Tomb Raider: A "something" is born.
So, I may be getting lazy, or maybe I just think this discussion has been had to death, but I figured I'd take a shot at Tomb Raider while it's fresh in my mind. I think Tomb Raider is a pretty leisurely step back for gaming and narrative while possibly not being the necessary doom and gloom destruction of female protagonists it set itself up as in trailers (although it takes that step back with its hands in its pockets whistling politely hoping no one notices).
Part One: People. How do they work?
In another thread on Zelda/Link hero-swapping I read someone complain about how every game about minorities is a game about minorities. The argument was that, in a game about white men, you do not get a game about white men but about default humanity.
Bullshit. Bioshock Infinite is a game about the internal struggle of being an indifferent white man within the framework of an oppressive, default white supremacist power system that shoves privilege at you without telling you how to deal with it. It does this while disguising itself as a game about how horrible it is to hold strong beliefs at all. Every story arc in the game is a violent white man's struggle with his relationship to 1) non-whites, 2) women, and 3) the poor while attempting to casually dismiss all of them as background noise in his personal angst.
So Tomb Raider is a game about what it's like to be a white woman surrounded by patriarchy trying to develop a personal identity regarding power. It comes out ahead of its plot because white women's empowerment stories are a bit more predictable (and less problematic) than white men's empowerment stories. But this is still a story about white womanhood achieving power.
I originally intended to dismiss all of the problematic elements off-hand in a sort of grocery list of troperific harumphery, but the point got ahead of the examples. So let's go ahead and take a second to meet...
Lara Croft - She's brilliant, but a white man with more degrees and experience doesn't respect her. Another white man with more field experience does. Her arc is proving the second white man is right. But...more on that white man later.
Reyes - a selfless woman adventurer and the only person other than Lara displaying leadership. She could be Lara's role model except for the matter of her blackness, so, of course she becomes very angry late game and repeatedly tells Lara she's going to leave her to die...because fuck Lara, that's why. The voice actress's decreasing enthusiasm for her dialogue was ironically amusing.
Sam - Sam is a woman of Japanese descent and a "girl power safety release valve" who provides a damsel in distress complete with Snidely Whiplash "women's weak spot" arm grabbing. Charming at first, she eventually just errs on the side of whatever makes her a convenient victim. I laughed out loud when she willingly goes to the site of an ancient resurrection to be sacrificed while, as you discover with a hidden journal, planning the whole time to kill herself with a concealed dagger anyway...instead of just, you know, killing herself before the ritual.
Jonah - he's big, he's got ethnic tattoos, and he believes in magic. So, yeah, every Polynesian guy ever put on film.
But what's important is that he is the only man who is not white. Because, Crystal Dynamics, can we talk about white men for a second!? I know you love to!!!
Roth - Lara's real role model provides sage advice to Lara in his surrogate father role while being a deadbeat dad to his actual mixed-race daughter with Reyes. While Reyes at several points defines herself by her relationship with Roth, Roth never mentions it. Lara is his only explicit emotional bond.
Alex - He's a geek (a tattoo of a caffeine molecule on his neck! An escape key on his shirt! So much cred!). Oh, and he has a self-sacrificing venture deep into the heart of badguy territory where he stages a one-man war and sacrifices himself after making a long speech about how much of a hero he is.
Grim - He's Scottish, so he's naturally Angry (I'm capitalizing it when used as an ethnic trait from now on). He doesn't actually need rescuing but he does need to die, and he does so like a boss snapping necks, kicking guys off ledges, slitting guys' throats with their own machetes, and then plummeting to his doom while holding a guy's throat in a vice grip...like a boss.
Alan - He is the one white man keeping Lara down. If you were counting down the seconds to his sudden but inevitable betrayal, I was right there with you. The catch is, he actually makes several selfless moves to negotiate for the womenfolk before getting infected with shitbrain.
