What was going on in that Tomb Raider reboot anyway?
‘On Culture’ Missive for August 2024
Reading some 1990 game magazine reviews reminded me of the value of severely limited space, so here is my 127 word summation of Tomb Raider (2013):
Tomb Raider (2013) shockingly abuses Lara, harming her emotionally but mostly physically in an overcompensation to legitimize her ability to hang with the likes of Nathan Drake. Her arc from soft, apprehensive, self-doubting, into a hard, confident, tough, “survivor,” is very plainly told through dialogue, her barks, and imagery: a scene of looking into the mirror in the intro is mirrored later on and explicitly commented on in case you didn't understand. A rip-off of Uncharted is avoided by giving the player patches of land in which to rummage about finding collectibles and gear points to upgrade your killing tools and lightly salted with a Metroid style progression of obtaining new tools that open blocked doorways. These checklists cannot obscure that the flesh is rotten. 7/10.
Publishers Will Always Find Opportunities to Monetize
The Open World Bloat to Live Service Pipeline
Frictionless and Time Suck Games
Violence in Tomb Raider
Ludonarrative Dissonance
Sexual Assault Backpedaling
Lara Croft’s reboot had a long pre-release press run. What would become Tomb Raider (2013) was originally leaked on July 13, 2009 via concept art published by FourPlayerCoop.com1 and show off a survival horror angle not seen in the final version. It was then officially announced on December 6, 2010 with a, wouldn’t you know it, GameInformer cover story reveal. Tomb Raider finally released March 5, 2013, just on the precipice of the new console generation, for which it would get remastered as a “Definitive Edition.” The lead up to its release was a reminder of the different ways publishers attempt to squeeze as much out of games as they can. Tomb Raider was reported on for not having a season or online pass, for a bewildering competitive multiplayer mode that was handled by a third party developer, having only multiplayer DLC, no single-player additions planned, and retail exclusive pre-orders2.
This period also reminded me of the brief time publishers attempted to combat used sales and piracy with the Online Pass system, which made multiplayer modes in video games require a code provided with a physical copy of the game in order to access. Those who purchased a used or pirated copy were required to purchase a $10.00 license in order to access the multiplayer features. It was largely abandoned before the introduction of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in 2013 and technically prohibited by online pass participant Sony for its console. This time also saw multiplayer modes (frequently developed by a separate team from the “real” game) tacked onto any and every game capable of hosting it: BioShock 2, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Tomb Raider, Dead Space 2, Spec Ops: The Line, God of War: Ascension, Mass Effect 3. Not to say that these multiplayer modes are inherently bad but their existence was based on the idea that a multiplayer mode would preclude someone from trading it in to GameStop who would then turn around and sell it back to anyone asking at a cheaper price than purchasing the game new. Used game sales destroying the video game industry was a real and constant conversation for many years. It never happened3 and then we all transitioned to digital distribution.
Nathan Grayson at Aftermath recently spoke with Yanis Varoufakis, former economist-in-residence for Valve as well as former finance minister for Greece and author, about his recent book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. One of the two most material excerpts from the piece was,
The real goal, as Varoufakis identifies it, is to provide the land on which these transactions occur and, like the feudal lords of yore, to effectively give us, the townspeople, no choice in the matter. You either sell your product on Amazon – or share your music on Spotify, or tailor your videos to the ever-shifting whims of YouTube and TikTok – or you may as well take a hike into the internet’s equivalent of the frozen wastes. Companies extract rent, whether in the form of a 30 percent tax on the App Store and Steam or by collecting all your data and selling it to ad providers on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and the like – all while you provide the content that gives these platforms their appeal in the first place.
This was a real insightful perspective through which to view the majority of our existence online: most major platforms do not provide a service. Instead, they rely on the populace (or in Amazon’s case, other companies) to create the content that draws people to the platform. The other interesting excerpt, which I disagreed with, was,
Varoufakis recognizes his own role in paving the way for technofeudalism to bulldoze capitalism, which was already bad, and build something worse in its place. At Valve, he studied Steam’s then-nascent community marketplaces, which have since evolved to become some of the most influential in video games. Without Team Fortress 2’s hats and Counter-Strike’s knives – not to mention Steam’s almighty algorithm – you’d have never gotten the real-world-money-powered stores present in games like Roblox and Fortnite, nor Facebook’s fumbling metaverse aspirations, nor numerous other platform monetization efforts. But during Varoufakis’ time at Valve, from his perspective, it all arose from a place of necessity.
