Tomb Raider

One of the most important elements of a game – or any other piece of art – is its consistency. It’s important to observe how its various elements connect with each other: whether they work together to expand the core ideas being discussed or end up contradicting one another, diminishing the overall impact of the experience. There is even a specific term to refer to this problem when it comes to video games and the case where story and gameplay are in direct conflict: “ludonarrative dissonance”. Tomb Raider, the reboot released by Square Enix in 2013, fails precisely when it comes to this aspect. Its story may be mature and its gameplay may work well when viewed in isolation, but both are often fighting against each other, probably making the player wonder if everybody in the development team shared the same view on the project.

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, her ship gets stranded on a mysterious island – and Lara doesn’t take long to realize that it will be quite complicated to escape from this dangerous place.

Right 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 her belly. She is a heroine who hurts herself, bleeds, and cries. Unlike Nathan Drake, the protagonist of Uncharted, who always manages to perform his stunts mostly unscathed and get out of bad situations with a joke up his sleeve, she deeply suffers the consequences of her more daring actions. Here, the protagonist’s physical pain is always highlighted.

There is, from the get-go, 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 we can see Lara shaking near a campfire at night. Various elements in the game follow this more grounded guideline, creating 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 gunfire silencing them. Heavy rain often floods abandoned structures and blurred red messages in the corners of the walls stating that “it’s impossible to escape” are very effective in keeping the player on alert.

One of the most shocking moments of the game is when 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 it was for her to do it.

Tomb Raider’s story – and the message before the end credits puts this in very clear terms – 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 reinforce the line that marks how far one can go to survive and still remain morally “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, since Lara, in addition to acting like everything is perfectly normal, falls easily asleep with a male stranger sitting right next to her. What could possibly go wrong, right?

Despite these scenes, the main problem of this Tomb Raider is the incompatibility of its core ideas with its gameplay. Lara apologizes to the deer she kills to survive, but the game actively encourages us to shoot animals at all times, rewarding us with experience points. Lara is emotionally shaken by her first murder, but by killing two hundred men and looting their corpses we unlock an achievement. Our actions and Lara’s personality are in constant conflict. She may even state that it was “easy” to kill her first victim, but eliminating thirty well-armed men every 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 constantly suffers and the miraculous actions she performs. Lara gets cut and pierced by metal objects, falls from great heights, rolls several hills down, and cries in pain a lot, but still remains able to climb mountains and defeat enemy squadrons without batting an eye: it’s as if the game was only interested in seeing this woman suffer, without caring to develop the consequences of that. There is only one moment, during the whole adventure, where we’re prevented from moving at a normal speed due to a severe wound. However, until this 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 is dissipated 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’s possible to kill silently, using stealth takedown or a bow and arrow, and any failure in stealth is punished by more enemies appearing on the stage, just like in Uncharted.

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. It’s simple Metroidvania design, but one that still suffers from some issues.

Tomb Raider contains so many secrets, for example, but many are pretty useless. Why would we bother to look for eighty GPS devices if, in the end, we’ll 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 our health, while missile expansions increase ammunition capacity. Meanwhile, in Tomb Raider the items are just curiosities and distractions, serving no practical purpose.

It’s 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 some 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? And since almost every action in the game is rewarded with experience points, the importance of collectibles is greatly diminished: why would we struggle to look for artifacts if it is easier to just shoot down birds?

For a game called Tomb Raider, it’s also baffling that the actual action of raiding tombs is an optional activity. Some areas of the island contain hidden tombs whose location is signaled to us as we pass near their entrance. Each one is made up of just one room and a specific puzzle. These puzzles are indeed ingenious in working with the physics of the game without seeming artificial and they require us to pay attention to contraptions and try to figure out how they work. It’s just a shame that the main adventure has very few similar moments. And again, what’s the reward for all this work of exploring tombs? Many, many experience points, of course.

Tomb Raider is a prime example of ludonarrative dissonance. Whereas the gameplay is absurd by nature, the story prizes realism. Whereas the player is rewarded for violence, the character they control abhors it. There are as many contradictions in the game as there are useless collectibles to be found.

February 09, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on October 23, 2014.