Uncharted: Golden Abyss looks astounding for a handheld game from 2011. It’s not quite up to the standards of a PS3 game from that time, but it’s pretty close. There are some flat textures, some frame rate dips, and some limitations in the animation, but as someone who has played both PS2 and PS3 games in the last months I was very impressed by the level of detail. There was, in fact, too much detail. But we’ll get to that later.

Uncharted: Golden Abyss is a prequel to the main Uncharted Series, made by Sony’s Bend studio rather than series creator and steward, Naughty Dog. Nolan North reprises his role as Nathan Drake, and there are other returning voice artists, so it doesn’t feel entirely like an off-brand Uncharted game, but it definitely feels lesser. You start the game with a flash forward, which is pretty common for the series, and Nathan Drake is, as usual, big mad at someone who has done him wrong, but instead of hanging off a train or speeding a boat towards a mysterious island he’s sort of skulking around a temple being guarded by men working for the object of his ire, a fellow named Dante. After the obligatory big explosion and cut away from a moment of extreme peril for Drake we travel back a couple weeks to a happier, more innocent, time, when Dante and Drake were not quite friends but at least associates on good terms, traipsing around a South American jungle looking for treasures that don’t belong to them.

The game proceeds to introduce other characters, like a power mad ex-general who is always ranting about some revolution (it’s not quite clear which one but he seems to be modeled on Fidel Castro in a lot of ways) and Marisa Chase, Dante’s sometime collaborator and Nate’s sassy love interest in place of Elena or Chloe, neither of which she comes close to in charisma or sass. It’s not that the writing is bad, it’s that it lacks the snap and crackle of main line Uncharted. It’s just above average video game writing, with some pretty good jokes, a few clever moments, way too much uncomfortable sex talk (there’s a mention of ‘spinners’ that feels completely out of place in an Uncharted game) and a whole lot of filler. In terms of plot and development it definitely feels like a respectable knock off of what the main series does.

The actual game play feels pretty true to the Uncharted series, except a little bit slower, clunkier, and lacking in set pieces of change of pace moments. Uncharted has always been about a mix of very light traversal, stealth and combat scenarios, puzzle solving, and set pieces. Golden Abyss has all these things, but they feel scaled back. The traversal is probably closest to a console Uncharted game, at least prior to the changes made in 4. There’s lots of climbing along paths with obvious golden handholds and shooting people while hanging behind cover, with the occasional rope to climb or swing from and lots of big jumps. While the game does a decent job of hiding collectables behind subtle climbing areas from time to time, the majority of the climbing is even simpler and more straightforward than in the main series, with very few actual obstacles except a few timed handholds that crumble under Nate’s grip if you don’t move fast enough. Uncharted has always taken liberties with how far Nate can jump, allowing him to leap way further for certain scripted jumps than he can under normal control, but Golden Abyss takes this to an extreme, and several times I was convinced that a jump was completely impossible because of the distance, only to test it and find that it was, in fact, the scripted way forward.

The shooting in Golden Abyss is also very close to the big console versions, except that enemies are somewhat slower and less prone to flanking, presumably to compensate for the Vita’s limited analog thumbsticks, and, probably more importantly, the environments are smaller and more restricted. By the time Uncharted 3 released, just before Golden Abyss, Uncharted combat had evolved to be much more dynamic, encouraging the player to use Nate’s mobility to flank enemies and escape difficult situations, and even permitting him to re-enter stealth after being spotted. Golden Abyss is much more of a bare bones cover shooter and the combat is not a lot of fun. You can still use various Uncharted tactics, like thinning enemy ranks with stealth takedowns if you enter an area without being spotted and softening enemies up with gunfire before hitting them with melee, but the cramped combat arenas favor hiding behind cover and trying to headshot guys as they pop up. When stealth works it often works too well, allowing you to easily clear entire encounters just by running up behind everyone and snapping their necks. I didn’t enjoy Golden Abyss’ combat encounters. I’ve never been a huge fan of Uncharted combat, though it got better on the PS4, and this game probably has the worst version since the very first game in the series. It felt like a scaled back, dumbed down, generic cover shooter. This was probably necessary because of the hardware limitations of the Vita, most specifically the smaller and less precise analog sticks and the inability to render large areas, but that doesn’t change the fact that the shooting wasn’t really fun.

