Rise of the Tomb Raider

Several years back I reviewed the first in the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy, the 2013 game somewhat unimaginatively named Tomb Raider.  My opinion of that was that it was really fun as a game, but thematically was a total incoherent mess.  Now that the third game in the trilogy has come out, there was a special deal on the second one, a 2015 release that I'd sort of been meaning to get around to at some point.  A sale is some point, right?  And as it turns out, they basically did the same thing as last time, and so I mostly enjoyed playing some more of it.  Only "mostly" because I am not sure I really liked myself for enjoying it.

Bear with me here.  There's a pretty good book called Armor by John Steakley that deals with the standard SF trope where you have some guy in powered armor fighting a bazillion alien monsters.  He keeps dropping down onto the planet again and again for astoundingly dangerous missions, while his humanity is slowly eroded by the horrible things he witnesses, all the creatures he kills, and the trauma of witnessing his comrades constantly getting killed around him.  Eventually he disassociates his personality from what he calls "The Machine" and becomes basically an automaton, with no drives beyond continued immediate survival - no desires, no friends, no hopes, which is apparently what it takes to become totally fearless.  In this case though it turns out the whole thing was sort of a ghastly mistake.  When his unit had been dropped the very first time and everyone except him got killed, they'd never deleted the unit from the computer roster because they thought it was nonexistent, so he was basically slated for all those combat drops by accident.  When someone eventually catches the mistake the people responsible are aghast that they put anyone through this (and even more astounded that any person could possibly survive).  It's one of the better SF examinations of the psychological effects of participating in extreme violence for a long time.

Rise of the Tomb Raider ain't interested in any of that shit.  You may recall from the first game that Lara Croft had been shipwrecked on a haunted island populated by an evil cult and a bunch of undead monstrosities.  There was a malicious sorcerer queen keeping anyone from leaving by force, so she literally had no escape short of either dying or defeating her foes.  Due to the sort of stupid nature of the plot I didn't appreciate how important this element actually was until it was missing in the second game.  The first game actually did a pretty decent job of depicting Lara going gradually mad; she's at first reluctant to kill anybody, then comes to accept it, and by the end is basically taunting her hapless opponents while firing a grenade launcher at them.  When finally rescued she just sort of huddles under an emergency blanket.

And apparently she does go get some therapy, but her therapist is secretly working for the evil secret society that was behind everything all along, so I guess that's why it didn't work out so well.  But after her experiences on that island she's convinced that her disgraced father was really right about searching for immortality (although why the existence of a soul-surfing nature witch means that, I couldn't tell you) and goes on this quest hoping to find the Divine Source, which allegedly will grant immortality.  This quest leads her to Syria, where the secret society tries to kill her, and then on to remote Siberia, where the secret society tries to kill her again.

In the first game Lara wasn't looking for trouble and couldn't escape it once she found it.  Now she's going out of her way to enter what she knows will be a dangerous situation, and continues to say she "has to" do a bunch of really dangerous crap.  She doesn't!  She was free to take other options, or even just to leave.  By the time she's killing mercenaries by the dozen she never stops to reconsider her life choices or even consider taking another option.  And yes, the mercenaries are evil because they want to steal the artifact and are going around murdering everyone, while Lara makes allies with the locals.  But she's there to steal the same artifact as they are.  The Trinity people are just being more obnoxious about it.  Plus the narrative sort of has a lot of elements of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade about it, where it turns out that even if you can steal the Divine Source it might not do just a ton of good anyway - and it's guarded pretty well already, as it turns out.  Lara might have been worried about Trinity getting this thing but it's unlikely they would have been able to do so if she hadn't been there in the first place.  But the game isn't interested in you thinking about this.

Despite the griping, the game as a game is really well done.  Lara's very responsive, the scenery is fantastic.  Morality aside, I enjoyed the combat quite a bit, especially once I'd unlocked some of the better weapons and skill tree abilities.  There are some very fun optional tomb puzzles which require some lateral thinking and utilize the physics engine in interesting ways.  And there are a ton of optional things to collect and do if you're so inclined, including some extra sidequests and bonus challenges.  One of which is to take some pumpkins from a pumpkin patch and toss them into some strategically placed buckets as sort of a physics/basketball challenge.  Oddly, it was this one that really stood out as morally egregious, since it takes place in a village where Trinity massacred a bunch of innocent people.  And in fact their bodies are still strewn all over the place as a testament to Trinity's depravity.  Lara doesn't let a little thing like piles of corpses stop her from practicing her pumpkin-tossing abilities, though.  So really there's just an absolute disconnect between the game part of the game and the story part of the game.  (I tossed the pumpkins anyway, I'm a completionist.)

Further disconnect is the absolutely enormous stash of weaponry you collect over the course of the game.  Although Lara can only equip one weapon of each of four types at a given time, she's got tons of spares to swap out at campsites, as well as up to twenty different changes of clothes which give various combat/exploration bonuses.  Those do change her model in cutscenes which is a little jarring if she's wearing a deer skull as a hat and no one feels like this is maybe worth commenting on, or maybe questioning her sanity.

