Stranded on the mythical island of Yamatai following a freak storm, 21-year-old Lara Croft’s career as a videogame protagonist begins with suffering. In the opening hours of Tomb Raider she is stabbed, burned, drenched, assaulted and almost freezes to death: that’s if you’re doing well, meeting the demands of every linear climbing section, gunfight, finickety stealth sequence and quick-time event that presents itself. Fail any of these and you’ll also watch her be crushed, impaled, strangled, mauled and so on.
This early cruelty is the game’s most strikingly idiosyncratic feature. Lara sobs and trembles, and evident effort has been made to slow down and focus on the details of her experience. Hunger necessitates finding a bow and hunting deer. Her elbows shake believably when she mantles up onto a ledge. Her first human kill leaves her blood-soaked and distraught. Give it a few months and I suspect these opening hours will be what people will be talking about when they talk about Crystal Dynamics’ reboot. It’s certainly what they’ve been talking about until now.
Shortly afterwards, Lara hops onto the bottom rung of a ladder leading up a rickety radar tower whose topmost transmitter is her crew’s best hope for rescue. Once you’re on that bottom rung, the game will only accept one input: forwards. Press forward and Lara climbs: press anything else and Lara stops. There’s no way to fail, though a few pre-canned moments will have a rusty rung give way and leave her hanging. There’s a point where the game slips into a cutscene but pretends that it hasn’t: nothing changes, with the exception that it’s no longer accepting your input. Let go and Lara will keep climbing without you. Adventure game sleight-of-hand, as taught at Uncharted’s School of Seven Bells – what is being pickpocketed, in this case, is your right as a player to have your agency reflected in the events taking place on-screen.
The game spits out some real eye-rollers, though – it’s honestly a miracle that Lara can find anything to fall off given the amount of scenery the villain manages to chew through in his relatively brief screen-time. Enemy chatter doesn’t fare much better. I can think of a number of things I might say if I suddenly found myself with an arrow in my sternum, and “damn, she’s a good shot!” isn’t high on the list.
The real weakness of Tomb Raider’s storytelling, though, is its failure to express its big ideas in the way it plays. Lara receives two pieces of advice repeatedly during the game: ‘trust your instincts’ and ‘keep moving forward’. Both jar with the reality of what Tomb Raider actually wants you to do. ‘Trust your instincts’ should really be understood as ‘trust Lara’s instincts’: or at least, trust Survival Instinct mode, which highlights objects in the environment you can interact with. Trust that this type of craggy rock will always be climbable, that these barricades will always yield to your rope arrows, that this particular type of scenery will always be flammable – and that you should always do all of these things because that’s why they’re there.
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