Specifically I do not agree that “Without Team Fortress 2’s hats and Counter-Strike’s knives – not to mention Steam’s almighty algorithm – you’d have never gotten the real-world-money-powered stores present in games like Roblox and Fortnite,” because I do not underestimate game publishers finding the most optimal way to profit off of their player base. It is something I mentioned circuitously in last month’s piece when listing out all the various currency exchange options available in the games of today. Games whose continued existence is predicated on extracting as much money out of its players as it can. Playing the Tomb Raider reboot from 2013 and reviewing the article feed on IGN for it was a time machine to a past era of publishers seeking new ways to profit.
Season passes, the option to pay up front for future promised DLC, still exists today in a reduced form. They have been largely passed over in favor of battle passes: premium access to a list of in-game items that are unlocked by playing more of the game. These usually exist alongside other monetary exchange options such as loot boxes (literal slot machines you pay a pull for using either earned in-game currency or its purchasable version/equivalent) and cosmetic items for purchase. You can very easily see why the battle pass has become such a lucrative feature pushed by most of the so-called “live service” games of today. This system keeps the player within your game’s ecosystem by requiring them to play consistently in order to unlock everything offered by the battle pass, tapping into not only the fear of missing out (fomo) in not unlocking that one weapon or character skin only available in the (premium) battle pass but also taps into the gamer’s inherent return on investment (roi) id. I mention this not only because it shows publishers have always been on the prowl for the newest way to extract funds from players, and why I disagreed that “without hats and knives” we wouldn't have reached this point of paying real money for in-game currencies, but also because the many ways publishers have attempted to maximize profit has not only effected how games are sold but also how they are made.
I have said it often enough that I really want to put out a definitive piece on how gamers found it unacceptable (save for the rarest of instances) for a retail game product to be sold without a sufficient return on investment in its length4. Due to this, bloat has slowly been introduced into the way games are now created. You can view the evolution of the Far Cry series and its Howlongtobeat data to see this progression: 13 to 17 to 16 to 17 ½ to 18 to 24, and that is just the “Main Story” dataset. Assassin’s Creed went from a 15 hour “Main Story” romp and a 30 hour “Completionist” run to 61 and 146 hours respectively with its last big release in Valhalla before the soft reboot in Mirage. You’ll also notice both of these are published by Ubisoft, whose usage of “third person action open world checklist game” was so obvious my writing on Watch_Dogs in 2014, when I was just starting to write about video games, I could already recognize that it was a frankenstein of other Ubisoft open world templates and that would only continue to be built upon even a decade later with the upcoming Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Tomb Raider (2013) is largely a riff on Uncharted, itself an evolution of Tomb Raider (1996), itself a sort of video game version of Indiana Jones. The bloat is introduced by way of multiple locations full of little things to do and collect. There are GPS caches, weapon parts, documents, relics, gear currency, and item challenges to complete and mark off your map. These exist to pad out the runtime, as without them Tomb Raider would be an even more blatant riff on Uncharted and contain a significantly reduced “time to beat.” It took a month of on and off playing yet my total video footage added up to just under 12 hours. Removing the time spent walking about looking for these little items, as well as the simplistic tombs, and you’d be reduced to a 8 hour long game. That time estimate is just from trimming out the fattiest portions of my mucking about.
Would the game be improved without the bloat? Do these additions to a traditionally linear action-adventure romp amplify the aesthetic? Enhance the overall experience of it, play into the themes, the soul, the essence of the game? No to all. Removing the bloat would not magically make the main plot of the game you follow any better. The arc of the game is that Lara Croft transforms from soft, nervous, apprehensive, self-doubting, into a hard, confident, strong, tough, “survivor,” hence the tagline that also serves as the self-congratulatory cap off, “A survivor is born.” The arc itself is plainly communicated. Lara’s barks progress from scared to defiant and finally aggressive. Characters are constantly telling her to have more confidence in herself. A scene from the CG introduction video where Lara looks at herself in the mirror is replayed upon her return to The Endurance (Get it? Endurance!) to show how much she’s changed. Patronizingly she says “So much has happened.” out loud immediately afterwards in case you didn't understand the symbolism. Were I feeling generous the “numbers go up” aspect of gathering gear to upgrade your various weapons, the accumulation of items that allow you more access to locked off area—an aspect attributed to the Metroidvania genre that is superficially recreated here—might play into the ascendancy of Lara’s confidence, but instead it exists as a reinforcement of the checklist genre of games that Tomb Raider is attempting to emulate in the hopes of maximizing its market value. Her arc is dwarfed by a meaningless accumulation of numbers projected on screen by performing weightless tasks in order to release the pleasure of checking a task off a to-do list.
