Welcome Back, Adventurer!

It’s about time we wrapped things up, isn’t it? We’re almost at the end now, but there are a few more games to talk about. Think of all the times in movies and games where the main character beats the big bad guy. The story doesn’t end there, not without a few final knots to tie up before credits begin rolling.

We have three knots to tie. In addition to all the mainline games we’ve played, there were a few spinoff games created in support of the franchise. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, released in 2010, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris in 2014, and Lara Croft GO in 2015. They’re each fun little gems in their own right and deserve a little attention, even if it’s at the very end of this retrospective.

The last few lights are on in the Croft Manor. Winston broke out of the freezer and packed his things. Lara’s long gone. It’s just me now. All the manor’s secrets have been uncovered, there’s nothing else to explore. So let’s hit those last lights and be out of here for now, shall we?

Top-Down Lara
Guardian of Light and Temple of Osiris began essentially as an afterthought. After Crystal Dynamics were done with the with the Legends/Anniversary/ Underworld trilogy experimented with what else could be done with the franchise. Eventually they settled on a top-down shooter, something faster-paced than the traditional games. All the elements are still there; the platforming, the gunplay, and the puzzle solving, but it’s like a LP record being played at 45 RPM. All the fat has been trimmed away from these games to the point where there’s very little game left.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Both these games take roughly five hours to clear and there’s something to be said for a game that can be beat in a sitting or two. I’m reminded of some of the more plodding of Lara’s adventures, particularly Tomb Raider 3. The levels there seemed to go on, and on, and on. And on! Here there’s no question of where to go next or what to do. And that leads to the tightest Tomb Raider experience I’ve seen.

Guardian and Temple were also refreshing in their prioritization of gameplay over plot. It’s wonderful to have a different focus after spending so much time watching Survivor Lara deal with trauma and whether or not raiding tombs is even morally correct. There’s no challenging Lara’s principals or discovering her past, just sticking dual pistols in her hands and asking her to traipse around ancient ruins.

Cooperative Raiding
The last big change I wanted to touch on is the inclusion of cooperative play in the duology, a first for the series. One player plays as Lara and others take on sidekick characters. Guardian only allows for two players, though Temple lets you bring up to three friends along for the ride.

I played both games in two-player co-op and I’m glad I did. They were a blast to play with another adventurer. Puzzles were more enjoyable to solve with another person to bounce ideas off of, and even the duller moments were spiced up by having stupid races towards treasures or laughing at our own misfortunes. There are a fair few puzzles which can only be solved with the help of two people and I wonder how they would have played out in a single-player setting.

This co-op play also strikes me as antithetical to the originals. The early entries contained an air of intense isolation most of the time. Very few other people populated the crumbling structures and expansive caverns. Now you have a friend with you at all times, one with banter and their own desires working in tandem with Lara’s own. It creates a strange fracture between these two games and most of the rest of the franchise, the chatty Survivor trilogy notwithstanding.

So with all of that said, I loved these games for what they were: two snappy, instant gratification type games which you call up a friend to play and knock out over a weekend. They’re far from what drew me to this series in the first place, but mixing it up isn’t always a bad thing. Definitely check these out if you have five bucks in your wallet and a few hours to kill.

Lara Croft GOes Full Puzzle
Board games were a big part of growing up for me. Chess, Risk, Monopoly…heck even Battleship. Speed and dexterity were seldom part of these experiences. Instead the challenge came from positioning–thinking of where you will be and where your opponent will be in a few moves from now.

Lara Croft GO brings Lara into this realm, translated into a bite-sized video game format. It first released on mobile platforms, but was later ported to home consoles and PC.

It wears a lot of its mobile roots on its sleeve, with those aforementioned bite- sized levels and a paved-over (on PC) hint system which used to lock clues to your next step behind a microtransaction.

If there was a semblance of a plot in Guardian and Temple, it is entirely gone here. Lara explores ruins hounded by a giant serpent, and that’s about it. The lack of narrative also fits well into its mobile origins.

It’s also opting for a more stylized design than we’ve seen before. Lara is a collection of flat-shaded polygons, and the levels are extremely minimalistic in their layout and design. This is both to fit into the limitations of mobile hardware and to give this game a unique identity. There’s actually a trilogy of GO games based on Eidos-owned properties, with Lara’s entry being the middle child.

So, how does it actually play? Lara has four directions she can move in, one space at a time. There are ladders to climb, ledges to mantle, switches to pull, and torches to light. All gunplay and platforming is performed simply by having Lara move to a particular spot. She’ll gun down enemies when she moves onto their space (provided their back is turned) and all feats of athleticism are automatic. She moves, and the rest of the level’s elements perform a reaction. Think enemies, crumbling bits of floor, things like that. Rinse, repeat for five or six hours, and you’ve got the entire experience of Lara Croft GO.

Okay, maybe that’s a little reductive. There’s tons of strategy involved in the game, but it all comes down to calculating where you’ll be, as well as any number of those aforementioned hazards. It starts out simply enough–only a couple things on screen at any time, but the levels get deviously tricky later on. I ended up getting stumped on a few of them and had to get hints in order to proceed.

It’s elegant, and I struggle to think of a puzzle game which introduces and then expands on its concepts this well. Based on my experience with this game, I probably will be checking out Hitman GO in the near future. The final game in the series, Deus Ex GO, was unfortunately never ported to PC and the mobile versions have since been removed from the app stores.

It upsets me greatly to see so many developer’s efforts rendered inaccessible because some corporate bigwig wants to save a buck. There’s a campaign devoted to stopping companies from continuing this practice. I’d strongly urge anyone who cares about media preservation to check out the website stopkillinggames.com.
But is it worth playing? Again, I’d say yes. Same with all three of these side games. They’re all short enough that you won’t grow sick of them by the end, something I can definitely appreciate. I can’t say that for all the games I played during the course of this retrospective. I’d definitely put these towards the top of my list.

No More Tombs Left To Raid?
Well, that’s pretty much it.

As of now there are rumblings of a new game on the horizon. Crystal Dynamics released a new design for Lara, something very similar to her sixth- generation appearance in Anniversary. The tentative title for the next game is, well, Tomb Raider Next. We’re hopefully not too far off from another game or even trilogy to experience.

What’s more is that since I started writing this retrospective, a remaster of the first three games was released, with another for the next three games on the way. They provide a much more accessible way to play the older games in the franchise as well as the extra side content which was such a struggle to get running on modern PC hardware. If you were to go back and play these games from the beginning, I’d strongly recommend you start with this remastered trilogy.

It’s been a long run for this retrospective. I would like to thank everyone who helped support me along the way, both knowingly and unknowingly. I’d also like to thank Christina Wilkinson for being willing to take on such a crazy project, and of course whoever has eyes on these words right now.

That’s all for Lara for now. If and when she does return I’ll be around to cover her next adventure. Up next, though, is another adventurer, someone Lara took more than a little inspiration from. I hope you’ll stick around!