- The other Uncharted games' start screens had "Nate's Theme" playing against beautiful scenery from one of the game's levels. A Thief's End has...a pirate skeleton inside of a gibbet in the middle of the jungle accompanied by dead silence. It almost has The Last of Us vibes. Um...adventure...?
- Rafe Adler's obsession with Libertalia and proving himself make him dangerous to anyone associated with him. He murders the prison warden in cold blood the second their deal starts going south. He also takes great pleasure in attacking Nate, only being done in because he decided to gloat a little too long. Out of the main villains, he's come the closest to killing Nate. He even gets unique kill animations should the player lose their duel or when Nate gets his Heroic Second Wind: the camera is practically at Nate's eye level and we see Rafe not only slash Nate but stab him while Nate is pinned to the ground!
- Special mention goes to the moment you really see him lose it after Nadine locks the two of them in the ship. It's chilling to see him go from furious to calm and back so quickly.Rafe: Nadine... wait—
Nadine: So long, Rafe. (shuts the door)
Rafe: Nadine! Nadine! (starts pounding on the door) YOU OPEN THIS GODDAMN DOOR RIGHT NOW!!
Nate: Rafe, she's gone! (starts trying to get the debris off Sam) C'mon, give me a hand, we'll all get out of here.
Rafe: Oh, no... no, that won't work.
Nate: C'mon, help me with Sam, I'll help you open the door!
Rafe: No, I'm not gonna be able to enjoy one of these coins... (draws a sword from Avery's corpse)
Nate: Shit.
Rafe: ...knowing that you and your worthless brother are still sucking air. (advances on Nate)
Nate: All right, just... just calm down, you can practice your fencing when we get outside—
Rafe: Nate, just shut up! - And then he starts ranting while swiping furiously at Nate, showing just how much his envy of Nate's exploits has twisted him:Nate: Seriously, Rafe, this is insane even for you.
Rafe: You wanna hear insane?! "Nathan Drake raced a madman and his entire army to the steps of Shambala!" (takes a swing)
Nate: (dodges) Jesus!
Rafe: "Nathan Drake found a lost city in the middle of the Rub' al Khali desert!" (swings again)
Nate: (dodges) God damn it...! Come on, we can get out of here together!
Rafe: "Nathan Drake discovered the fabled El Dorado!!" (swings a third time)
Nate: (dodges, sounding genuinely afraid) C'mon, Rafe, stop!
Rafe: "Nathan Drake... is a legend." (Evil Laugh) You know, I... I shot the man who told me that.
Nate: Look, I get it, you don't like me very much—
Rafe: You know, for all your "greatness", Nate, you have nothing. You are nothing. And I warned you... to get out of my way. (pins Nate to the ground) I have sacrificed everything to find Avery and I'm not going to let a couple of two-bit thieves, a senile conman and a washed-up journalist take it away from me!
Nate: Enough! (pushes Rafe off, grabs a sword from Tew's corpse and blocks Rafe's attack)
Rafe: You care...about that parade of losers so much...I'm going to make sure they join you. - His murder of Vargas in the prologue is just as scary. He manages to calm Vargas down regarding the crucifix, manages to ease him with talk of a large cut, and just as it looks like things go fine, Rafe pulls out a hidden knife and stabs the warden in the abdomen. He then proceeds to savagely stab two more times before Vargas dies. It shows how fast Rafe can turn from charming to outright murderous in a second.
- Special mention goes to the moment you really see him lose it after Nadine locks the two of them in the ship. It's chilling to see him go from furious to calm and back so quickly.
- Captain Henry Avery is gradually revealed to be this throughout the game. Whatever intentions he had when he established Libertalia, by the time he died he'd become a cunning, ruthless overlord driven mad by paranoia and his pursuit of keeping the treasure for himself amidst a pirate rebellion. The island is filled with old gibbets containing the remains of slaves and/or rebel pirates. You can find almost all the bodies of the Libertalia founders seated at a huge banquet table, all of whom were poisoned and left to rot. Some of the late-game areas include a cavern with rooms individually decorated with the skeletal arms, jaws, or rib cages of Avery's enemies. Not whole bodies, just parts. He also mummified dozens of his victims, loaded them with gunpowder, and left them as booby traps. Even Lazarević never went that far!Nate: "The hands that stole from me." Wow, Avery's not even pretending to be sane at this point.
- The way in which things are shown to have fallen apart is equally unsettling: in every other outing in the series, the lost civilizations Nate finds were destroyed because they went insane from a quasi-supernatural Psycho Serum (zombie plagues, super steroid tree sap, hallucinogenic aquifers, uranium deposits). Here, Avery and the Founders did what they did only out of simple human greed and cruelty.
- In the last chapters, as you're exploring New Devon with Elena, you can find a note on a table in a gazebo outside one of the flooded mansions that says something along the lines of, "What you take from me, I will also take from you." Floating gently above the gazebo, without being highlighted in any way (save a single line from Elena), is the skeleton of a woman in a tattered blue dress, hanged by the neck. It's easy to mistake her for a flag or something, until you happen to look up...
- Nadine Ross is pretty frightening the first time Nate meets her. She unexpectedly appears outside a library that Nate tries to vacate, twists his wrist and shoves him back into the room. She then steps inside after him, removes her shoes, and starts beating the living daylights out of him, finishing their fight by throwing him out of a window. Nate can't even get one blow in. No doubt about it, Nadine is a pretty Scary Black Woman. Thank goodness she's A Lighter Shade of Black compared to Rafe.
