Tomb Raider

One of the most important elements of a game – or any other piece of art – is its consistency. It’s important to observe how its various elements connect with each other: whether they work together to expand the core ideas being discussed or end up contradicting one another, diminishing the overall impact of the experience. There is even a specific term to refer to this problem when it comes to videogames and the case when the story and the gameplay are in direct conflict: “ludonarrative dissonance”. Tomb Raider, the reboot released by Square Enix in 2013, fails precisely when it comes to this aspect. Its story may be mature and its gameplay may work well when viewed in isolation, but both are often fighting against each other, probably making the player wonder if everybody in the development team shared the same view on the project.

In the story, Lara Croft is an inexperienced archaeologist who sets out on an expedition to find traces of a lost civilization called the Yamatai. After a terrible storm, her ship gets stranded on a mysterious island – and Lara doesn’t take long to realize that it will be quite complicated to escape from this dangerous place.

Right at the beginning of Tomb Raider is evident the attempt to differentiate the game from its direct competitor, the Uncharted series. Lara Croft is scared and wounded, trapped in a sack, hanging upside down. When she manages to get free, she falls on top of a thin metal tube that pierces her belly. She is a heroine who hurts herself, bleeds, and cries. Unlike Nathan Drake, the protagonist of Uncharted, who always manages to perform his stunts mostly unscathed, she deeply suffers the consequences of her more daring actions, like rolling downhill. Here, the protagonist’s pain is highlighted.

There is, from the get-go, an emphasis on survival and on the realism of Lara’s actions. One of her first missions is to hunt a deer to eat and Lara is even seen shaking near a campfire at night.  Various elements in the game follow this realistic guideline, creating a heavy and suffocating atmosphere. When the island’s sinister inhabitants capture Lara’s crew, for instance, she can hear the shouting from afar and the sound of shots silencing them. Heavy rain floods abandoned structures and blurred red messages in the corners of the walls stating that “it’s impossible to escape” are very effective in keeping the player on alert.

One of the most shocking moments of the game is when Lara kills a man for the first time: she is terrified by what has just happened, clearly in shock. But, when she’s questioned by her mentor, Lara explains that it was not the killing that she found scary, but how easy it was for her to do it.

Tomb Raider’s story – and the message before the end credits puts this in very clear terms – is one of survival. The protagonist is forced to commit horrible acts to save her own life and escape the island with her friends. The purpose of the villain – the sinister leader of the island’s inhabitants – is to reinforce the line that marks how far one can go to survive and still remain morally correct: he personifies one of the extremes, but questions if Lara is not actually much closer to him than to the role of a heroine.

The story is well-developed overall, although some of its scenes feel too artificial. The first encounter between Lara and a stranger on the island, for example, is the worst offender, since Lara, in addition to acting like everything is perfectly normal, falls easily asleep with a male stranger sitting right next to her. What could possibly go wrong?

Despite these scenes, the main problem of this Tomb Raider is the incompatibility of its core ideas with its gameplay. At the beginning of the game, the protagonist apologizes to the deer she kills to survive, but the game actively encourages players to shoot animals at all times, rewarding them with experience points. Lara is emotionally shaken by her first murder, but by killing two hundred men and looting their corpses the player unlocks an achievement. The player’s actions and the personality of the protagonist are in constant conflict. Lara may even state that it was “easy” to kill her first victim, but eliminating thirty well-armed men every now and again is certainly not something she would celebrate or even be able to do.

In addition, the realism so sought by the story is also lost with the incompatibility between the wounds Lara suffers and the miraculous maneuvers she performs. Lara gets cut and pierced by metal objects, falls from great heights, rolls several hills down, and cries in pain a lot, but still remains able to climb mountains and defeat enemy squadrons without batting an eye: it’s as if the game was only interested in seeing this woman suffer, without caring to develop the consequences of that. There is only in a moment, during the whole adventure, that the player is prevented from moving at a normal speed, due to a wound in the character. However, until this scene, the protagonist had already suffered much worse injuries – and some of those should have even been fatal. In other words, the writers may have tried, but in the end, Lara Croft turns out to be as immortal as Nathan Drake. The realism so sought is dissipated by the gameplay.

Now, analyzing the mechanics of the game in isolation, they do not present many flaws or novelties. Tomb Raider is a typical third-person shooter: just move from one cover to the next and shoot anyone who is shooting back. It’s possible to kill silently, using stealth or a bow and arrow, and any failure in stealth is punished by more enemies appearing on the stage, just like in Uncharted.

The level design, in turn, invites a bit of exploration, being intricate and guarding innumerable secrets. The exploration is structured around Lara’s equipment, which opens new paths when obtained: ropes allow reaching distant places, for example, while shotguns can destroy wooden obstacles. Basic Metroidvania design, but one that still suffers from some issues.

Tomb Raider contains so many secrets that it can intimidate any player, even though most of them are pretty useless. Why would the player bother to look for eighty GPS devices if, in the end, they only receive an Easter Egg and an Achievement? In any Metroid, the items that are found are responsible for a sense of progression: energy tanks extend your health, while missile expansions increase ammunition capacity. Meanwhile, in Tomb Raider the items are just curiosities and distractions, serving no practical purpose.

It is true that with every secret discovered, Lara gains experience points that can be converted into upgrades, but this effect is indirect and abstract. After all, how do you explain that murdering three hundred rabbits and finding some three-thousand-year-old pots allows Lara to increase the damage of a machine gun using random bits of metal, a hook, and a bonfire? And since almost every action in the game is rewarded with experience points, the importance of collectibles is greatly diminished: why would the player struggle to look for artifacts if it is easier to simply shoot birds?

For a game called Tomb Raider, it’s also baffling that the actual raiding of tombs is an optional activity. Some areas of the island contain hidden tombs whose location is signaled to the player as they pass near their entrance. Each one is made up of just one room and a specific puzzle. These puzzles are ingenious in working with the physics of the game without seeming artificial and they require you to pay attention to contraptions and try to figure out how they work. It’s just a shame that the main adventure has very few similar moments. But again, what’s the reward for all this work of exploring tombs? Many, many experience points, of course.

Tomb Raider is a prime example of ludonarrative dissonance. Whereas the gameplay is absurd by nature, the story prizes realism. Whereas the player is rewarded for violence, the character they control abhors it. There are as many contradictions in the game as there are useless collectibles to be found.

June 08, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on October 23, 2014.