The earliest most prominent examples of this genre of game, which eventually evolved into the “live service” games we see today, are The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The former gave the player a large map and the freedom to go wherever they so desired, littering the world with various things to do, all of them never taking too much time to complete. Caves, ruins, and camps are distributed in such a way that the player will never be too far from having something to do, and as they do so will accumulate levels, skill points, items, equipment, and markers on the map indicating what they have accomplished. This is not that different from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, which also gave the players a vast map full of points of interest to encounter during your freeform journey. The main difference was the level of friction between the two. Morrowind has fast travel, but it works within the confines of a diegetic system of Still Striders, boats, mage guild teleportation, and the overly difficult-to-setup Propylon Indice. Morrowind lacks a map to easily track where you have been and what remains to be cleared, and its journal is chronologically filled as you yourself take on quests and talk to people, making it harder to track what has been completed and what remains outstanding. Oblivion rather infamously made it so any point of interest could be fast traveled to from any point within the game world, removing any friction that might exist between a player and where they wanted to go, or return to. Oblivion’s map and quest tracking was much more readable and feature rich compared to Morrowind’s. An ever present compass would indicate where the objective or a new location to “discover” was.
Historically PC players have been most aware of the “dumbing down” of games and attribute it to the rise in prominence of consoles and their limiting hardware in both power and controller. I think the real reason is that as games have continued to increase exponentially in complexity and cost, the need to appeal to as many people as possible has reduced any and all friction to a smooth gliding experience of ease. Nate Purkeypile explains it when talking to Edwin Evans-Tirlwell at Rock, Paper, Shotgun for the excellent piece How the checklist conquered the open world, from Morrowind to Skyrim,
As to why open worlds have lost that element of surprise, Purkeypile points straightforwardly to how expensive today's biggest games are to make, and the number of people involved in their creation. There has never been greater pressure to standardise the format and mitigate the risk of a flop. And the larger the team, the harder it is to set aside time for exploration within the complex geography of video game development.
"When you have literally thousands of people working on the game, sometimes you need to be able to have these bite-sized portions of 'do this, go there'," Purkeypile says. "It's very hard to run things at that scale without all those checks and balances and stuff."
Even more relevant is the quotes from Matt Firor, director for The Elder Scrolls Online for its entire existence, on Morrowind,
"If you play that right now - there is no compass, no map, literally the quests are like 'go to the third tree on the right and walk 50 paces west'," Firor says. "And if you did that now, no one would play it. Very few people would play it. So now you need to give them hints and clues, and because nobody wants to really devote that much time to problem solving. Like they want to go and be told the story, or enter or interact with another player, or interact with an NPC.
"Morrowind is a great game obviously," he goes on. "It's one of my favourite games. But the way it told its story with the open world is a little out of date for the type of gamers that we have now, where they're not all hardcore, they're not all PC or generation-one console diehards, right, who are going to go out and invest as much time in the game as possible. Now [that there are] so many other options for players, you really want to make sure that it's engaging and fun, and wandering around a field trying to gauge 50 steps from a tree is not part of that anymore. Which is kind of sad, because I'm old school."
"[We now] have to support both those kind of hardcore players - I'm saying hardcore, that term is loaded - but the people that really want to take the time and live everything and make it difficult, and then the wider audience that really just has 20 minutes to burn,"
Oblivion’s real failing was that it had an ending. Skyrim introduced radiant quests which produced never-ending content and removed the level cap and a hard stop at its end, which Bethesda learned to avoid with Fallout 3. Fallout 4 continued utilizing radiant quests with the infamous, “Another settlement needs our help,” line from Preston Garvey. Starfield is the Bethesda masterpiece that eliminated an ending entirely and justified it through the narrative so that the player would never stop playing. There is a throughline from Oblivion to Modern Warfare to Fallout 3 to Borderlands to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood to Skyrim to Far Cry 3 to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag to Destiny to the current landscape we live in now in which AAA single-player games can only exist as open worlds and multiplayer games can only exist as treadmills that require a time dedication only previously seen in MMO’s.
The real insidiousness is that these games and their ilk are so easy to pick up and play that people willingly and mindlessly engage with them, consume them. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare perfected rewarding the player for every action they accomplish and also introducing RPG level up mechanics into what once was an entirely flat and skill based system of competitive play against other players, forever altering the development of video games. All of these games make sure to introduce increasingly flashy animations to alert the player that they accomplished something, no matter how inconsequential. Fallout 3 had a specific sound cue for whenever the player discovered a location or leveled up, which seem quaint and reserved compared to now a screen has counters for each task and individually branded variations of a Quest Complete animation that takes up half the screen. They also make sure each task on their list will never take too long to complete, enticing you to stack up those pleasure activations by playing for extended periods of time. This makes returning to their game more appealing than putting forth the energy to begin something different and new. No friction, all kinetic energy forward march. Why wouldn’t you continue playing? The progression of this loop has become the basis for monetization in online multiplayer and gacha games nowadays in which a loot box or battle pass centered monetary system pushes the player to spend more time playing it than anything else in order to fill a bar, accumulate currency to spend on things, and most importantly spend real money to get flashy animations and even faster bar filling and item accumulation. Importantly not all of it, just a little more so that you will continue spending.