Actually, the deer skull hat thing comes from completing an optional DLC sidequest which is probably the high point of the whole game.  It's an absolutely gonzo section where you have to go through a forest full of hallucinogenic pollen in order to confront someone claiming to be the Baba Yaga.  Lara ends up having to complete an epic boss fight which involves jumping, fighting and puzzle solving while tripping balls the entire time.  None of it makes any sense but it's so gloriously excessive that it doesn't really need to.  I wish the whole game could have just been an excuse for great setpieces like this.  Another great setpiece occurs later in the game when you've got to fight about eight commandos in a smoke-filled room and you can use holes in the ice in the floor to pull them down one by one like an evil whack-a-mole.

AAA titles feel they need plots, but if they're going to ever get credit for greatness they can't be totally separate from the game.  Lara can't go around being all mopey and vulnerable at the same time she kills four to six hundred people, and the game itself can't completely call attention to the game elements at the same time it ignores all that in the supposed plot.  Plus it basically hits all the same thematic points at the same time the first game did, so it's sort of a remake of the reboot that they just did.

Still, I enjoyed most of it, even if I felt bad about knifing all those dudes in the back it was fun at the time.  I liked it enough that when Shadow of the Tomb Raider goes on sale in two or three years I'll no doubt pick it up then.  I just wish that they'd stop trying to shove the obvious depiction of a psychotic killer into the round hole of a journey of alleged self-discovery.

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

In my review of Harkaway's debut novel The Gone-Away World, I compared it favorably to a bunch of SF absurdist and surrealist works, with the caveat that it wasn't for everybody.  Since then I've made sure to read all his output.  I also did a review of Tigerman, and generally liked Angelmaker without an official write-up of it - although in both cases I wasn't sure if they lived up to the promise displayed in Gone-Away World.  But a new work by Harkaway is cause for excitement, and I wasn't sure what I was going to get out of this.

Having read it, I still don't know if I'm entirely sure.  As it opens, we're introduced to the UK of about fifty years from now, where surveillance has become so ubiquitous and social media so intrusive that they're no longer considered distinct things.  Any citizen can learn just about anything about any other citizen with a simple online query, although of course the existence of the query is itself disclosable to anyone who asks.  You live in a fishbowl but so does absolutely everyone else.  As an upside there's next to no crime, since everything is recorded, and there's a benevolent search construct which monitors everything constantly - for safety and security, naturally.  And everyone is more or less happy and content with this situation, and if they're not happy then they can get adjusted until they are happy and content with it.  So far it sounds a lot like 1984 with more than a hint of Brave New World about it.

Anyhow, there's a woman named Diana Hunter who was into some sort of subversive stuff and she's brought in for an interrogation session, which means that they'll plug her in and literally read her thoughts over her protests.  They'll fix what's making her unhappy while they're at it.  And then the unthinkable happens - she dies under interrogation.  Enter investigator Mielikki Neith, since even a panopticon surveillance state can't see absolutely everything, and sometimes the human touch is required.  As an agent of the Witness, Neith is responsible for satisfying the general public that this event wasn't intentional or at least that if it was, those who did it are themselves called out.

You think it's that easy?  The first chapter outright tells you that the investigation will make her doubt everything she believes.  Which is certainly plausible, since she gets a whole bunch of Hunter's memories downloaded into her own mind to sort through, and then things get really weird.

I find myself hesitant to actually say much more about the actual plot of the book.  The comparison that I kept drawing as the book went on is actually the cult classic Illuminatus!, in that much of the pleasure of the book comes from the constant discovery that the authors are screwing with you, and that even when you know what kind of book you're dealing with, it just keeps happening.  There's nothing more trustworthy than some huckster telling you outright that the whole thing is a con, after all.  (There's also quite a bit of thematic similarity around the number 5 . . . coincidence?)

So, without specifics, let me mention a couple of high points.  It's clear from a reading of Harkaway's work that he is very intrigued by the notion of bad things which happen without any specific evil intent on the part of anyone, and he heavily advocates for people to stand up and be counted, even when it's maybe not in their own personal interests to do so.  There's a lot of that here.  And he's also deeply affronted at the idea that procedural and democratic safeguards are to be set aside in the name of safety and exigency.  There's something freeing about reading a good writer really, incandescently pissed off about morally offensive things.

Unfortunately it's not perfect.  I felt that it took a while to really get going.  Neith encounters a villainous figure in the first chapter who engages in frankly preposterous dialog, and that individual continues to do so whenever encountered.  In fact, I wasn't hooked until about halfway though the third chapter, which isn't an unforgivable failure in such a large work but might be a dealbreaker for someone who wasn't already predisposed to give it a chance.  And there are many, many different narrative threads without immediately obvious connections going on there for a while.  All that said, once I did get through the third chapter, I found myself actually really quite absorbed in the story to an extent that I don't normally get, so good on him.  He even manages to mostly stick the landing, although I'm still mulling over the last chapter.

All in all, it's a very solid effort and a good way to kick off 2018.  I'm finding it sticking with me and although I don't know if it'll be an all-time favorite, I think it's going to be at least significant for me.  If you liked any of Harkaway's previous novels, you'll probably like this one, and it's sufficiently different and weird to not be a retread of any of them.  If you want a story that combines Brexit, Facebook, Gamergate, global economic meltdown and a post-Singularity gestalt consciousness, you'll not be disappointed.  If you didn't like Illuminatus! or don't like the absurd, maybe this isn't for you.