The last two major aspects that make up an Uncharted game are set pieces, which are large dynamic events dominated by spectacle, and puzzles. There’s really only one set piece in Golden Abyss. It occurs at the end of the game, involves Nate escaping through a crumbling environment, and while it’s cool in some ways it doesn’t compare to the dangling train in Uncharted 2 or the burning chateau in Uncharted 3. Golden Abyss’ vehicle segments, such as they are, take place on canoes and involve shooting guys who pop up on the shore like it’s a gallery shooter, rather than the dynamic exciting vehicle chase scenes the larger console versions feature. This isn’t surprising but it does take away the big budget “feel” that Uncharted games thrive on. This is a game that makes you go “hey, those are some pretty detailed environments and spectacular backgrounds” rather than “holy flub what just happened that whole area just exploded and I barely survived!”

The puzzles are a good point to transition to the biggest way that Golden Abyss is different from the Uncharted series in general. Golden Abyss is a tech demo for the PlayStation Vita. The main Uncharted series generally situates its puzzles in large areas where Nate has to climb, push, jump on things to manipulate the environment like a modern version of Tomb Raider, though this is also mixed with other puzzles where you have to go around and gather information from the environment. Golden Abyss does away with the environmental manipulation puzzles altogether and instead focuses on gimmicky puzzles that take advantage of the Vita’s feature set. There are a number of jigsaw puzzles that use the touch screen, a whole lot of charcoal rubbings and item polishings that involve rubbing that screen, and other things like combination locks that you spin with the touch screen, as well as other gimmicky challenges like photos that you can aim with motion controls while adjusting the zoom with back touch. The game also has a ton of collectables, like all Uncharted games, and you can pick them up by touching them on the screen, including during some cut scenes and other sequences.

All this stuff is pretty neat…the first time. The problem is that they’re repeated numerous times throughout the game. How many times over the course of a game do you want to manipulate an object using rear touch while you rub virtual dirt off it by running your finger over the screen? Whatever the number you have in your head is, Golden Abyss makes you do it more. How many 18 piece jigsaw puzzles with similar shapes do you want to solve by rotating and manipulating pieces through touch screen controls? The designers of Golden Abyss seem to think that the answer is “a lot.” None of this is challenging or interesting or fun. I won’t say that mainline Uncharted puzzles are always great, but leaping on to giant levers and pushing mammoth stone figures around can at least lean into spectacle and the sense that you’re exploring these otherworldly ancient environments. Piecing together a torn up flier you find in the mud that’s somehow not dirty or bent but looks like a jigsaw designed for ages 4 and up? Not so much.

This kind of touch control gimmickry is found throughout the game. You can climb using normal controls but you can also touch handholds to make Nate move from one to another. Hand to hand fighting involves touching the screen and doing swipes to counter enemy attacks. There are bamboo and cloth barriers, usually hiding optional items, that Nate has to cut with a machete, which is done by swiping the screen in a pattern, which Nate then mimics with his cuts of the material. It looks pretty cool the first time but gets old fast. It feels like you’re playing a decent but not great Uncharted video game and getting interrupted every few minutes so that you can be shown a boring Vita tech demo demonstrating features that may one day be used for cool stuff in some game, but this is definitely not that game. It’s tacked on and awful.

At one point you have to hold the Vita up to a light to make invisible ink appear on a piece of parchment. This is required for progression, and my phone flashlight wasn’t bright enough so I had to get up out of my chair and hold it up to a light bulb. The tech was kind of cool, but the use case is terrible. This is supposed to be a handheld game you can play anywhere, but if you’re on public transportation or in the back of a car or just lying in bed next to someone with the lights out you literally cannot progress until you can get to a bright light source. It’s a perfect example of game designers realizing they can do something but not actually thinking about whether it’s something that makes sense for the users. If it were an optional thing it would be fine, but as a progression blocker it’s awful design. And so much of Uncharted Golden Abyss feels bad in exactly this way.

At the start of this blog I mentioned that the graphics were possibly too detailed. I could not play this game without wearing reading glasses. The level of detail, and especially trying to find the little sparkly collectables in these lush and intricate environments, literally hurt my eyes. I don’t wear reading glasses normally to read (I’m typing this in 12 point font with normal magnification and I can see it fine) but scanning through the environments looking for tiny sparkly shines was too much for my old man eyes. I can’t imagine trying to do it while jostling around in the back of a bus, or whatever. Even with the glasses I was missing climbable objects in the environments because they’re just too detailed for the Vita’s little screen.

The pacing of the game is also not good for mobile play. The best handheld games are either chopped up into small levels or kind of modular. RPGs can be very long, but they are ideal for short sessions where you grind out a few battles, suspend the game and throw the system back in your bag when you reach your bus stop. Animal Crossing is probably my favorite 3DS game because it’s ideal for a commute. Uncharted is like one long action movie, intended to be propulsive with no breaks, and while this might work for a long airplane flight or, again, a hotel room stay, it’s pretty bad for day-to-day handheld use. Throwing it on to play 15 minutes and fight through a couple areas to see one cut scene, often followed by a short segment of game play and then another cut scene is not at all satisfying. It’s a game you need to devote longer sessions to, and that’s just not where handhelds shine.

