Developer Naughty Dog (Uncharted, The Last of Us) revealed its next game at The Game Awards 2024. Host Geoff Keighley knew it would be something special, which is why he saved it for last. There's so much going on here that I hardly know where to begin. But the Gaming Nexus Slack channel was rolling with speculation, connections, interpretations, and reconsiderations.
The game is called Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. You too may find that title hard to remember with its 11 syllables and tongue tripping "Tic Tac" sounds. Besides having trouble looking it up on YouTube, however, there is everything else to like—including the fact that it's not another Uncharted or The Last of Us.
Be advised, the majority of what we came up with is pure conjecture. These are just details we cherry-picked out of a four-and-a-half minute cinematic video about a video game without a release date.
Longtime musical collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (aka Nine Inch Nails) open with a mysterious synthwave soundtrack. It's one part Sword & Sworcery and two parts Mass Effect. It's pitch perfect and climaxes just in time for the CD disc changer to switch to Pet Shop Boys' 1987 banger "It's a Sin" at the end.
The first few moments of the trailer are owned by an ancient, theocratic script. The alien lettering is translated onscreen, saying:
"The suffering of generations must be endured to achieve our divine end." - Ancient Sempirian Scripture, 1986
It's the "1986" that sets the tone for this brand new game world. Try to ignore the fact that "Sempirian" sounds like a mash-up of something called the Simp Empire. Religious dogma sets the heavy overtone of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
Cut to a planet. It's blue. It's too blue. You know it's not Earth (or at least not Earth as we recognize it today) because there are too many (blue) clouds over too much (blue) land or (blue) ocean beneath the (blue) atmosphere. (Da ba dee da ba di.)
The camera pans out to a destroyed moon. It took a hit so massive there's nothing left but a swirling Ubisoft logo. Another hint that this is not a post-apocalyptic Earth is that this moon is too small and too close to the planet to be our Moon. Also, as we learn from a our protagonist's target is "hiding out around the Sempirian moon."
There is a drastic red shift in the planet's color once that moon passes in front of the camera. Unless the stark white, blue, and red is hinting at an '80s Pepsi logo. Look, conspicuous product placement does happen in this video. Case in point:
This video game is brought to you by Porsche. The ship she's piloting (her name is Jordan A. Mun, by the way) has "Porsche 984 Tempest NDX" across the rear, with additional 984s on the wing tips. This branding is also on her pilot seat headrest.
Then we get to a bloody anime playing on a TV. The twin-handgun protag of the show is taking down dinosaur-headed creatures in business suits. You could even say the creatures are draconian, which is a word that can mean the excessively harsh and severe application of laws. That ties in with the game's religious overlords, the Sempirians.
And remember when I said Sempirian sounded like a mashup of Simp and Empire? Sem- could be a prefix to the word "semantic," which is a type of argument that relies on defining a term in a specific way to support a claim. Semantic arguments are often used in religious discourse. Arguing semantics is linguistic nitpicking, rather than any serious attempt to determine the true meaning of a word.
The anime protag, with moon earrings and moon logos on her outfit, could be a tie-in to our real protag, Jordan A. Mun. (If you pronounce "mun" phonetically, it's moon.)
Thanks to a buzz cut, we see that Jordan has multiple scars on the back of her head. She either took one or many hits from behind. This reeks of betrayal. The moon took a nasty hit, and so has Jordan Mun.
Since we're here, Jordan is a unisex name, applicable to both males and females, and could point to director Neil Druckmann's Israeli heritage. The Jordan River is referenced in the Bible, being the river that flows from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. It additionally serves as a border between Israel and the country of Jordan. Either way, the River Jordan is in the Holy Land. The religious overtones just keep piling up.
Jordan sees an incoming call on the TV screen. She's looking around frantically for a remote to take the call. This tells me she doesn't take many calls, but has also been waiting for an important one. No spam.
The person on the video call looks like business-casual Snake Plissken from 1981's Escape From New York. The eyepatch is the giveaway. It's Jordan's handler in this bounty hunting business. The handler's facial features look maternal, but she's got the voice of a teenage Scarlett Johansson. But before she answers that call, the camera pans across Jordan's red thread board (with red tacks, but no lines connecting the dots; too messy).
Intergalactic takes place in a timeline where every single newspaper in the galaxy wasn't shutdown in the early 2000s. Jordan's got a board full of clippings, Post-It Notes, star charts, jump gate receipts, and photographs. Everything points to her old gang, the Five Aces—who are all either dead or hiding.
This is where IMDb clues us into the voice actors and likenesses behind a few of these old gang members. In the photo, from left to right, is:
The write up on IMDb vaguely sums up Jordan's situation:
Set thousands of years in the future, Intergalactic puts players into the role of Jordan A. Mun, a dangerous bounty hunter who ends up stranded on Sempiria—a distant planet whose communication with the outside universe went dark hundreds of years ago. Jordan will have to use all her skills and wits if she hopes to be the first person in over 600 years to leave its orbit.
It's time we talk about all of Jordan's tats. At first they look like she just walked into a tattoo shop and said, "I would like some tattoos, please." But she's has at least 10 that we can see, they're all deliberate, and all seem to point toward a long history with the Five Aces gang.
At first glance, this trailer is just '80s nostalgia a la Ready Player One style. After all, I didn't even mention the Sony-branded electronics, Macho Nacho carryout, or her Adidas hi-tops (which become more pronounced when she lands on the Sempirian planet), or her tootbrush blade that looks like a review bombing on Steam.
One more thing that our own Jason Dailey came up with: Despite Intergalactic not having a launch date, the number "7202" appears on several pieces of electronic interfaces, even though those interfaces are unrelated. Jason thinks 7202 is in reverse and points to a 2027 launch window.
Naughty Dog has given us a lot to unpack. I haven't been this excited about a trailer in a long time. See you, space cowboy.