The Stack

I was a Kickstarter backer for Hypnospace Outlaw, intrigued by the premise of an alternate 1990s internet simulation. And I’m glad I caught it, because it’s both one of the funniest and one of the best-designed works of interactive fiction I’ve played in some time. It’s a mockery and celebration of a bygone era, when the entire web was a glorious mess of enthusiastic amateurism, lo-res and badly-constructed by people deeply invested in dorkishness and petty nonsense, but for that very reason extremely personal and revealing in ways lacking in today’s more slickly-invented internet personas.

Not that Hypnospace lacks invented personas. There’s a strong current of make-believe, of people using Hypnospace as a playhouse. One user page, for example, has a bunch of “potions”, with descriptions of their effects, and gives the reader permission to take whatever they need. The potions are just images. I remember doing similar stuff back in the day, setting up a “hotel” in my college VAX-11/780 account’s directory structure, opening up write permission and inviting other people to create “rooms” with text files. That was a machine accessed through text-only terminals, but the desire for imaginary spaces runs deep. People will push the limits of whatever is possible. Hypnospace Outlaw recognizes this.

But people will also give up halfway, and HO recognizes that as well. Some of the heartiest laughs come from coming across pages where some kid just typed a bunch of failed attempts at exiting edit mode, or figured out how to change the text on the default homepage’s buttons but didn’t figure out how to make them do anything. It’s not even cruel laughter at their incompetence, really, so much as the shock of recognition. We’re not used to seeing things so blatantly half-assed in a published game, even if it is diegetically half-assed. But without it, the game would be a lie. The web of the 90s was always barely half-constructed, full of placeholders, at least as much promise as actuality. The largely-unjustified belief in that promise was crucial to the zeitgeist.

It’s odd that the game gets the feel so right, given that it was co-written by Xalavier Nelson, who isn’t old enough to remember the 90s (as he enjoys reminding people on Twitter). Nelson is the author of Screw You, Bear Dad, a game that I didn’t like much. In particular, I had harsh words for its use of “interface screw” — interfering with the player’s ability to read the text. HO indulges in interface screw as well, but at least it’s justified in-world there. If you download software from a sketchy source, it’s going to do bad things to your computer. That’s so obvious that it actually held me back from progressing in the plot for a while. There are some online hygiene habits that are so ingrained that I was reluctant to violate them in the game, even though it was clear that I was meant to have the full 90s internet experience, good and bad.

But even the malware, scams, and blatant commercialism, by being so transparent, come off as endearingly goofy — and all the moreso when they seem to be trying to take themselves seriously. There’s a whole subculture called “coolpunk” that’s centered around doing remixes of a single commercial jingle, and even though they’re presumably doing it in a spirit of irony, they’re so earnest about their irony! The original of the jingle was written by a musician called the Chowder Man, whose other works (including several other commercial jingles) can be found throughout the game, and he’s basically the king of overwrought, earnest, 90s-tinged goofiness. The Chowder Man is definitely a Hypnospace celebrity, but it’s not clear to me if he’s supposed to be an actual celebrity outside of Hypnospace. It hardly matters. Hypnospace can have its own celebrities that no one outside Hypnospace has heard of. It’s just more make-believe, right?

Like the Web, the game is broad and explorable, with offshoots and deep rabbit-holes. But it does have a main plot, with a lot of guidance about where to go and what to do in the beginning, opening up to web-search sleuthing as you become more familiar with how Hypnospace works. It impels you through this plot by giving you a job enforcing Hypnospace’s terms of service. Wait, the 90s web has terms of service? But of course Hypnospace isn’t quite our web. It’s more like a melange of AOL, Compuserve, and Geocities, and it definitely has a specific company in charge — which is the source of most of the story’s tension. The company behind Hypnospace doesn’t have the same priorities as its users. Your job as enforcer means you root out harassment and abuse, but also copyright violations, making fair-users justifiably angry at you. Surprisingly, though, this isn’t simply a matter of evil greedy corporation vs freedom-loving cyberpunks. The people behind Hypnospace are convincingly humanized, with their own personal home pages about their quirky interests that differ from those of the regular users only in that they have fewer spelling errors. If they’re making stupid decisions that alienate their users, its because they’re in over their heads. They’re a little startup in a field without a lot of historical precedent to lean on, and they genuinely don’t know what they’re doing, just like everyone else on Hypnospace.

In fact, there’s a sub-plot where the users effectively re-make the same stupid decisions as the company. At some point before the game starts, the company decided to reorganize their “zone” structure a little by combining five geek-fandom communities into one zone. The members of those communities were incensed, imputed nefarious motives to the reorg, and abandoned the combined zone to found their own “Freelands”. Which is… a combined zone, just like the one they left. Ah, but this one is under the control of the users! Well, one user. Who immediately sets himself up as a petty martinet, issuing notices to Freelands pages that don’t conform to his vision. It’s easy to see in this not just a satire of the 90s internet in particular, but a critique of power dynamics in online communities in general, both ancient and modern.