A lot of people have theories as to why the Vita failed. Many relate to the cost of the system and price of the proprietary memory cards, the rise of smartphones, and the dominance of Nintendo in the market. All of those things had their place, but I think the real key was that Sony didn’t understand what handhelds are for. The 3DS succeeded despite a rocky launch because it aimed squarely at two major markets. The first was children, who often don’t have access to their own television and want a system to play while riding in a car etc… The second was commuters who want a system they can play for a little bit and then fold up into their pocket and go about their day. The 3DS had games that catered to those markets perfectly. The PSP, Sony’s successful handheld, ironically also catered to those markets, but it seems to have been an accident. They made a lot of racing games (perfect for a short commute because you can get a bunch of races in) or RPGs (grinding on the bus!) because those games were popular when the system came out, and they made sense with the PSP’s limited hardware, which wasn’t ideal for big open worlds or cinematic adventures (though there were some of those too, of course.) Once they released the Vita they decided to develop software that was just like a PS3 game but slightly scaled back. Their big releases were games like Uncharted and Gravity Rush, which are really good games but also games that benefit from you sinking substantial time into them. Even compared to something like God of War, which is also a linear game, Uncharted involves a much slower pace and less action.

So what you’re left with is an okay Uncharted game that lacks the big screen spectacle, snappy storytelling, or quality of gameplay of the other games in the series. It shoehorns in a bunch of motion control stuff to various effect, requires you to strain your eyes searching out tiny glimmers in cluttered environments on a screen smaller than that of your phone, and just isn’t a well-tailored experience. There’s also an element of shoddiness to parts of the game, with areas that have pre-set cameras that make it hard to see where you’re going, and small technical glitches. The game is stingy with trophies and I was surprised when I got to the end and the completion trophies did not trigger. It turned out that for some reason the game didn’t record me as having completed the first two chapters, even though there’s no way I could have completed subsequent levels without having gone through them, and it recorded the things I did in them such as collecting items and completing puzzles. I ended up having to go back through those chapters to get the trophies for finishing the game, and apparently this is a not uncommon glitch. At other times the game would give me an opportunity to take a photo but if I walked one step forward I triggered a cut scene and entered a new chapter, losing that collectable unless I wanted to go all the way back through the last chapter. They were so focused on showing off the new hardware that they didn’t nail down the basics. None of this makes you excited for the various features that Sony crammed into its fancy new handheld while leaving out basic stuff like a way to play UMD PSP games or support for SD cards. The Vita elements feel like they detract from the game, and just make you hope that other games on the system are less gimmicky and more focused on a good overall experience. It’s not a bad game, but it’s the wrong game to make you want a Vita. Instead it makes you want a port of this game for the PS3. Or ideally a version that was built for the PS3 from the ground up and was able to have larger environments and more spectacular events. Like Uncharted 2 or 3.

If Sony had made this game a supplement to the Vita having games like Patapon, Lumines, or Loco Roco and said “play those on your commute and hey, here’s a big Uncharted experience for plane rides and hotel rooms” it might have worked. But instead it went big on the cinematic games and neglected the smaller stuff. If you look at list of best Vita games they are full of the types of indie games that have that pick up and play appeal. Spelunky, Guacamelee and Hotline Miami. Or they’re RPGs like Persona 4. Those are ideal handheld games. But they’re also not system exclusives, and they don’t showcase the system’s expensive technology or justify its price. Nobody wants to pay for a pricey new system with powerful 3D graphics for 2D games that they can get elsewhere and that don’t look any better than what’s on their phone.

I wonder if the issue was that the Vita was made for the Japanese market, where only having a handheld is much more common than in the West (The Switch is dominant in Japan moreso than any other territory for this reason) at a time when the Japanese market was shriveling up and moving to mobile. Japan was the PSP’s biggest market and the focus of a lot of Sony’s development. This might have meant that in Japan more portable use was done at home and by people without home consoles, so big console style experiences on a portable made more sense.

Regardless, Uncharted: Golden Abyss is a good game that makes a bad case for the system that it’s on. Is it worth playing in 2021? If you love Uncharted or are just craving something for your Vita (in which case you’ve already played it) or a linear action adventure game it’s not too bad. As a system seller it’s a total bust. I had an okay time sitting in a chair with reading glasses on and guiding Nathan Drake through a lower key adventure, but I wished I was holding a Dual Shock and staring at a big screen. The system that Golden Abyss really makes a strong case for, is the Nintendo Switch.