Shadow of the Tomb Raider

 

How fitting to have a game with an apocalypse theme these days.  Possibly more appropriate back in the latter parts of 2020 when I was actually playing it, but still reasonably apropos.

Short version: if you liked this game the first two times you played it, it's back for some more.

Spoilers from here, if you care.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the third in a reboot trilogy of one of the original console all-stars.  I played a couple of them back in the day; I really only remember the first one, and that's partially because Lara was really cool.  Even aside from the unlikely body shape, she had a sarcastic sense of humor and a seen-it-all demeanor that she backed up with the ability to backflip twelve feet in the air while firing a pistol in each hand John Woo style.  Apparently they ran the gameplay into the ground and they started over, with Lara just out of college on her first adventure, and in that game they substituted extreme trauma for character development, beating the ever living hell out of her over and over again.  Then in the first sequel, they redid all the plot beats from the first time a second time, but out in the Russian wilderness.  And here they are again, with a couple of differences in the South American jungle.

They threw in so much stuff here that it almost chokes the actual gameplay.  In the first game in the series, you had one weapon of each of four types, and there was generic "salvage" that you could get in various ways.  Get enough salvage and you could upgrade the characteristics of your weapons, get some parts and you could upgrade the weapons themselves.  Admittedly it doesn't make a lot of sense that you could "upgrade" a gun into a whole different model of gun, but <shrug>.  In the second game they decided to take a different approach and add different resource types - antlers, animal hides, machine parts, and so on.  Upgrading required different amounts of those things so it didn't help to grind for the ones you didn't need.  And this time you had a bunch of different weapons, but the characteristic upgrades were consistent across all of them.

This time they went completely gonzo.  There's five different kinds of animal hides (including both regular and deluxe jaguar pelts), three different types of feathers, oil, black powder, two different kinds of venomous insects, four different medicinal herbs with different combat effects, and many others.  You have an absolute crap ton of different weapons and each one has to be separately upgraded.  You also can refurbish different outfits, many of which are cosmetic only but many others which give you really good combat bonuses.  And they still have the usual collections of documents, artifacts, buried survival caches and weird hidden subquests.  I'm sort of a completion fanatic, so I did all that stuff (I didn't entirely upgrade all the weapons though - that borders on total masochism) but you don't really have to.  The initial weapons are all pretty good and you could easily get by just using them.  In fact I really liked the starting pistol and used it in preference to all the menagerie of pistols I picked up along the way. The skill tree is also way out of whack.  A couple of the skills are absolutely vital - in particular the one that prevents you from having to hit a QuickTime event to avoid falling to your death on tough ledges - but most of them just aren't that useful and some of them seem like they should be useful but aren't really.  For instance, the ability to simultaneously headshot three enemies with your bow sounds awesome, but there aren't just a ton of places where they line up for you to do this easily and by the time you can earn enough skill points to unlock this ability, all your enemies have taken to wearing helmets anyway.

There's much less of an emphasis on combat in this one; there are a couple of big setpiece battles throughout, but there's more focus on Lara being a glass cannon as opposed to the combat in the first two, which encouraged more of a bull-in-the-china-shop style of gameplay.  It seemed to me that Lara could take a lot fewer hits, but combined with this you have a lot more options for stealth killing and disengaging from your enemies even during fights.  By a certain point in the game you can basically freeze time to line up headshots though, so I actually thought the combat toward the end was much easier.  Overall, I thought it worked pretty well.  They also eliminated the massive ammo caches everywhere, so you do need to make your shots count (or rely on the bow, which has free craftable arrows).  Offsetting this is that there are actual merchants now, and they do sell bullets for cash, but it's extraordinarily expensive to rely on that.

The developers also added a couple of extra platforming tools to Lara's repertoire.  In the second game, the major innovation was the ability to swing from hooks.  In this one you maintain that ability, but you can also anchor from climbable walls to rappel down or to run along walls, which is frequently used.  You also gain the ability to overhang climb, which looks cool and is neat enough, but seems to be almost an afterthought in terms of how frequently it's used.  While these new tricks make Lara more able to traverse space, they also seem to have made her somewhat less responsive than before - I found myself plunging to my death with somewhat more frequency than I recall from the first two games.

I bought the super deluxe extended version of the game on sale somewhat after release, which gets an extra 7 DLC sidequests.  I thought that the Baba Yaga DLC sidequest in the second game was actually the gameplay highlight of the whole thing, and they did seem to pour a lot of their creativity into these extra challenge tombs; if you're looking to get this game, that's the way to go.  I think it's also the only way to reasonably get enough XP to fill out the skill tree without having to do an abnormally large amount of grinding.