My condemnation towards this genre is, as with any opinion, entirely subject to my whims. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Fallout: New Vegas, Red Dead Redemption, and Grand Theft Auto IV, some of my favorite games, are of this lineage. I do believe that this monopoly on time, something shared by both the open world games and live service titles by their nature of being built to keep the player playing their game and only their game, creates an atmosphere where these are the only games being played, written, and talked about, and most of them are mid! We have built a culture where there is a need to be in the current conversation and playing the latest big new thing so you can talk about it online. So we end up playing Star Wars Outlaws even though it's mostly just okay but because of one or two good things at the backend it somehow magically transforms the 20 hours twiddling thumbs into a valuable experience worth playing more than the various other (smaller) games you could have played during that time.
I found myself thinking a lot about this ease of play during Tomb Raider. How it was simple to boot it up and run around marking off icons. I thought about why I continually do this, return to games I know are wasting my time, and to do what? To write an extended piece about how they suck or have one worthwhile aspect? I picked up Mad Max (2015) in the middle of my Tomb Raider playthrough to investigate further, as it is a game made from the same open world mold as all the rest. The recent Furiosa release, “Mad Max was Underrated” talk, and Noah Caldwell-Gervais’ recent video on the Rage franchise in which he psyops himself into thinking Mad Max was a masterpiece had that game at the forefront of my mind. It was spending time in Mad Max that helped coalesce my ideas on the base components of what makes these games a frictionless and constantly rewarding experience.
By Tomb Raider’s release in 2013 the formula for single player open world games had been pretty much perfected with Far Cry 3. Open world map, icon clearing the clutter, accruing experience points, leveling up, purchasing upgrades, and spending skill points. Tomb Raider is not quite the same scale of an open world as a Skyrim or Far Cry 3, but it does contain multiple areas with large diameters allowing the player to muck about and also allows them to travel from one to the other, never cutting them off from obtaining that last GPS cache or gear currency. It fulfills the absolute lack of friction. A game centered on creating a “survivor,” contains essentially no difficulty when it comes to surviving.
The introduction has Lara finding food and warmth but this is quickly cast aside in favor of an action romp of continual killing and explosions and brutalization of Lara. Even the tombs, the in-game interpretation of the game’s title, are simple puzzles that require one solution and reward you with a map to further reduce any difficulty in finding every checklisted item in the local area. Lara has “survivor vision” which will highlight what exactly she can interact with to make it easier. A “numbers go up,” approach to Lara’s gear and abilities also means she becomes ever more efficient at killing as the game progresses, and it never provides an adequate antagonistic force to match the ascension of Lara’s death delivery. Even in platforming the camera helpfully moves into the desired position so all you have to do is hold the correct direction on the thumbstick and occasionally press a button to jump and then, get this, a second button to latch onto the rock face you’re jumping towards. Revolutionary.
Lara’s island adventure is filled to the brim with violent imagery for a game that lacks any real threat, danger, or tension. There are tons of bodies, gore, and bones strewn about every major location you crawl through5. At one point the game even riffs on the iconic image of Michael Sheen’s Captain Benjamin Willard emerging silently from underneath the water in Apocalypse Now6, with Lara emerging silently from a pool of blood which she then swims through to escape capture and death. Samurai cannibals have been able to live and progenate for thousands of years. Decades of shipwrecked crews have accumulated into a brotherhood of bloodthirsty cultists. The land itself is a brutal place, with Lara frequently killed in an exceedingly brutal and graphic manner when the player fails quick time events. From falling, having her throat torn open by a wolf, impaling her through her throat, impaled by a tree limb, and having her head knocked against rocks by an underwater current. The people are just as violent, stabbing her in the chest, choking her, shooting her in the head, throwing her off ledges, and cutting open her throat. When I wrote about the violence in Fallout 3 I recognized how the enemy factions and the land itself beckoned the player to enact that same brutal violence displayed back, and Tomb Raider does very much the same7. You are rewarded for headshots and melee combos, for killing people in different ways, for killing animals. The game will introduce a new weapon and feed enemies into the grinder so the player can fully test out her new weapon against the nameless horde.
The abuse hurled towards Lara physically was recognized even at the time for being excessive. I cannot emphasize enough that this game is constantly, and I mean constantly, throwing Lara around. These beatings show a game that is laughably insecure. What, Lara couldn’t hang with the likes of Nathan Drake unless she was severely and consistently beaten to prove her strength? It is a gross overcompensation. This toughness plays into the greater arc of the game, that transition from a whimpering Lara into one who aggressively barks at enemies, ““That’s right you bastards, run, I’m coming for you all!” Is there such a limitation in the medium that the only way to display Lara’s tenacity is to drop her onto rebar, slam her into the ground, have her head beaten in? Her emotional turmoil comes in the form of feeling responsible for the disaster that continually unfolds before her, from the kidnapping of her close friend Sam to the increasing tally of deaths of other crew members she was shipwrecked with. Time spent on this is woefully insufficient.
