in a way that is neither ham-fisted nor out-of-place. Indeed, it is the long-awaited, never-attempted exploration of Nathan Drake the person, and a seriously well-crafted plunge into the things that make him tick. That the game-makers managed to frame it all within a compelling story that is at least as good (and in many spots flat-out better than) Drake's previous adventures is a testament to their skill and commitment. The crow doesn't taste so bad when it's washed down with damn fine gaming.

Storytelling takes center stage right from the start, plunging you in medias res as Drake and his brother – yes, that's his brother, and who knew? – race across a storm-tossed sea toward a foreboding island, pursued by heavily-armed foes hellbent on scuttling them. Then a collision, a fantastic explosion, and we are back in Nathan Drake's life. The narrative leapfrogs from there, sending us back in time to a fateful night when Nate, a lonely tot of ten or so sequestered in a creepy orphanage, busts out for a night of rooftop shenanigans with elder sibling Sam. As they leap and climb and grapple with the skill of professional parkour artists, we glean the close bond that exists between them, the fledgling adventurer and his juvenile delinquent bro (who smokes and wears denim and does all the things juvenile delinquents do). Then another time shift takes us to a hellish Panamanian prison where the story proper begins. The now-grown brothers Drake are on the trail of infamous captain Henry Avery, a seafaring genius and unrepentant pirate who supposedly hid a $400 million dollar haul of gold and jewels that remains undiscovered 300 years later. Joining them is shifty-eyed moneyman Rafe Adler, a fair-weather fortune hunter with a psychotic streak whose impulse-control problems lead to a dead guard and a harrowing, bullet-riddled getaway. Sam is shot and left for dead while Nate barely escapes, reluctantly abandoning the brother who taught him how to be an adventurer.

All this occurs before the opening credits. Only then do we realize that fully fifteen years has passed since the incident in Panama, the period when Drake (Nolan North, in the best performance of his career thus far) became the Anthony Bourdain of lost cities. But it seems a thousand near-deaths at El Dorado, Shangri-La, and Iram of the Pillars has exorcised his wanderlust, and he has finally settled down into a normal life of commercial salvage diving and predictable marital bliss (?) with longtime love interest Elena Fisher (Emily Rose), now a successful travel writer. Naughty Dog takes great pain to emphasize the pablum tuna casserole Nate's life has become, taking us through an entire chapter exploring his lovely normal home (laundry room, living room, office) and his attic stuffed full of mementos from more exciting times (a inside-reference geek's wet dream). It's so bland it hurts, and as Nate gazes distractedly at a wall painting of some exotic locale, we feel his frustration, the old pull of danger, even as our thumbs itch to lead a target and pull a trigger once more. It is a testament to the time and detail the designers put into Nate's here-and-now, if only to contrast the poop storm that is to follow.

Troy Baker brings his puckish charm to Sam Drake

Said storm arrives in the form of Sam Drake (gaming's golden boy Troy Baker, here affecting a slight Chicago twang), not dead but lost this last decade-and-a-half in the prison where Nate left him. Seems Sam's last cellmate was notorious drug kingpin Hector Alcazar, who instigated a daring escape for the two of them in exchange for Sam's share of Avery's swag, about which Sam very indiscreetly chattered nonstop for fifteen years. Failure to remit payment in three months will result in Sam's painful, torturous death. Nate finds himself caught between the promise he made to Elena to leave adventuring behind and saving the life of the brother he's only just found again. All they have to do is pick up a trail close on twenty years cold.

What follows is standard Uncharted fare, albeit presented in about as taut and nail-biting a framework ever attempted. Together again and as unstoppable as ever, Nate and Sam resume their fortune hunting escapades in grand fashion, first crashing a swanky auction at an Italian villa then raising Hell at a Scottish cathedral before the clues lead them to Madagascar and a fateful rendezvous at a forgotten island in the Indian Ocean. Their foil, no surprise, is none other than Adler, who never stopped looking for the treasure but, for lack of Sam's knowledge or Nate's je ne sais quoi, compensated with manpower and explosives, carving a swath of destroyed tombs and false leads with the help of Shoreline, a private mercenary company and this outing's hapless redshirts, doomed to die by the score. As usual, the treasure is protected by any number of ludicrously elaborate puzzles (although Naughty Dog did, for a little while at least, conjure a somewhat plausible explanation for the assorted Rube-Goldberg death traps this time) judiciously seeded with equally ludicrous gunfights in which Nate routinely bests a dozen armed foes, all while running, tumbling, leaping, rope-swinging, and butt-sliding through a living obstacle course of gorgeously-rendered environments. Familiar territory to any Uncharted vet, but the designers cranked the dials to eleven this time, upping the challenge factor in all of Drake's requisite skill sets. Plan to die a lot in this game, as the platforming elements will require crackerjack timing and and the shooting encounters will tax even seasoned gunners. Foes will actively (and successfully) attempt to flank you at every turn and cover will dissolve amidst a fusillade of lead, demanding constant repositioning, reloading, and improvising. Stealth-minded gamers will be happy to see Naughty Dog borrowed a page from The Last of Us, allowing Nate to stalk and disable enemies for added battlefield advantage, something he could always do in previous games but here seems almost essential to the outcome of a fight. It's the little concessions to...well, not realism, but we'll say 'fidelity' that makes this title something special.

Views like this won't be the same without Nate by our sides...

But at its heart A Thief's End is a rumination on bonds – those of brotherhood, of friendship, of love, of shared joys and divided loyalties. Not unlike but at least significantly less like the other games in the series – which always ended with Drake choosing honor over booty – fortune and glory take a back seat to the squaring of emotional debts and figuring out once and for all what is most important in life. Hint: it ain't some dead sailor's gold. Naughty Dog uses the entire width and breadth of the game's 15-20 hour story to explore Nate's relationships with each of his supporting cast in turn – Elena, Sam, and even irascible, invincible old salt Victor Sullivan (Richard McGonagle). Every character shines, exposing more facets and foibles than ever before, never once resorting to stock stimulus-response antics or predictable dialogue. This is especially true of Sam Drake, who, being new and untested, had to work that much harder to win us over (he does) while avoiding the easy pitfalls of being the the “bad brother”. But the writers chose not to make Sam bitter or brooding, but rather driven, and armed him with a kind of gruff panache that is decidedly different from Nate yet endearing all the same. As the hunt for Avery's treasure morphs into the unearthing of a lost pirate utopia ruined by infighting and madness, the specter of “gold fever” looms in background but never takes over the narrative. When Nate uncovers the desiccated bodies of forgotten fortune hunters, it isn't lost on us that their dying words scrawled on foolscap unfailingly mention wives, children, sweethearts, and the quiet comforts of home, all abandoned on a fool's quest ending in lonely death. Nate gets the message, but he still must see it through to the end if he's to save his brother.

I can't abide end-game spoilers, so I'll only say the ending is deeply satisfying and, while textbook Uncharted in any number of ways, all the more profound for the patient, layered story the Naughty Dogs cared enough to give us from the very start. It is easily the most beautiful looking game I've seen on the PS4 thus far, and loaded with collectibles, unlockables, and easter eggs to merit several replays. And replay you will, if for no other reason than to remember the good times before old-fashioned adventure went out of this world. While we are very sorry to see such a likable hero ride off into the sunset, we can't help but feel happy that his swan song was indeed one for the ages.