The pattern is interesting. White male protagonists are portrayed as generally self-sacrificing badasses possessing protective instincts -- even when they're absolutely destined to turn on you. Non-white, non-male power all happens off-screen and minorities prefer to sit around waiting for a white person to save them. By the time they develop agency and decide to take the fight to the enemy, Lara just tells them all to back off because she's now the last white person standing.
tl;dr Empowerment, in the world of Tomb Raider, is an inheritance of white male roles passed onto the next most capable person -- a white woman.
There. I said it.
Part Two: This game is...familiar.
Tomb raider is the lazy but ambitious child of Far Cry 3 and Uncharted 2, cribbing experience points and flashy slayings from the former and happy-go-lucky homicidal platforming from the latter. Whole sections of Uncharted 2's gameplay and characters and set pieces were actually lifted and placed in this game, but there are a few things that make it stand out.
Combat is really good and very original. From a technical level, it's at its best early on, but the AI that is not armed with a sword/spear and programmed with the RE4 slow-motion walk of menace will flush you out, regroup, call for backup, lay down flaming molotovs and generally avoid the one-ninja-at-a-time school of fighting (which...can get really annoying, actually). Melee is visceral, exciting, and well-orchestrated . The bow is responsive and elegant (and they know it, forcing you to rely on it alone in some instances) and the assortment of guns is well-balanced and their various modifications are rich in strategy and rewards for the risk put into them.
Blah, blah, blah.
The original Tomb Raider was a puzzle/platformer with the occasional bullet put into an attacking velociraptor to mix things up. Uncharted made them do a double take and ever since Tomb Raider has been chasing it. With that regard, this game is not new. It is actually very derivative of the later Tomb Raiders in scope with less clever puzzles (now assisted with a "survival instinct" that shows you all of the pieces and a Lara who will give you unwanted hints if you take a break) but tighter platforming (the addition of the SQUARE button recovery is used well).
Still, there's not really that much platforming. Levels are usually one-dimensional and ground-level. In Uncharted you found yourself dashing between cover and climbing buildings to get to sniper points, but the enemies here are too smart and their bullets start to move faster and faster making your "scramble" move useless when there are more than three enemies on screen at once. I found myself stuck hunkering down popping and shooting like any other cover-based game once everyone and their granddad had body armor.
While the range of platforming abilities changes over time, they are attached to a linear story, which means most of your platforming will involve a pick axe, jumping on crates, and crawling slowly across rope bridges. A late-game speed-climber gives you about half an hour of not hating every use of your rope arrow before the game ends, though.
They also have stealth. It sucks and Crystal Dynamics knows it and hates you for wanting to use it. In one mission, I snuck past a more than half a dozen guards to an exit only for three new ones to walk out of the door. I assume it was to catch me by surprise and shock me, but after they finished their chat they just stood there -- doing nothing. See, they were only there so that any attempt at getting past would trigger a dozen guards and dogs to attack me...because Crystal Dynamics hates stealth. They even had a side path you could sneak through -- that leads to those same guards.
My hatred of the QTEs in this game know no match, as I've said in other comments. Until the end of the game, they don't match the visual context at all and while they require a high degree of precision they also cause insta-death upon failure.
But it is really the "slide of doom" that I hate. During the "slide of doom," the camera shifts low, Lara Croft tumbles out of control, she lands on her back and she plummets toward her death. Sharp objects, explosives, and barbed wire fly at you and you have to avoid all of it or die instantly. Many times you don't know what's an insta-death hidden spike, what's a flashy showpiece, or what's just bouncing debris that will ghost through you.
tl;dr If Uncharted 2 and Far Cry 3 had a baby and then fed it dog food, it would be Tomb Raider.
- What do you think this is, a book? You don't play books.
I don't care that the story wasn't very good. What I care about is that the story and the gameplay obviously want nothing to do with each other and balk at the very idea. I care that the gameplay is so divorced from the story, that the story has to do backflips to explain why the gameplay is even happening.