So that's the gameplay basics out of the way.  What about the plot?  Yeah, okay, about that.  In the second game it was revealed that there was a secret organization called Trinity that was all about finding immortality and other Illuminati-mind-control type conspiracy theories.  So here fairly early on we're introduced to Pedro Dominguez, who is the leader of this group, and who also turns out to have been born into a tribal society in a hidden city deep in the South American jungles.  Overlooking the fact that this is the third hidden secret civilization in this series which also ostensibly has satellite mapping and cell phones, this is absolutely an astounding career path, and incidentally has the effect of making him far more interesting than Lara herself.  She once again starts off by getting involved in stuff she doesn't understand and doesn't really have to get involved in, accidentally triggering the apocalypse unless she can recover the magic dagger she removed as well as some other MacGuffins and doing a ritual or whatever.

I mean, I could try to explain it but I don't really care that much, and what's worse is the game doesn't really seem to either.  Dominguez wants the power of the dagger to become a god and do some sort of vaguely sketched out bullshit that's probably bad.  He allegedly wants to protect the hidden village where he comes from, so it's interesting that he has infiltrated and taken over the secret society that's already been running the village for its own ends for a few centuries, but no particular tension is ever explored with this double or triple loyalty stuff, and then the game just sort of loses interest in resolving the Trinity plot and they all just get killed offscreen except final boss Dominguez and some other guy whose name I forget but who runs all the mercenary teams.

And once again Lara causes a crap ton of collateral damage with her clumsy attempts to get in the way of stuff she doesn't understand; this time moving the dagger causes a bunch of disasters which destroy a few villages and kill a lot of people.  She feels vaguely guilty about this but not guilty enough to stop messing around with stuff, and by the end appears to have no particular worries about what she's done.  She also somehow manages to walk around within the secret South American village and be "disguised" as a member of a secret group of cultists, all of whom are male and much larger than her.  Plus, she repeatedly obeys the rule of secrecy in the village and won't use her firearms openly there, even when involved in a bunch of fights to the death.

Don't get me wrong, the emphasis on stealth killing and camouflage provides an interesting contrast to the gameplay of the prior two chapters, and the game is entertaining enough, but it takes itself far too seriously while making absolutely no sense whatsoever.  So if you enjoyed the last two installments, you'll get at least camp value out of this one.  And it seems like even the developers aren't interested in returning to the well a fourth time with this exact formula, so perhaps they'll manage to match up the gameplay and tone in another sequel. 

The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

 "Mer Celehar's notions of obedience are most individual," Maia said wryly. -The Emperor of The Goblin Emperor on Thara Celehar.

It's been a while.  What can I say - it's been a long pandemic.  Logging back on here I see that I've got a couple of half-written posts that I don't even really remember doing, but they're not bad and I can probably work them back into shape.  But this is something I recently read and I want to do it first, so here goes.

The Goblin Emperor was a 2014 novel which explored the unlikely ascension of Maia Drazhar to the throne of the Elflands, and roughly his first year of reign as Edrehasivar VII.  I have a review of it elsewhere here (notably it contains a major error in the number of grandsons the prior emperor had, which I cringe on recalling but don't want to pull a George Lucas and retroactively fix).  I find it very hard to describe why it grew on me so much over time, but I've reread it on several occasions since.  The word that I would use for it is "comforting", and despite the fact that it contains a couple of coup and assassination attempts, it's not really a novel of intrigue as such.  With one notable exception the people that are against Maia are threatening and obnoxious (the single exception is in a trusted position, but I just looked to make sure and he's only got one line of dialogue prior to his betrayal - Maia might have good reason to trust him but the audience sure doesn't).  A large portion of it is Maia trying to fit into the role he wasn't really prepared for and trying to some very minor degree to challenge the rules that keep him entirely separated from anything besides the nobility and their court problems.

This sequel doesn't take place at court and starts with protagonist Thara Celehar being called in to try to identify a dead hooker pulled out of a canal, so you can see we're dealing with something entirely different here.

So here's a brief recap on what Celehar did in the first book.  Maia's father was sort of a Henry VIII type in terms of marriages and his fifth wife was a young trophy wife airhead.  As the widow of the former Emperor she gets to hang around at court and maintain her own household, which includes her distant cousin Celehar.  Maia is not satisfied with the progress of the inquiry into his father's murder, and one of his staff suggests that he might want to bring in a Witness for the Dead, a cleric of the god Ulis with the ability to actually speak to the spirits of the departed, one of whom just happens to be at hand.  Maia summons him to give him this commission, discovering an unenthusiastic, morose man who clearly doesn't want to be involved in any of this but nonetheless accepts.  He's taking things seriously but not making much headway either; eventually wind of this gets back to his cousin, and Celehar ends up having to explain to Maia the circumstances which led him to him being stuck in semi-exile; he'd been involved in a same-sex love affair with a married man, and after that man killed his abusive wife Celehar ended up being called upon to investigate.  Celehar easily solved this crime but his lover was executed, and afterwards the scandal led to him being more or less defrocked and unemployable.