There is a meme I’ve seen pop up recently online wherein a bell curve will be displayed with an original statement being presented as the stupid beginner's opinion, the height of the curve being some galaxy brained treatise, and the ending being an enlightened and wise return to the original statement. I think of this meme when I think of the term ludonarrative dissonance. It was a term embraced and then derided and now somewhat back in vogue. The term was never wrong, but the usage and application has been at the whim of the greater culture which can quickly make anything repellent. This term came to mind when playing Tomb Raider because its thematic ambition was far outweighed by the requirements of making a mass market video game.
Thematically the game is looking to showcase a survivor being created. At a base level, the game accomplishes this. Lara transforms from soft, apprehensive, self-doubting, into a hard, confident, tough woman. The methods by which this is accomplished are plain and often in opposition to its potential. The most extreme example of this is Lara’s first kill. She was captured, hands tied, and nearly executed before making her escape. Still disabled, she crawls about, avoiding the cultist scavengers until discovered by the presumed leader of this gang of killers. He suggestively gropes at her, something we will be delving into further later on, before being knocked about in a QTE sequence that ends with Lara shooting him dead. She cries out, overwhelmed at the action of taking a life. The man’s gang is still in the area however, so Lara takes his gun and proceeds to execute a headshot for +15 XP no problem8, a feat she will continue to perform ad nauseam, to infinity, for as long as the game supplies lives for her to extinguish.
Narratively, the game needs to have a great weight attached to this act of taking a life for the first time. Ludicly, the game needs to supply the player with bodies to shoot at and not impede their ability to do so in any way. This is acknowledged by writer Rhianna Pratchett9 in an interview with Kill Screen by Yannick Lejacq in 2013,
It’s about balancing the needs of gameplay with the needs of narrative. The needs of narrative don’t always trump the needs of gameplay. In fact, it’s usually the other way around. And so I’d say from a narrative perspective, we would have liked the ramp-up to be a bit slower. But, you know, there are other factors to be considered! When players get a gun, they generally want to use the gun. We were brave in going such a long time without giving players a gun in a game where you end up doing a lot of shooting. We tried to innovate a little bit, but narrative can’t always win. Ideally if you can find a sweet spot, that’s great. But sometimes combat, or gameplay or whatever, has to win out.
You see this again when Pratchett spoke with Cara Ellison for Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
Rhianna also tells me about her conflicting feelings on Lara’s violence curve going from being afraid to kill, to being a mass executioner. “Hand on heart, the narrative team would have liked that to be a bit slower, but on the other hand we’d kept the player without a gun for at least an hour, we’d kept them without a weapon for a while. ...We found that as soon as gamers got a gun, they wanted to use it. ...You’ve got the needs of gameplay, you’ve got the needs of narrative, and you’ve got the needs of the player for this to be a fun experience. They don’t always align exactly. Sometimes you’ve got to make compromises on this.”
Lara’s escape from the introductory cave is followed by establishing a source of warmth in fire, a cover from the rain, and procuring meat to sustain herself. These needs are dropped in favor of procuring different guns, upgrades for said guns, and XP so you can apply skill points to upgrade Lara’s abilities. RPG mechanics do not evoke survival. Journals exist for the player, not the character. Lara will have a sentence of text commenting on the content of what you found but no audio, no effect on her conversations with others, even when they contain important information that would affect the relationship between the two or should be shared with another. These structures on the island have existed for centuries yet fall apart as soon as Lara makes her appearance.
YouTube channel Gameology has a series of “Experts Reacts” videos and did one on the Tomb Raider reboot with journalist, anthropologist, and survival expert Kinga Philipps which goes over some of the illogic of the game. Things such as how pulling out impaled rebar would result in your death from internal bleeding, that wolves don’t attack humans, leaving deer and wolves corpses is a major waste of helpful resources, being caught in a bear trap means no more ankle, and how Lara never wears anything warmer than her tank top despite ascending to snow level elevations. None of these are things players batted an eye at. You just accept that the player character is only going to have one outfit (or model in gamer terms) for probably the entirety of the game. They course corrected for this in the sequel which gives her more outfits, and more fitting attire for the conditions she finds herself in, comparatively.
