"To understand what drives Lara to the Siberian wasteland, you have to first understand what drives..."

“To understand what drives Lara to the Siberian wasteland, you have to first understand what drives Crystal Dynamics. Staff namedrop great explorers – Jacques Cousteau, Edmund Hillary, Neil Armstrong – and talk of man’s desire to be first or go further. These aren’t the Saturday matinee larks of Indiana Jones. You can’t ride a magic red line round the globe and expect to make history. Lara is driven by something grander, something studio staff summarise with fellow pioneer Amelia Earhart’s bullish creedo: ‘Never do things others can do and will do if there are things others cannot do or will not do.’”

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GamesRadar’s Five Days of Exclusive Access to Rise of the Tomb Raider (via tombraider)

I cannot, in limited words, call enough bullshit on this.

This is Tomb Raider. This isn’t Everest Expedition Simulator.

With a brief wave, they are dismissing the core of that which the original Tomb Raider was built upon: adventure. Yes, Indiana Jones is based on exaggerated serials of the 30s and 40s, and no, you can’t ride a “magic red line” into said adventures, but with all due respect Crystal Dynamics, so fucking what? Shall we then submit to a gritty, brutal, realistic adventure of PTSD-suffering Lara Croft, who is battling inner demons as she ventures forth through a wasteland into — possibly — raiding tombs? Or this is going to be another cover-based shooter with climbing mechanics and quicktime events?

What makes the adventure genre fun is the exploration of — and yes, sometimes exaggeration of — history. True, a game like Far Cry can make adventure exhilarating and fascinating and downright fun without going into historical examination, but we are talking about Tomb Raider. One cannot dismiss the foundations and inspirations of what made Tomb Raider possible in the first place and expect the TR XBOX One exclusive to be thusly elevated above that which has come before. It insults a — pardon the pun — history making franchise that captured the best elements of adventure and action and archaeology. It insults the writers who championed adventure as pioneers, including H. Rider Haggard and Jack London.

I understand a need to craft an experience that lends itself more into the realistic. To drive a character into an experience that creates a human element within the realm of the fantastic. But by dismissing the “matinee larks” which inspired the creation of Tomb Raider in the first place, one then has to wonder where the true intention of Rise of the Tomb Raider lies. It is in creating a true adventure game with a likeable protagonist, or is in it selling software for Microsoft by tossing about keywords such as “something grander” and by quoting Amelia Earhart as if to draw comparisons to real-life female heroes and the digital frame of Lara Croft?

In short: the Uncharted franchise, even with the flaws in the third game, understood the “grandness” of the Saturday matinee larks, while still infusing a sense of humanism and character and realism. Tomb Raider’s 2013 reboot was an off-kilter, bland, brutal, and awkward game that held no identity outside of violence against its main character. Rise of the Tomb Raider, based on this snippet of quote, seems to aim itself into the categories of literature, whilst still retaining the harsh grittiness of its terrible predecessor.

Saturday matinee larks. How dare you. Bite not the hand that feeds.