The Stack

I put a few hours into Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness last night, starting over from the beginning and getting somewhat past where I had been before. I actually got into a gunfight this time! That it took so long for Lara to need to kill anything is, I think, a sign of how much the designers wanted to take the IP in new directions. Similarly, a scene in a cemetery had me thinking “Ah, finally we get to the tombs promised in the title!”

(The franchise, by the way, seems to have wavered a lot on whether to hang their brand on “Tomb Raider” or on the more thoroughly trademarkable “Lara Croft”. The full title of this game puts “Lara Croft” at the beginning, but in much smaller letters than “Tomb Raider”. I guess the idea of retroactively renaming the series after the main character is one more thing that they stole from Indiana Jones, although they seem to have abandoned it in the later reboot.)

The focus so far has been on wandering the seedier parts of Paris, through abandoned buildings decrepit enough to force Lara’s trademark parkour, seeking out contacts who can help her figure out what Von Croy was up to before his murder, and doing a little light burglary when the opportunity presents itself — she needs funds, and I suppose she can’t access her vast treasure hoard back home while the police are hunting for her. It would basically be in character for the Lara I know to just take people’s stuff regardless, though. I’m quite enjoying the scenery. Lara’s been in plenty of urban environments before, but this is the first time it’s been in an engine capable of doing them well. I don’t know if the tiny urban park and cheap café here are authentically Parisian, but they’re familiar sights from my own life, and fill me with the delight of recognition.

I had some difficulty getting the game going. On startup, when it should be displaying the Eidos logo movie, it instead displays the text “Unknown file, please insert the correct disc for Data\FMV\EIDOR.mpg” and hangs. It was not doing this the last time I played it on this machine! But that was a few Windows Updates ago. Searching for fixes, mainly I just saw the same old advice to enable VMR9, which was already enabled. A third-party utility let me work around it by disabling FMV playback, but it’s still not ideal: there are a few FMV cutscenes in the game itself. Not many, though. If necessary, I can just exit the game and watch them in VLC at the appropriate points.