Tomb Raider Keeps Getting Its Story Tangled (original) (raw)

What's the story of Tomb Raider? In a nutshell, it’s about Lara Croft: a rich British orphan follows in her father's footsteps and explores forgotten cultures and caverns in search of treasure. Sometimes she fights dinosaurs. Whether it's Natla or Trinity, there is a Treasure Hunter But Evil nemesis to be aware of, but the basic hook is very straightforward. So why has it gotten so complicated?

The Survivor Trilogy tried to give Lara a little more narrative, rebooting her origins but keeping the key facts of her being a rich British orphan following in her father's footsteps and exploring forgotten cultures and caverns in search of treasure. It gave her a crew, who are the focus of Tomb Raider (2013), as well as a secondary father figure in her father's best friend Roth. He dies protecting her midway through the 2013 reboot, and this is the catalyst for her character growth.

Tomb Raider Largely Abandoned Its Cast

This angle could have worked. Jonah and Sam had the makings of good characters, they just needed a little more time to blossom with so much of the game spent establishing how this Lara was different from, and similar to, the older Lara we'd previously played as. While Reyes got a bad rap, I've since realised (partly through the Netflix animated show) that we might have been wrong about her.

But the series never committed to this approach. Jonah returns in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where he spends a lot of time either by Lara's side or back at her base camp hub, and again feels like he has the makings of a great character. But Shadow doesn't quite know what to do with Lara, and unlike 2013 and Rise (more on that later), adds nothing to her arc. It's a game that often stagnates, even if it knows how to turn up the heat with the tombs themselves.

The rest of the characters are basically cut from the roster after 2013. Many die in the game, which seemed to be thematically underlining how important it would be to Lara going forward to act as a protector, but those who get out alive might as well not have. The anger Reyes feels towards Lara goes unresolved, the budding chemistry between Lara and Sam does not sprout further, and the trilogy as a whole lacks any cohesion.

Rise Of The Tomb Raider Is The Most Classic Survivor Game

Rise is an outlier in the trilogy. Jonah is present in the opening scene, where he is separated from Lara by an avalanche, and we don't meet up with him again until much later in the game. Rise is the only game in the Survivor trilogy where Lara has to go it alone. As a result, it feels the closest to the classic games. Correlation is not causation, but it was also by far the best game in the Survivor Trilogy.

That poses an interesting question for Tomb Raider's future. Perhaps to inject the series with a sense of legitimacy (a character so iconic hardly needs it), there has been a concerted effort to build up the lore around her. There must be more to Tomb Raider than raiding tombs, is the idea it projects. The Netflix show continues the story of Jonah et al - thankfully with more room for Reyes and Sam - but gives us another Treasure Hunter But Evil villain that makes the whole thing a bit of a campy mess.

Tomb Raider has always been as camp as it is cool - again, she fights a dinosaur. She meets a real life dinosaur, a scientific and historical marvel, and shoots it in the face. But it can't simultaneously balance that with a grounded story of a group of associates, especially when these associates are shuffled in and out of the story before they can get much of a foothold.

Where Does Tomb Raider Go Next?

Of course, it may be that Tomb Raider has painted itself into a corner. Lara is, again, a rich British woman. Her personal tragedy is a non-factor when she lives in a mansion and does the work of a coloniser, pilfering the treasures of indigenous tribes for her own gain, or to lock up in the British Museum. Is that an overread of an often light-hearted adventure game where dinosaurs are shot in the face? Well, it depends.

If Tomb Raider wants to tell a grounded story with narrative depth and personal stakes, then it must grapple with the fact society's views on British treasure hunters have evolved since the '90s. If it would rather be a globetrotting adventure full of glitz, glam, and femme fatales, people are more likely to overlook it. But by trying to nail down this 'lore' that Tomb Raider 2013 established then mostly abandoned, Tomb Raider is getting the worst of both worlds.

There is a way Lara's adventures can still work. Exploring at the behest of the natives to recover their artefacts locked away somewhere, or cursed, or with Treasure Hunters But Evil coming to steal them, would be a relatively quick fix. Maybe, despite the name, she doesn't need to literally raid tombs and steal golden trinkets from the dead anyway. Overcorrecting and becoming preachy would be a mistake, but a little bit of nuance around what Lara is searching for, to what end, and whose possession it is currently in would go a long way.

The Netflix show, wherein locals warn her about taking a prized amulet because it is cursed, which then turns out to be cursed, sort of delivers consequences to her actions but mostly just feels like we should feel sad because she stole something.

I don't know what's next for Tomb Raider. I hope it's better than the middling Netflix show, but rumours of Lara mentoring a squad suggests it will again involve establishing a much wider cast. I'm torn between wanting a classic Lara adventure and knowing the colonial albatross that has around its neck, but I'm sure the way forward is to cut off the dead weight that has dragged Lara down this past decade.