In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves10 Drake gets shot constantly but it only matters in a cutscene. Half-Life 2 will occasionally tie you to a chair so that you can’t jump on top of someone's head as an important scene unfolds before you. Cutscenes reveal the limitation of games, what they cannot enact via its regular gameplay and what it cannot entrust the player to do. If video games are a theater, they’re performances in which the main character, the player, does not know their marks or lines and has to insinuate them based on the environment and their own history with the medium. Gamers are sensitive to game over screens, as missing a mark results in a reset: curtains are drawn, everyone reverts back to the beginning of the scene, and we go again, hopefully with greater success. Constant failure due to a misunderstanding of what is being asked of the player can result in an Angry Joe. You can create a game this way, or you can just have anything more complex than jump here or shoot this person become something you present via cutscene, with maybe an occasional quick time event to get the player involved with the on-screen action, though this also risks a redress if the prompt is failed.
You see the distrust in Tomb Raider in how the camera will position itself in the best position before certain jumps or as you climb. The game will slow down so you can better shoot an obstacle out of your way or match a button prompt to avoid death. Sometimes you can’t even tell when the game has taken control. You’ll be climbing a rope as normal and then a cutscene begins seamlessly where the rope is cut and you have to swing and then cling onto a wall never quite knowing when exactly you gained control back. This lacking, there being no rehearsal, no pre-agreed upon method of cueing in the player to what they are supposed to do and when, is part of why cutscenes become so frequent. It is also due to the game lacking the ability to provide the player the tools to sufficiently interact with the game world in a complex manner. A game can easily provide a button to aim and shoot, but to perform something such as grabbing a rope? That becomes a button prompt. Assassin’s Creed addressed this issue, with its face buttons corresponding to body parts and a low and high profile version for each action. This was eroded away as the series continued. The erasure of friction in service to the mass market.
This lack of both difficulty and interaction is shared with those more familiar with the series. Elijah Beahm wrote earlier this year on their Medium blog, Press E For Everything, “How One Button Ruins Tomb Raider.”
Crystal Dynamic’s era of Tomb Raider games is perhaps some of the most damning evidence that we didn’t know how good we had it. We threw away some of the most refreshingly thoughtful, well-written, tightly designed action-adventure titles that managed to span two console generations in favor of pressing one button an exceptional, ludicrous amount of times.
It’s a world fairly indifferent to you. These are levels not meant to be explored meditatively, but to be navigated in such a way that you hit your marks precisely or are met with an overly gratuitous death scene straight out of Eli Roth’s work. Where once failure in Tomb Raider was a bit grimly slapstick and over quick, it’s now disturbingly voyeuristic. It wants you to know that you failed. So you become more averse to it, even as the chance of failure has gone down substantially. Experimentation is actively avoided. So what’s there to do?
Press Interact on journals. Press Interact on crafting resources. Press Interact on animals you’ve hunted. Press Interact rapidly, over and over, to pry open locks. Hold Interact to pick a lock. Press Interact to use your climbing axe to traverse porous rocks. Of these actions, only one doesn’t involve standing perfectly still while the same associated animation plays for the 100th time. On it’s own, this sounds fine — countless games have a variety of things to “interact” with that are as interactive as staring at a wall, but there-in lies the rub.
It is on its own.
The attitude expressed in the image above is the problem with games, the problem that makes them very insular despite the massive market games have captured. Games have a language that is illogical to anyone on the outside, and is so overwhelmingly accepted without a second thought by the ones on the inside, that I don’t think these contradictions that litter every major release will ever be resolved.
As Calum Marsh wrote for Kill Screen in, “Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition crystallizes the original game’s flaws,”
As a work of narrative fiction, Tomb Raider needs you to invest in the story of an ordinary woman taking extraordinary measures to escape an island alive. As an action-adventure game, Tomb Raider needs to have you spend eight to ten hours shooting people in the face. That the developer at least tries to address this dissonance in earnest is perhaps commendable—so few games strive to account for the expected incongruities that even the ambition distinguishes the effort. And yet their attempt makes their failure more pronounced.
I had nearly forgotten the major conversation about this game was the sexual assault showcased early on during the E3 2012 Crossroads trailer. In it Lara is running away and hiding, hands tied, from a group of men who are killing survivors they found. Lara is caught by a man who proceeds to put his hands on her and leans into her. In the trailer his mouth is definitely at her neck, implicating an even more overt sexual nature to his groping than before. In the final game this was slightly changed to where his mouth is instead at her ear. The subtext of sexual assault still exists, but this change and their reaction to comments on it’s original form shows Crystal Dynamics was incapable of committing to the scenario being presented, and unwilling to acknowledge the threat Lara faces as an attractive young woman on an island of men. The QTE during this sequence, should you fail, results in the man choking Lara to death11, and no other encounter in the game bears any semblance of a desired sexual domination of Lara. Not that it stopped the coverage of the game from partially centering on that.