The story opens with: "A survivor is born."
The story ends with: "A survivor is born."
This implies that there is some sort of survival mechanic at play. That you have to manage resources or spend your time figuring out ways not to die similar to Silent Hill or Metal Gear Solid. That this is a game where your character grows from helpless to perseverant. This is not that game.
This game is a big-budget TPS with crisp gunplay and visceral finishers and experience points that bolster your character throughout the course of the game.
You don't realize that something is incredibly wrong with their approach to the game at first. You're vulnerable. You're tied up. You're alone. You've been impaled on rebar. You're clenching your side and limping. Then the QTEs come. These constantly instant death QTEs put you in a life-or-death mindset. If you fail, you will die. This is the game that has been laid out for you. A man grabs you, you struggle or die. A rock is about to fall, you struggle or die. A wolf attacks you, you struggle or die.
The context doesn't change until you get your bow and arrow. At this point, you can now kill things. Wolves stalk you in the bushes and you kill them as they leap at you. You're frightened, cowering, cornered.
But the next time you see wolves, it's in the field map and you're running around scrambling, firing off headshots, and killing a half dozen with barely a thought. You get bitten, you get back up and keep fighting. There's no life-and-death, no struggle or die, just struggle or maybe eventually get closer to dying.
It's a shame the best elements of survival horror are encapsulated in the worst elements of gaming. But the bow is elegant and precise, that much is clear.
The wolves die and the red edges of your screen heal up and you're back to normal again. You can fight ten times as many wolves as long as you wait for your screen to clear up. This isn't the savage wilderness, this is a series of rote obstacles, the first of many you will encounter.
When it all comes down is when Roth calls you on the radio and you inform him that you had to kill a few cultists who attacked you.
The first time you held a gun, you STRUGGLED OR DIED. The blood on your face, the viscera in your hair, that was an either/or proposition. But as soon as Lara gets her gun, we're in slow motion bullet time picking off headshots.
"I had to kill a few of them," she said. I counted. She had to kill 10 of them. She killed ten people less than an hour after her entire world was shattered by taking a single life in self-defense.
Lara gets more dangerous. More unstoppable. The environment can't keep up. Three dangerous men become six become nine become an arena become hordes of enemies charging straight into her hail of gunfire wielding -- bows and arrows and spears and machetes. She has to be stopped. The story snaps in, an angry brother, a friend beating on Lara until they get their fill. She has to be stopped but they can afford to lose another Vladimir and another best friend to slow her down.
Lara, for her part, walks it off. She drops twenty feet and lands on her face (that face meets its fair share of gravel and rock and hard landings). She twists like a rag doll (and not in that voyeuristic classic Tomb Raider drop-Lara-on-the-spikes to see what a beautiful woman looks like crushed and twisted and torn...they save those for the QTEs) at the bottom of a slope after sliding across hard grit for 600 feet pummeled by broken boards and sheet metal. She walks it off. At one point she digs for painkillers after being thrown from an exploding helicopter and I think, "At least something other than 12-foot metal rods through her head give her pause."
I think about the level of PTSD she must be experiencing. I start to wonder even more about the inexplicable dissociative state she must have been afflicted with. The kind that makes her shout, "Die you bastards! Run, I'm coming for you all!" as she is increasingly empowered. As she is increasingly reshaping herself to be the survivor she is destined to be.
Why is she wielding a machine gun against twenty armed guards?
She has to. She's surviving.
Why is she stabbing people in the throat with an arrow?
She's a survivor.
Why is she getting triple the experience for headshots?
She's learning faster that way. Growing into a better survivor. A more effective survivor.
And I realized that Tomb Raider is actually meant to be the story of a young woman growing to be an incredibly resourceful "survivor"...I'm just still trying to figure out what the euphemism stands for.
tl;dr Lara Croft is not a healthy person.
Posted Apr 13, 2013, 11:57 PM UTC