Welcome back, adventurers!

We’re about to witness the end of the Survivor Trilogy. Lara’s nearly through her adventures with Jonah and we’re almost at the end of the Tomb Raider catalog. All you have to do is sit back, get some popcorn, and see how this heady drama plays out.

Crystal Dynamics, tasked with creating the middling and ill-fated Avengers game, stepped aside from primary development. Eidos Montréal came in to develop Shadow, though I wouldn’t have been the wiser.

These new developers picked up the pieces nearly perfectly from the prior two games. The obvious elements of tone and gameplay style were replicated without issue, but what sticks out to me the most are the additions Eidos made. They fit perfectly with what Crystal Dynamics aimed for with their last two games, like a vision fully realized.

Gameplay, Refined

Even before starting the game, you’re given unprecedented choice in the game’s difficulty. Puzzles, combat, and traversal are each given individual sliders. This means you can have easy combat but tricky puzzles, or whatever your individual gaming needs are. I went for normal combat, difficult puzzles, and difficult traversal. For me it was just the right amount of challenge.

After picking your difficulty, a message onscreen states that the game was created by a multicultural team, and that historians were consulted during development. I want to put a pin in this for now, come back to it later.

Combat and puzzles haven’t changed much from the other games. Lara still takes cover, shoots guns, and solves puzzles in ancient tombs. Traversal, though, did get a bit of a facelift. Climbing hooks now allow Lara to rappel down rock faces or do inverted climbing. Cramped air pockets underwater lengthen swimming segments and makes them more claustrophobic. Puddles of mud and vines hanging down from rock walls increase stealth’s viability during gameplay.

Lara’s move-set is the strongest it’s ever been, and I’m hard-pressed to think of anything else they could add to the mix.

The one fly in the ointment comes with the QTEs that play when Lara grabs a ledge. You’ll have to press X to not die, a common trope in the modern Tomb Raiders and modern gaming in general.

I’m not a fan of this, but a skill tree upgrade turns them off completely. I’m grateful for that skill, but it just seems strange to have QTEs and also have a skill that then removes said QTEs.

Character Development

Lara’s faithful companion Jacob returns, alongside the villain du jour, Pedro Rodriguez. Jacob’s physical appearance here is odd. I didn’t point this out in Rise, but it seems like they couldn’t decide on an look for Jacob, to the point where I wasn’t sure who this guy was until Lara said his name.

Trinity is back as well, destroying every precious artifact they encounter on their clandestine quest. Their motivation here seems more hamfisted than the previous games. The long and short of it is that one of the bigwigs within Trinity, Pedro Dominguez, is after the ability to reshape the world as he sees fit. Frankly, it’s tired. But the game is more focused on inner conflict rather than external. We’ll come back to this later.

Mexico and Peru are on the table this time, with a brief layover at the Stately Croft Manor for a flashback sequence. I want to point out here how good the jungle looks here. Branches sway off in the distance and the mist and steam waft around beautifully.

Eventually Lara enters a temple in Mexico, searching for a dagger Dominguez is after. A shootout ensues, and Lara makes off with it. She did not heed the warnings, though. The temple collapses. A flood billows out from hallowed grounds and sweeps into the village below. Lara’s then tasked with avoiding a watery grave.
There are moments, many moments, in this segment where you see the locals drown or fall to their doom. You see how they cling to life and cry out for help, and the game’s soundtrack underscores it immaculately. As if it weren’t enough, when Lara finally does make it to safety she has an argument with Jacob over the efficacy of their plan. Jacob’s right; Lara messed up. She’s ravaged a society in the name of personal gain and glory.

I want to shine a light on this point. To my knowledge, it’s the first time in the franchise where Lara is questioned on her motives. Something I haven’t talked much about in the past, but I’m going to bring up here is the concept of colonialism. Put simply, it’s the occupation and exploitation of a country or culture by a foreign entity.

