![]() Then there’s the scavenging itself which seems harmless until you sprinkle in some context…įrom reading quotes with the devs, they set this game in South America intentionally to ground the world of the story and address these very themes, but in reality it made said themes so much worse and more glaring. Lara appropriating a new outfit, presumably for Coachella. But you still just pulled rags off a corpse, made them look nice and are now parading around in some stat-boosting culturally appropriated threads. When you successfully complete a crypt, you don’t pull something from a corpse and claim it as your own, you have to ‘restore’ it first with scavenged resources, giving the illusion that you ‘saved’ something. When you raid a tomb, you don’t take anything big back with you your reward is a new skill from the skill tree (you still smash your way in and break who knows how much valuable architecture/machinery but that’s just par for the course one supposes). The Shadow of the Tomb Raider game mechanics feel so utterly at odds with the intent and you can see that the developers were genuinely concerned with the topic but couldn’t see a way to get around the standard gameplay this particular trilogy had built for itself. ![]() And, crazed cultists or not, you’re still murdering people who have more of an inherited birth right to the objects you’re climbing their corpses to steal. Challenge tombs continue to make up a sizable portion of the side-gameplay. Paying lip service and spending a not insignificant amount of in-game dialogue discussing these themes of colonialism is all well and good but you’re still making a game called “Tomb Raider”. The problem is that the only truly honest way to handle this problem would be to just not make the game. On the one hand, you have to admire the very intent of trying to address this issue at all, especially given just how much of the game’s play time is dedicated to earnestly engaging with the topic. ”You’re still murdering people who have more of an inherited birth right to the objects you’re climbing their corpses to steal.”p> Now they want her to be morally in the right as well as someone who invades foreign countries, commits mass slaughter of numerous species, is a literal murderer, a desecrater of priceless archaeological finds and outright thief. ![]() Which could be fine if Lara was still a pulp adventurer and anti-hero who only saved the world because its ending was between her and a new shiny bauble for her basement collection. The more realistic environments lead to a more realistic world and therefore to a more authentically real world where the lines and ethics are forced to bleed into our own. The problem now with Shadow of the Tomb Raider is two-fold an emphasis on realism and making Lara a hero. Her exaggerated pin-up design helping the whole enterprise feel detached from reality. ![]() Lara was a woman of few words, a deadpan adventurer, happy to murder anyone in her path and accidentally save the world along the way. While always in the background of the series, it was easier to ignore in the heady days of the 1990s where the games had more of a pulp adventure feel. One aspect that doesn’t seem to be garnering as much attention – which is surprising given that it feels like prime fodder for the “anti-SJW” crowd who are still mad at Lara’s insistence on wearing sensible clothing – is the franchise’s first real attempt to tackle the elephant in the room of its own deeply ingrained and uncomfortable colonialism. Shadow of the Tomb Raider fans seem pleased with the reduced combat and focus on exploration and underwater traversal.Ĭritics meanwhile are musing that this rebooted formula has become a bit tired while the gameplay feels dull for its lack of Uncharted levels of murder like the previous two. Shadow of the Tomb Raider released recently – and unfortunately close to the juggernaut that continues to be Insomniac’s Spider-Man – and while it’s gotten good reviews for the most part, there’s been a notable divide between ‘fans’ and ‘critics’.
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