Revisiting Tomb Raider (2013)

 Where there is an emerging trend for games to embrace a more cartoony art style, Tomb Raider (2013) bucks that trend and strives to immerse the player in a realistic, storm-soaked island where seemingly everything that can go wrong will go wrong. The game features a wide variety of natural phenomenon portrayed as realistically as possible. Lush jungle vegetation, eroded temples, decaying wood bridges, and plenty of muddy tombs flesh out the world in which the game takes place. While exploring various aspects of the island, the player encounters various signs that the game world is alive and inhabited. The island’s hostile natives leave bones and worn possessions strewn about caves and various wildlife can be seen in the skies, on land, and scurrying away spider webs are burned clear with Lara’s torch.  

During gameplay, Lara controls like the capable athletic adventurer the story establishes her to be. Her climbing, running, and fighting movements look and feel true to the motion capture work that went into animating them. Her character feels competent and responsive to player input. During particular sections of the game, the narrative is enhanced through contextual modifications to how Lara ‘plays’. When injured (through various means as the story progresses), Lara won’t run as quickly with a hurt leg or stab wound. The pain in her body language, distressed breathing, and altered controller response further immerse the player in what is happening on-screen. 

Classifying a game like Tomb Raider into a singular genre is difficult due to the genre-bending trends emerging in both gaming and other media. While the Tomb Raider Franchise is well-regarded for its puzzles, Lara is famous for her dual pistols (making a pure puzzle game classification difficult to fathom). If adventure games primarily rely on puzzles for the bulk of their gameplay, and action games heavily rely on combat, Tomb Raider is best classified more as an action games. Puzzles break up sections of combat and typically not the other way around. However, the game is best classified holistically as an action-adventure game.  Both simple puzzles and third-person combat are prevalent enough that a description of the game would be incomplete without mentioning both aspects of the gameplay experience.

Thematically, the game revolves around the grit Lara must embody to survive her adverse environment. When confronted with yet another hardship, she uses her resourceful nature to craft a makeshift solution and persevere.  To the player, traversing those circumstances depends on the games core mechanics of inventory management with crafting elements, puzzle-solving, and third-person, cover-based combat.

If the game can be accurately shoved into just one of Caillois’ classifications, the Lara Croft avatar through which the player experiences the game world creates a competitive atmosphere best described as agon. The player experiences the game environment in the same lens as Lara. From the moment she arrives on the island, she is struggling for survival: competing against the environment to extricate what she needs to survive. In the same way Lara is competing for survival, the player is similarly battling the lack of resources and plentiful threats in order to keep their sympathetic hero alive.