Oh, Elena…

Thanks to the wonders of an impending deadline, and the need to take a break from putting words into a snowman’s mouth in an entertaining and engrossing fashion, I have recently played through Uncharted and Uncharted 2. I know I am late to the party. I am so late that all the balloons have gone down and the remains of the cake has not only gone hard but has a thick layer of penicillin growing on the top of it.

I first played Uncharted 2 at the Eurogamer Expo in 2009. I enjoyed it immensely and it was one of the reasons that, on the way home from the final day of the Expo in Leeds, I found myself in a branch of Sainsbury’s buying a PS3 with a copy of Uncharted 2. I played it a bit and enjoyed what I saw, I even went out  and found a cheap copy of the first adventure. But I never sat down to play them all the way through.

Until now. Until I had a looming deadline, and a script to finish. Now, at this most inopportune of inopportune moments, I wanted to sit in front of the PS3 and throw Nathan Drake around a series of crumbling ledges. I wanted to shoot wave upon wave of enemies. I wanted to play it all.

And while I was playing, I fell in love. Not only with the games, but with Elena. I cared for her, much as Nate did throughout the games. All through the first game I willed her to put her bloody camera down. “Just put it down,” I’d yell at the screen. “Seriously, woman, you see all this jumping I’m doing? You won’t be able to do that with a camera in your hand. Put it down.  Why didn’t you bring the carrying bag with you? Wouldn’t that have made more sense? Honestly, you could probably have got the bag as a discounted price when you bought the camera. Later on you’re going to wish that you’d put the camera down. You are. It’s going to be important.”

In the second game she does, at least, have empty hands. She’s got a cameraman who insists on carrying the camera around instead. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t shouting at the screen on occasion. “I think you need to get up to that ledge,” she’d chip in, helpfully. “Oh really? That ledge? That one up there? The one that I’ll have to traverse the entire temple to reach? That ledge? No, seriously. Allow me, you just hang on there, I’ll do all the hard work and then probably lower something down for you or there’ll be a door somewhere that I can open for you. You just wait there.”

But despite all my non-answered bickering, I’m still worried that she won’t make a jump or that someone will shoot her. I care about her. Her well-being means everything to me. I’m more immersed in the game – I’m feeling the same things Nate is feeling.

I love her. She’s ace.

I was right about that bloody camera, though.