IGN’s Daemon Hatfield in his talk with Karl Stewart at E3 2011 mentions, “I gotta admit, the panting and the groaning, that kinda does it for me.” IGN would also upload a “Tomb Raider Sexy Saxophone Recut” video to YouTube playing into this remark by cutting up Lara’s pants and verbal outbursts from the trailer to the backing of saxophone music. Conan O’Brien’s Clueless Gamer12 video for the game frequently saw him commenting on Lara’s attractiveness, cleavage, tight pants, “you’d think that top would come off at some point,” “just looking at her for a bit,” and mentioning he was told to, “tone it down with the pervy stuff.” For the official behind the scenes video Camilla Luddington, Lara’s voice and motion capture actor, talks to host Zachary Levi and mentions “The shorts are gone,” which garners the response “That’s a bummer.” You can write it off as a joke but what does that joke represent?
This was 2011-2013, the Time Before Gamergate. The tension between those who would sexualize Lara’s groans of pain and those who were critical of a culture that reduces female bodies into objects to lust after had not yet exploded. Now the internet turns pieces of media into representatives of their side of a greater culture war. Stellar Blade is protested for reducing the protagonist's sex appeal. Star Wars The Acolyte’s season 2 cancellation is cheered for and booed on not for the quality of the content but for representing something different than the status quo13. Has the game industry gotten better at curbing comments and content such as the ones listed? I would like to think yes, but there is also such a breadth of coverage online that it can be difficult to discern any overall progress or regression. Despite my familiarity with the time of Tomb Raider’s development and release I was still a bit taken aback with how consistent comments like these appeared in coverage of the game.
Jay, writing for FemHype, would comment on Lara’s updated look in this reboot,
This second reboot wanted to remove “Teflon coated Lara,” which made her a more relatable character by demonstrating the emotional struggle of her arc in the game. However, it also put the player in the position of “her helper,” with executive producer Ron Rosenberg saying that players will “want to protect her.”
These changes reflect an updated, yet enduring view of women in the current gaming industry. Lara does not appear as blatantly sexualised, but her design is still impractical, with a lack of sleeves and hair that is constantly obscuring her vision. She is still presented as a brave and resilient character, but her pose on the box art is guarded, looking away from the camera and clutching an injured arm. Unlike the earlier trends of an action shot, this plays into the stated desire to have the player feel protective of Lara rather than heroic as her.
This transition from player as character to player as protector was not the effect the game had during my playthrough. I was controlling Lara the same way I control Nathan Drake or Max Rockatansky, and her frequently brutal deaths didn’t make me want to keep her safe, that was overshadowed by the insecurity I saw behind them.
There is a decided lack of addressing sexuality when it comes to anything in the game. Rhianna Pratchett, a writer for the game, said, “There’s part of me that would’ve loved to make Lara gay. I’m not sure Crystal would be ready for it! But we’ve not spoken about it directly, either… You know, we didn’t actually touch on Lara’s sexuality in the game… People have talked about Lara’s boyfriends and stuff like that, and I’m like, ‘No, no, I don’t want that to be part of it!’ This is about her. I didn’t feel like a boyfriend or that side of things fit into it… It was interesting that with a female like Lara rescuing a female, people sort of projected that there was more going on to that relationship because of that.” The relationship between Lara and Sam, the crew member who is kidnapped and who Lara spends the remainder of the game seeking to save, was criticized due to being tossed aside and for having a romantic realization in its comic adaptation reduced to a hug by Bella Blondeua for Gayming. Additionally, as Maddy Myers writes for Paste in, “Closeted Damsels and Heroic Gal Pals: Life is Strange and Tomb Raider,”
Many women heroines in games seem to suffer from the same type of problem. Even though our male heroes seem to be able to date whoever they want, our heroines don’t appear to deserve the same happiness, no matter their sexuality. It’s not that these women are written as canonically asexual or aromantic, either—instead, they are presented as characters who would date if it were possible for them, but choose not to because a relationship would somehow demean them, or cannot date because of external forces. I assumed that Nilin in Remember Me, for example, would end up in a relationship with the cute bartender she meets at the beginning of the game—but then it never went anywhere. I recall some rumblings at the time about how male players would have too much trouble playing as a straight woman in a relationship with a guy, but I don’t think that’s the whole story here, given that we haven’t even seen a game yet where a woman romances a woman and it ends happily. I think the bigger problem is that we just don’t have an example of a heroine in a relationship that’s actually healthy, period.
Another character who was part of the Endurance crew, Alex, clearly had a crush on Lara and found her attractive, but he’s killed off shortly after being reintroduced and gets a kiss on the cheek prior to his demise. Lara and Sam’s relationship is completely platonic, and seemingly born from Lara’s responsibility towards being the cause of this nightmare they’re all going through.