Shortly thereafter, Celehar claims that he had a dream from Ulis about how to proceed with his investigation and skips town on the next available airship to a far-off provincial city without bothering to explain himself beyond a cursory note as he's leaving.  This leads to Maia's quote from the top, and Celehar spends most of the rest of the book appearing only by virtue of sending letters to Maia explaining what he's up to off page.  This part also explains why Celehar got his own spin-off novel, because what he does in the town of Thu-Athamar is single-handedly figure out how the prior Emperor was assassinated, identify the likely culprits, insinuate himself into their social circle and later work with the local police to round them all up and return them for trial.  He also tells Maia the identity of the nobleman whom he believes bankrolled the whole thing - which he's also right about. This earns him the approval of both the chief priest of the Elflands and an Imperial favor, which he uses to receive reassignment as sort of a freelance criminal investigator priest.

This is where we find him at the start of The Witness for the Dead, back in the city of Thu-Athamar but this time with his own office where supplicants who need his particular services can find him.  Or the local watchmen can rope him into solving their issues as well.  In case you're wondering about what Maia and his entourage are up to then you are out of luck; he's off in the capital doing his Emperor thing and no one talks about it that much.

Anyway, the woman in the canal was actually an opera singer and not a hooker as such, although The Goblin Emperor implied that female opera singers were widely considered to have this sort of reputation and this book establishes that this isn't entirely without basis.

You'd think that the ability to speak with the spirits of the dead would be incredibly useful in a murder investigation, but in this you'd be only partially correct.  These aren't omniscient dead and they tend to fade away pretty quickly, so first of all they won't know any more than they did when alive and second of all they quickly forget all but their names or things they felt really strongly about as their spirit transitions to wherever it is dead elves go.  So Celehar was able to use his abilities to ID his doomed lover very easily because the murdered wife saw her husband very clearly as he killed her and was very pissed off about it even in the afterlife, but Celehar wasn't able to get anything useful off the deceased Emperor because he'd been blown up with a bomb he knew nothing about and his last thoughts were more along the lines of "Aaaaaaaaaaah".  The dead opera singer is more along the lines of that latter one; although he's able to figure out who she is pretty quickly, he isn't able to solve the murder through strictly supernatural means.  And as it turns out the trick is finding out who didn't want to kill her - she was something of a jackass and a kleptomaniac, among other things.

It's possible to have an entire book revolve around resolving one murder, but this one doesn't take that route.  In addition to this investigation, Celehar also gets caught up in a bureaucratic turf war among the local priesthood, participates in a contested will, tracks down and destroys an undead monster, goes through a trial by ordeal due to the participants in the aforesaid will contest getting pissed off about his testimony, works with some other priests to discover then track down an entirely unrelated serial killer, and helps out in the aftermath of a horrible industrial accident which kills dozens.  It's amazing that he has the time in the day to do all this stuff.

But here's the thing.  Celehar is suffering from major depressive disorder and although his sense of duty keeps him going (and he's competent, dear lord is he ever) none of it really affects him that much.  Unlike Goblin Emperor, which was in third person through Maia's eyes, this one is first person through Celehar's bleak and gloomy perspective.  He just feels he was put on Earth (er, or wherever planet this takes place) to do this stuff and it's not worth getting excited over.  About the only time he really has a big emotional reaction is when he's about to get ripped apart by the ghoul, and again, it's more along the lines of "Aaaaaaaaaaah".  I get the feeling that if the ghoul was a little slower and Celehar had a little more time to think about it he would have ended up being indifferent even to that.  He doesn't really want to do any of this but he can't imagine quitting.  It's certainly off-putting when an author tells you how amazing and incredible things are without actually presenting them that way, but this is one of the very few books that I can remember where the narration actually seems to be trying to clog up the fascinating events actually contained in the book with the protagonist's constant Eeyore like musings.  At some level, if even Celehar isn't that invested, how can you be?

But of course for those of us that can relate to this, and I unfortunately have felt this feeling myself, it's moving nonetheless.  I felt bad for this guy, who manages to do the right thing every day for not much money and barely more respect.  I wanted him to succeed.  And I liked that we finally get a little inkling of what's really eating him - not that he had the illicit affair, because he's pretty adamant that there's no real issue with that; not that he had the guy turned over to the law, because that's just how he sees his job description; but that he still mourns for someone who did something that horrible, and wonders whether that makes him horrible too.  Then at the end he gets a little bit of unexpected advice that it's okay to mourn just the good parts and forgive himself for the rest.

Does he take the advice?  I don't know, but unlike the very extreme on-the-nose hopeful ending of The Goblin Emperor it basically just ends with Celehar not cured and not happy but with the potential to get to those things.  It's a lot shorter than The Goblin Emperor and I don't think I'll read it as many times, but I think I enjoyed getting back into this world even through the eyes of someone who doesn't necessarily want to be there himself.