Tomb Raider (2013)

It’s great when things make sense. And it’s even greater when they also come together nicely, harmoniously. Charles, the snob, likes to call this a matter of “coherence” and “cohesion”, but you can call it whatever you want if you still stop and take the time to see if all elements in a piece of art are working together or contradicting one another, diminishing the overall impact of the experience. There is even a specific term to refer to the time when the story and gameplay in a videogame are coming into direct conflict: Charles, the snob, calls it “ludonarrative dissonance”. This is all to say that in Tomb Raider, things often don’t make sense; they don’t come together nicely, harmoniously. Here, that ludonarrative is indeed dissonant.

This is a reboot, so we’re dealing with a still inexperienced Lara Croft, who’s a young archaeologist who one day sets out on an expedition to find traces of a lost civilization called the Yamatai. After a terrible storm, however, 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 that hellish place.

It becomes clear right away how Tomb Raider endeavors to distinguish itself from its direct competitor, the Uncharted series. We see Lara Croft scared and wounded, trapped in a sack, hanging upside down. When she manages to set herself free, she falls on top of a thin metal tube that pierces her belly. She is a heroine who hurts herself, who bleeds and screams. Unlike Nathan Drake, the protagonist of Uncharted, who always manages to perform his stunts mostly unscathed and with a joke up his sleeve, this Lara Croft deeply suffers the consequences of her more daring actions, with her physical and emotional pain always highlighted. Charles, the snob, explains that this is a question of tone, and he is right: this one is much more serious, much more grounded. Lara won’t make a joke; she’ll cry in pain.

There is, from the get-go, an emphasis on survival and the realism of Lara’s actions. One of our first missions is to hunt a deer to eat, so she can feed herself, and we can see Lara shaking at night after she sets a campfire alone. The game succeeds in creating a heavy and suffocating atmosphere: when the island’s sinister inhabitants capture Lara’s crew, we can hear the shouting from afar and the sound of gunfire silencing them. At the corners of the walls of some abandoned structures, which have just been flooded by the heavy, oppressive rain, we can read blurred messages in red stating that it’s impossible to escape the island. One of the most impactful moments in the game comes early on when Lara kills a man for the first time: she gets terrified by what has just happened, clearly in shock, but when she’s questioned by her mentor afterward, Lara explains that it was not the act itself that she found so scary, but how easy it was for her to perform it.

As the message before the end credits puts in very clear terms – Charles calls it “condescending” – Tomb Raider’s story is about survival. Lara Croft is forced to commit horrible acts to save her own life and escape the island with her friends. The narrative 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 uphold society’s moral values: he personifies one of the extremes, but questions if Lara is not actually much closer to him than to the classic role of a heroine.

The story is well-developed overall, although some of its scenes can feel contrived. The first encounter between Lara and a mysterious stranger on the island, for example, is the worst offender, since Lara, in addition to acting like everything is perfectly normal, falls asleep with this male stranger sitting right next to her. You must agree with Charles, the snob, who called the scene “preposterous” and wrote a 1500-word review just to complain about it.

Despite these scenes, however, the game’s main problem lies in how its story communicates with the gameplay as effectively as Charles used to with his ex. Lara may apologize to that deer she killed to survive, for example, treating the act as a necessary evil, but the game actively encourages us to shoot down all animals we spot in the wild, rewarding us with experience points. Lara is emotionally shaken by her first murder, but after killing two hundred men and looting their corpses, we unlock an Achievement. Our actions and Lara’s personality are in constant conflict. She may state that it was “easy” to kill her first victim, but eliminating thirty well-armed men every now and then is certainly not something she would celebrate or even be able to do (as it goes against that more grounded tone).

But the realism so sought by the story is constantly lost. 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 whole enemy squadrons without batting an eye: it’s as if the game was only interested in seeing this woman suffer, without caring to commit to 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, Lara had already suffered much worse injuries – and some of them 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 – just with a more somber sense of humor.

Much like Uncharted, Tomb Raider is a typical third-person shooter: we just have to move from one cover to the next and shoot anyone who is shooting back. Not the most original or exciting stuff, but it works. And it’s also possible to dispatch enemies silently, using stealth takedowns or Lara’s bow, and any failure in stealth is punished by more enemies appearing in the arena… much like in Uncharted.

The level design, in turn, invites a bit more exploration than in Nathan’s series, being intricate while housing innumerable secrets. Exploration is structured around Lara’s equipment, which opens new paths when obtained: ropes allow us to reach distant places, for example, while shotguns can destroy wooden obstacles. It’s basic Metroidvania design, but one that still suffers from some issues here.

Tomb Raider may contain hundreds of secrets, for example, but most of them 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? Charles claims to have better things to do with his time, like being a snob, watching Cats for the fifth time, and lamenting his life decisions, and can you honestly blame him? After all, in any Metroid, the items we find are responsible for a sense of progression: energy tanks extend our health, while missile expansions increase our ammunition capacity. Meanwhile, in Tomb Raider, these items are either curiosities (such as some lost artifacts) or bland distractions that serve no practical purpose (such as eighty bloody GPS devices).

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. Can you explain how murdering three hundred rabbits and finding some three-thousand-year-old pots allow someone to increase the “damage” of a machine gun using random bits of metal, a hook, and a bonfire? Because Charles can’t. 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 lost 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, but to their credit, these puzzles are usually indeed ingenious in working with the game’s physics without seeming artificial: they just require us to pay attention to their contraptions to try and figure out how they work. It’s just a shame that the main adventure has very few similar moments in store for us. But then again, what’s the reward for all this work of exploring tombs? Many, many experience points, of course. That sound you just heard? That was Charles, the snob, sighing.

If Tomb Raider’s story goes for a somber tone, a more grounded, atmospheric feel (despite the eventual fantastical nature of its events), its gameplay is totally bonkers by nature. If its protagonist abhors violence, the player is rewarded for committing it. There are as many contradictions here as there are useless collectibles to be found. And this is why Charles, the snob, ended his review by stating that Tomb Raider is a prime example of ludonarrative dissonance.

February 09, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on October 23, 2014.