Super Nerd Sundays Presents: On the Raiding of Tombs!

I never played the Tomb Raider games when I was young.  I’d like to claim it was from some early onset of feminist thought, as a personal stand against the objectification of women, or even from a love of the Indiana Jones films that the series parodies so inelegantly, but the reality is that I didn’t play Tomb Raider because it was too hard.  Just way too fucking hard.  I couldn’t figure out where to go, how to get there, or how to fight…  Well, anyone.  I just sucked and died.  I just booted it up, ogled Lara’s bump maps, felt guilty about it, boggled at the gameplay, then abandoned it.

I’ve spent more time reading about Tomb Raider than playing it over the years, and I’ve never felt like I was missing out on anything.  Lara forms an interesting conundrum: she’s simultaneously an objectified female-bodied figure who exists to be controlled by an ostensibly male gaze and a strong feminist figure who asserts herself over both overtly and covertly masculine figures and authority structures through the course of play.  That makes for some interesting reading, but the play itself never compelled me.  As such the reading fared better, but not by much.  I found myself reading essays about video games by people who didn’t play them, who considered imagery and positioning without so much as a nod to play and structure.  Perhaps I was not the only gamer who found the Tomb Raider games less than compelling.

So when the Tomb Raider reboot came out I wasn’t hooked by the prospect off the bat.  As details began to emerge, my interest was piqued.  Punishing combat?  High risk aerial maneuvers?  Survival in a brutal, hostile, breathtaking environment?  Lots of climbing?  These qualities, paired with a tremendous amount of positive buzz from people I respect, were enough to get me on board.  And by on board, I mean ready to purchase the game when it went on sale on Steam and then play it months later when I finished classes.

So that happened, and I’m actually glad I never played the previous Tomb Raider games.  If I’d gone into Tomb Raider expecting anything, I might’ve been disappointed with it.  But instead I was taken completely by the game, by its characters, its protagonist and, more or less, its plot.  Tomb Raider was something special, and I don’t think I’d have thought of it as quite so special if I’d played it with expectations or desires that it be something other than what it was.

What I found was a wondrous extravaganza of character arc functional game mechanics, a game where the plot demonstrated less about the development of characters than the evolution of the game’s systems.  Too often, we mistake droning conversations for character or world development in games, we mistake cutscenes for story.  But the story really unfolds, and character really develops, over the course of play.  Tomb Raider recognizes this, and executes on the conceit that gameplay should develop character in a way unlike any other game I’ve played.

In Tomb Raider you begin the game as a battered, bound and bruised young woman, trained but untested, determined but unarmed and terrified.  This young woman probably looks a little familiar.  She’s kind of got an Anna Kendrick thing going, without the cup-music, and she resembles an old school video game character a little, but with reasonably sized breasts.  Starting out, you really can’t do much.  Most of the first fifteen minutes of the game is spent swinging in mid air and limping around after an incredibly bone crunching fall and a nasty abdomen wound (this is a recurring theme throughout the game).  But after a while you get a torch, and you start to learn about proper torch use.  See, your torch can light things on fire.  This is important because it allows you to navigate your environment, bypassing obstacles that are torch-able, blowing things up as needed.  But the torch goes out if you walk under waterfalls (as torches do) and since you start out in a particularly wet cave, there are waterfalls everywhere.

So you have to learn about the mechanics of environmental manipulation in order to find a way to launch flaming debris through a ramshackle apparatus so that you can safely blow up a barrier.  After this, burning things and blowing them up gets progressively easier.  By the midpoint of the game, you’re so great at lighting shit on fire that you can do it from halfway across a room.  The challenging mechanic of controlling fire is iteratively simplified until it’s just a matter of shooting a flaming arrow at what you want to see on fire.  The puzzles that troubled you early in the game are a trivial matter by the end of it.

This is usually the way of things in games, sure, but in Tomb Raider it’s accentuated beautifully.  The first time you have to walk across a tree as a makeshift balance beam, it’s a harrowing experience where your strafe keys come into play as you desperately try to balance yourself.  This continues for a long while, before you’re confident enough to stand calmly on a balance beam, clutching a bow, firing arrows at distant foes.

