Set three years after his last adventure, Nathan Drake has now settled down with his wife, Elena Fisher and left the treasure hunting scene behind. That all changes, however, when Nate's long thought-to-be dead brother, Sam tracks him down, and asks for his help to find the long lost treasure of Pirate Captain Henry Avery. Together with Sully, Nate and Sam embark on a globe-trotting adventure, one last time.
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Fans had spent years poking fun at how a lighthearted adventure hero racks up such a huge body count, so Naughty Dog leaned into the joke with a trophy literally called Ludonarrative Dissonance, awarded for killing 1,000 enemies across the game.
A line from Luke 23:41 gets referenced repeatedly throughout the game as a kind of thematic anchor, tying into the story's ideas about guilt, self-justification, and whether any of the treasure-hunting characters actually deserve redemption.
One journalist tallied up their own playthrough and came away having killed 527 enemies, more than three times the commonly cited body count for Indiana Jones across his entire film series, a fun bit of perspective on just how violent these adventure games really are.
In its first week alone, the game sold through more than 2.7 million copies worldwide across disc and digital, making it the fastest-selling first-party PS4 title released up to that point.
By December 2016, just seven months after launch, Sony reported the game had sold through more than 8.7 million copies worldwide, folding in physical, digital, and console bundle sales.
This one almost never existed as its own game. Naughty Dog originally pitched it as a piece of paid DLC for Uncharted 4, something in the vein of a smaller side story, before the team realised they had way more to say than a DLC pack could hold and turned it into a full standalone release instead.
Before settling on Chloe, Naughty Dog kicked around a few other ideas for who should lead this spin-off, including Victor 'Sully' Sullivan, Uncharted 3's Charlie Cutter, and even Cassie Drake, Nathan and Elena's daughter, who'd only been glimpsed as an adult in Uncharted 4's epilogue.
There was genuine internal discussion about making Cassie Drake the lead instead of Chloe. The idea got dropped for a few reasons: the team worried she'd feel too much like a Lara Croft clone, an adult Cassie suddenly gunning down mercenaries felt tonally wrong, and honestly, Nate and Elena would never sign off on their daughter living that life.
Composer Henry Jackman, who'd scored Uncharted 4 the year before, came back for The Lost Legacy and wove regional Indian musical textures into his usual sweeping adventure sound to match Chloe and Nadine's trip through the Western Ghats.