Mass market video games such as Tomb Raider have a template that has persisted since its development in the late 2000’s: a mid game pumped full of frictionless challenges and checklists to release dopamine that presents itself with ambitions that are never matched by its reality as a video game. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood et all, Skyrim, Far Cry 3 et all, Dead Rising 3, Shadow of Mordor, Watch_Dogs et all, Mad Max, Horizon Zero Dawn, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, God of War (2018), The Outer Worlds, Saints Row, and Starfield. How many times are we going to perform the same believability that these games are going to be anything other than slot machines taking up our time. Occasionally you’ll hit the jackpot and be rewarded with a Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring or Red Dead Redemption 2. How many hours have we sacrificed to the ones that get a pass for simply being playable, that reward our every step with numbers going up and flashy animations, but whose meat stinks with rot? Tomb Raider is, for now, my moment of clarity. No more! It is time to seek out and spend my time on games that don’t suck the oxygen out of the market and discourse for everything else.
Next month: “indie” games!
RIP to that website. Also the original article had pictures taken down per Square’s lawyer’s demands but they are helpfully archived elsewhere online, such as BetaArchive.com
Remember the many, many charts and breakdowns of retail exclusives we used to have and sometimes still do with all the “editions” now promoted to get you to spend more money?
It was also never true. Executives withdrawing a majority of revenue for themselves has always been, and continues to be, the main reason why publishers and developers run out of business.
You see this in one of EGM’s reviews for the original Tomb Raider (1996) with Shawn Smith writing, “Tomb Raider is a huge game and will give you hours upon hours of play. Cool effects that are worked into the natural environment of the game really make you feel like you’re in the game. On top of all this, there are hidden areas that make for even longer playing times. This game will keep you lost for weeks.”
Nick Dinicola for Pop Matters explores this horror aspect of the game further in, “The Horror of 'Tomb Raider.'”
Reading the writing of others after drafting this piece I see multiple links of this scene not to Apocalypse Now but to The Descent, which I have not seen but a quick image search shows me the river of blood scene so I concur.
Nick Dinicola also explores this in “Bringing "It" Out in Lara Croft” for Pop Matters.
Not every player will have an identical playthrough, as Justin Keverne describes a dramatically different play style than the one I had in his article “The role of her life.”
The work of Lara Croft’s father in-game hanging over Lara’s decisions mirrors Rhianna Pratchett’s own father, author Terry Pratchett, whose shadow was hanging over Rhianna’s writing work within video games. Rhianna acknowledges this in her interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun: “I know we were talking before about how father figures kind of haunt both of us,” I say. “It’s nice symmetry that we are now talking about Roth and Lara’s father. Do you think you accidentally put echoes of that in the script?” I think I can hear Rhianna grinning. “I was careful not to go too Mary Sue on her, but I do joke that Crystal were like, ‘geeky, British, brown hair, possible father issues...Rhianna Pratchett’. ...We’re keen on standing on our own two feet. We definitely share that.”
Astonishingly Tomb Raider has the main antagonist giving the player character a, “You have killed many people too!” speech at the end as well as supernatural force that only appears in the climax being dubbed “Guardians,” both matching Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. But seriously how do the Stormguard reproduce enough to exist for over a thousand years???
This specific scene can be very powerful for those who have experienced this violence themselves, as Ashelia details in their piece, “This isn’t the article I wanted to write about Tomb Raider,” for Hellmode.
A series whose comedy largely is about leaning into the inherent illogic of video games and how they don’t make sense.
You can see the reluctance to create diverse characters from developers prior to GamerGate, as noted by Rhianna Pratchett in an interview with Kill Screen by Yannick Lejacq from 2013, “There was a blog post—it was referenced in a GameSpot article ‘Fear of a Woman Warrior’—by a developer who was talking about the fear he had of creating anything outside white male characters [laughs] lest he be accused of racism or sexism. I think there is actually a genuine nervousness amongst developers about straying outside those familiar grounds. That is why we get so many dudebros in suits—or Whitey McStubbly, as I call him—repeated over and over again. That’s the familiar ground. But it’s not an accurate representation of gamers, it’s not even an accurate representation of developers! Developers themselves are much more diverse than the characters. Whenever anybody talks about a need for more female protagonists I say: ‘There’s a need for more female protagonists, but there’s a need for characters of different ethnicities, ages, sexual orientation, ability, et cetera.’ We are very narrow when it comes to our characters. But also you’ve got a situation where female characters do get scrutinized more than male characters do, and in some ways can be seen as holding a banner up for female characters. A lot gets heaped on their shoulders. Lara Croft gets a lot more scrutiny than Nathan Drake does, as a female. Nobody talks about how well Nathan Drake is representing men, or male characters in games.”