And then there’s the shooting.  Oh my, the way violence unfolds in Tomb Raider…

Usually your first kill is a banal affair, a matter of unlocking a weapon, or perhaps desperately slugging it out with an especially tough foe so that your first time feels special.  Dishonored used my first kill to teach me how to block correctly.   In Tomb Raider, your first kill is a harrowing puzzle-like experience where you fight tooth and nail for a weapon.  If you fail (and I failed several times) the outcome is grisly.  When you succeed, the outcome remains quite grisly.  Tomb Raider is all about presenting violence as an unpleasant experience, a terrifying ordeal you have to endure.  At least, at first.

Eventually, the mechanics of the game change.  They do so gradually.  At first, killing enemies stealthily is a desperate measure, a struggle you find yourself pressed into that requires insane button mashing and is colored by Lara’s breathless fear.  By the end of the game, it’s a brutally casual action that Lara coldly administers before moving on to her next target.  A series of “special kills” associated with various weapons constitute a particularly unnerving game mechanic.  Shooting an enemy in the head from a distance is one thing.  Unloading your assault rifle’s magazine into a man’s face while he screams is quite another.  By the end of the game, Lara handles both actions with a grim aplomb earmarked by her occasional desperately shouted asides.  When Lara speaks, there’s pathos behind it that few games can muster.  When she says “That’s right, run you bastards.  I’m coming for you,” she means it.  The weak young woman who struggled to flee from her enemies in the game’s opening scenes, the girl who had trouble gutting a deer, finishes the game stabbing her foes in the head with arrows and then coolly moving on to her next target.  The world of Tomb Raider is a brutal, unforgiving place, but the mechanics that emerge as you grow into it are wonderfully integrated into the play and represent a harrowing tale of growth and adaptation.

If the story comes off as weak, oh well.  Most games have weak stories, ill conceived or underdeveloped plots.  Tomb Raider’s characters don’t always act the way reasonable people might be expected to.  They don’t always make the best plans.  It’s odd that Lara’s well honed instincts, which so effectively note handholds, animals and tiny GPS trackers, don’t mark traps or environmental dangers.  But this is a game.   It operates on the dream logic of games, the same logic that drives the Solarii to attack me as they’re beset by undying Japanese soldiers who have subsisted on dark magic for a millennia.  The logic that encourages my allies to accept a sketchy former crew-member without a wink after he runs across a field randomly firing a pistol into the air after he’s already betrayed everyone twice is slightly less insane than the logic that Russia wants to stage a land invasion against America to make a point about nationalism in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  I’m willing to put up with Tomb Raider’s “ugh” story moments as long as its gameplay delivers.

And it does.  It really does.  This is a game where the play scales, where it transforms.  It’s a masterful work of design, and the game itself presents a tremendously solid core.  Tomb Raider is an excellent work of game design.  Its story is perfectly serviceable, its character development and environmental establishment are well above average (though a sight short of exceptional).  Even the collectibles, usually the worst part of any game, are compelling.  It’s rare for me to take the time to actually grab collectibles, but Tomb Raider managed to hook me in and give me a reason and a reasonable chance at finishing area challenges.

There are problems with the PC port.  NVidia users (over half the PC gaming population, as I understand it) can expect serious technical issues varying from total graphic failure to a number of curious lockups.  At one point, the game began broadcasting a series of progressively more irate shouts through my audio channel while locking out my commands, and I would often have to restart my entire computer to get out of a particularly serious glitch.  Tomb Raider is buggy and poorly optimized.

There are also moments of arbitrary puzzle game frustration that will make you scream motherfucker at your screen until (and for a bit after) you discover the facile solution that the designers expected you to immediately grasp.  Fewer than usual, it’s worth noting, but they’re there, and they stand out all the more so for the wonderfully intuitive design behind so many of the game’s puzzles and challenges.  The melee combat, which is a big part of the end game, can also often feel iffy.  I didn’t feel confident about my control of the game’s crucial “dodge and counter” feature, which occupied nearly half of the available skill trees.  But then, I spent most of my playthrough carefully killing enemies in the dark, in complete silence, using my bow.

If the very fact that I can say that made you excited, pick a copy of Tomb Raider up.  Technical issues be damned.  If it didn’t, but you like puzzles and exploration with a heady dose of verticality, still go for it.  If you’re thinking about getting Tomb Raider because you loved the original franchise, ask someone else.  For me, this is its own game.  I’m aware there was a previous Tomb Raider, but I don’t know that much about it and, after playing this delightful little piece of game, I don’t really care.