One of the most important elements of a video game to be evaluated is its consistency. In other words, it is essential to observe how its various elements connect: whether they complement each other, expanding the game’s core idea, or whether they contradict each other, diminishing their potential. There is even a fancy term to pinpoint this problem in videogames, especially when it’s the story and the gameplay that are fighting each other: it’s called “ludonarrative dissonance”. Tomb Raider, the reboot of the franchise released by Square Enix in 2013, fails precisely in this aspect. Its story may be mature and its gameplay may be functional, but both are often in conflict, prompting the player to reflect on whether the development team really shared the same view on the final product.
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, however, her ship gets stranded on a mysterious island and Lara does not take long to understand that it will be quite complicated to escape from that dangerous place.
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 his belly. She is a heroine who hurts herself, who 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. The pain here is highlighted.
There is, at the outset, 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. When the protagonist is crossing a log – that works as a bridge –, the log resists the temptation to break only to cause a peak of tension, which would be unusual in an Uncharted game.
Various elements of Tomb Raider follow this realistic guideline, producing 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 saying “It is impossible to escape” are very effective in keeping the player on alert.
One of the most shocking moments of the game is one in which, about to be raped, 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 the deed was for her.
Tomb Raider’s story, as the message before the end credits exposes unnecessarily, 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 delimit the line that marks how far survival is still moral and 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, as Lara, in addition to acting like everything is normal, falls easily asleep with this male stranger lurking next to her, as if there was no danger in that.
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. The developers, nonetheless, encourage players to shoot animals at all times, rewarding them with experience points. Lara is emotionally shaken by her first murder, but by killing and looting two hundred men 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 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, but still remains able to climb mountains and defeat enemy squadrons without batting an eye. There is only in a moment, during the whole adventure, that the player is prevented from moving normally due to a wound in the character. However, until that 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 by the narrative is wasted 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 is 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.
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 Metroid design, sure, but done mostly right. The new equipment, for instance, comes naturally in the narrative, urging the player to return to previous areas to get hidden collectibles.
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 would 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 the life bar, while missiles increase ammunition capacity. Now, in this 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 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? Moreover, since almost every action in the game generates experience, the importance of collectibles is 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 is also alarming 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 require a certain dose of thinking. It’s just a shame that the main adventure has very few similar moments. But, again, what’s the reward for all the work of exploring these tombs? Many, many experience points, of course.
Tomb Raider, therefore, is a prime example of ludonarrative dissonance. Whereas the gameplay is absurd by nature, the narrative prizes for realism. Whereas the player is rewarded for violence, the character they control abhors it. So, in the end, the game just shows that it suffers from a grave case of bipolar disorder.
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