I don’t want to get overly in the weeds here, but “raiding” tombs belonging to foreign cultures, often destroying things in the process, is a centuries-old practice. Even if the artifacts taken from the site are stored in museums, who gets to see them? In most cases it isn’t the civilization the artifacts were plundered from, it’s the plunderers. A perfect example of this comes later in the game, when Lara discovers mass graves beneath an old Jesuit church. It shows within the game itself how foreign cultures enter a society and indoctrinates its natives into their way of thinking.

My issue here is that these points almost immediately forgotten by gameplay mechanics. This isn’t our first brush with ludonarrative dissonance in this retrospective. As a reminder, ludonarrative dissonance can be described as a discrepancy between the game’s plot and themes and the game’s mechanics. Bioshock and The Last of Us: Part II are good examples of this issue.

Underworld had Lara discovering fantastic creatures and the 2013 reboot dealt with mental struggles over taking a life. Both of these points are undercut by gameplay. Here in Shadow, you’re shooting hanging bird nests and smashing pots while the plot is telling you that your meddling is harming civilizations. It’s brought up only in the Mexico portion of the game and nowhere else, completely undercut by Lara’s path of destruction. I don’t know whether I should be rooting for Lara or charging her for crimes against history.

Moving to lighter subjects, the visit to the Croft Manor is probably my favorite part in the game. We’re again put in the shoes of Lara dreaming of her childhood, creating her own tomb and treasure to find. She starts out in her elaborate playground (and boy would I have killed for a setup like that when I was nine) before sneaking into the manor. There she finds a few more puzzles to solve before finding her father dead by apparent suicide at his desk. Lara snaps awake and the dream is forgotten.

Sticking the Landing

Pushing forward, the story fell apart for me towards the end. There’s a part where Jonah is captured, and Lara believes him killed solely because his captor said so. She’s enraged, gunning down even more of Trinity’s goons. Her hair disentangles from its immaculate ponytail and she’s drenched in mud and blood. Not fifteen minutes later Lara finds him, alive and well. It’s such a baffling thing to put in and resolve so quickly that I have to wonder whether or not Jonah was supposed to bite it in an earlier draft of the story.

For a moment, the game had me. I hoped desperately that Jonah had been killed and Lara maintained that anger for the rest of the game’s fifteen-hour runtime.

There’s a whole portion devoted to an underground tribe of natives known as the Yaaxil. Lara encounters them, at gunpoint first, but later becoming friends with them. Shadow dips perilously close towards white savior territory here, with the locals seemingly unable to solve their own problems without the help of a foreigner.

At the end of the game Lara learns that she must sacrifice herself. She lays down on an altar and waits for the knife to fall. Even here, with Lara practically begging for her life to be taken, the tribals step in and take the proverbial bullet for her.

This leads me to wonder: how could you craft a narrative involving a white person not of the local culture in without playing into that savior trope? I’m not sure if I’ve seen an example of that before.

Putting it all Together

So, where does this leave us? The final cutscene in the game sets Lara up for new adventures. Faithful Winston delivers Lara some tea at her father’s desk, having been newly rehired. We see artifacts on the walls, maps of the world splayed out on her desk.

It should be noted here that on day one of Shadow’s launch the original ending showed Lara receiving a letter from none other than Jacqueline Natla, returning from the very first Tomb Raider. This ending was quickly patched out, but you can still dig it up on YouTube. The developers clarified that this was one of a few different endings they were thinking of. It certainly raises the question of what’s next for Lara. And honestly, that’s a question I don’t know the answer to.

The license has changed hands a few times; from Square Enix to Microsoft to IP conglomerate Embracer, and finally to Amazon. It’s been a rough decade for Lara, to say the least.

There are rumblings of a new game on the horizon. Little is known about it save for a new teaser image of Lara herself. She looks more like her classic version, possibly a hint that the games will return to a less story-centric affair. Whatever the case might be, I will be there on day one to cover what comes next.

But We’re Not Quite Done, Are We?

Yes, there are a few more games left to talk about. One is a puzzle-first game in the style of a classic board game, while the other two are isometric games centered around cooperative multiplayer. What would be more fitting for a franchise surrounding the exploration of the unknown than delving into some games that go beyond the franchise’s comfort zone?

I hope to see you in the next (and final) one!