The one thing that the Freelands adds is one of those make-believe elements: instead of the standard Hypnospace zone menu, it’s set up as a multi-page map of an imaginary space, with people’s home pages embedded in it as towers and castles. This idea is later appropriated by the Hypnospace company as part of their slick new “Hypnospace 2000” initiative and presented as if they invented it. Hypnospace 2000 is frankly menacing, a visible attempt at eliminating everything vibrant about Hypnospace in order to make the whole thing more palatable to their corporate partners. It’s a small moment, but it’s the first point in that whole sub-story that made me really feel like the Freelanders really had a point, that they were being abused by the system and weren’t just overreacting to nothing. And this isn’t the only time this happens, that something is first presented as ridiculous but later turns out to have more to it. I’ll say more at the end of this post, when I get into spoilers for the ending.

But first, I have some comments on the UI and gameplay. Hypnospace is called “hypnospace” because part of the premise is that you access it via a special cyberspace headband while asleep. The internet is thus literally a shared dream, although the introductory video paints it as a productivity feature that lets you keep working 24/7 — a brilliant metaphor for the two-sided nature of wired life. And yet, even though it’s a dream, it uses the desktop metaphor. It’s a very thoroughly-implemented desktop, too. Although most of the game is played in the in-game browser, there are moments when you need various other apps — to listen to a sound file, say, or to crack an encrypted document. And these can be run from your in-game desktop, which can be customized with various desktop images that you can download from the fake internet. Desktop stickers are also a thing. You can get stickers from various sources and affix them to your desktop. And it all seems fairly pointless, because you hardly ever see your desktop. At least, I personally spent the majority of every session with Hypnospace Explorer open and maximized, and when I needed a different app, I usually used an app switcher in the main menu bar. I kind of wonder if this is deliberate, a sly bit of commentary on the wasted emphasis on desktop customizations in OS releases.

Some particular bits of the customization, such as the voice used by the optional in-game voice assistant, are put into a fake BIOS screen, which seems fittingly retro, although it occurs to me to wonder why it does. It’s not like BIOS screens have gone away. My primary game-playing machine gives a prompt to enter a BIOS menu when it boots. Ah, but how often does it boot? Mostly it just comes out of sleep mode. So I suppose I was seeing BIOS prompts a lot more in 1999 than I do now.

The game is split into multiple chapters, with time skips between them. On each skip, some pages will change while others stay the same (particularly the abandoned ones). At first, I was worried that there was no way back, and that I was going to miss content, but the final chapter has a clever way around that: it skips forward long enough that there’s a Hypnospace archival project going on, from which you can view pages from any chapter. And here’s where we get into spoilers for the ending.

I recall seeing some retweets from the developers along the lines of “Dammit, I didn’t expect this game to make me cry.” I can’t say I was moved to actual tears by the ending — possibly because I had that much warning — but I did, despite the warning, find it unexpectedly moving. It’s sort of a reverse of history: first comes the farce, then the tragedy. In an earlier chapter, people get worried about a made-up medical condition called “beef-brain” supposedly caused by excessive Hypnospace use, and a hacker collective takes advantage of their gullibility by selling them placebo images to “protect” their pages. But then an incident leaves six people dead, and Hypnospace is shuttered for years until the archival project comes along. The final chapter, then, sees you using the archives to conduct a long-overdue investigation of that incident to find out how much the Hypnospace company knew about the risks their users were facing. And at the very end, it does something brilliant. Only at that moment, after devoting your efforts to this investigation for some time, do you learn the names of the six people who died. And they’re all people you know. People who had become familiar to you through their Hypnospace presence, who you had laughed at or sympathized with or gotten annoyed at in the previous chapters.

It’s a beautiful moment because of what it shows: that this game cares about people. That’s been its attitude all along, but it’s really noticeable when it conjures characters out of a statistic. This is a good-hearted game that doesn’t need its minor characters to be flawless, or even good people, in order to be sympathetic and not deserve what happened to them. And I thank the developers for that.

Baba is You, released just under a month ago, was one of my hotly-anticipated titles of 2019. The original version, created for a game jam two years ago, left a strong impression of unexplored potential, and I’m happy to say that the commercial version explores that potential fairly thoroughly, and even goes beyond what I imagined possible. It’s a lovely, lovely puzzle game where a large percentage of the puzzles expose new possibilities, and require you to think about things in new and different ways.

The basic idea of the game is that the rules of the game exist in the same space as the things they apply to, and can be manipulated in the same way: via Sokoban-style turn-based block pushing. Each level is a grid of simple icon-like sprites, each single-colored and running a three-frame wiggle animation like an indie cartoon from the 90s. Some of those sprites are words, and the words form sentences, reading across or down, defining how the other sprites interact, like WALL IS STOP (wall icons form an impassable barrier), ROCK IS PUSH (rocks move when another moving object moves into them), and FLAG IS WIN (standing in the same place as a flag passes the level). Words can be pushed around, and changing the rule sentences changes the rules. Break up WALL IS STOP by pushing one of its words out of line, and walls are no longer obstacles, and become instead mere background decorations, like any other sprite without rules. As the game progresses, more words are introduced, always without explanation: the only text is the text of the in-game rules, so only by experiment can you figure out exactly what BELT IS SHIFT or BOX HAS KEY means.

It may sound very free-for-all, but the puzzles soon start locking away particular crucial rules behind walls, or placing them against the edges of the level, to prevent you from changing them. Sometimes the crux of a puzzle is a realization about what can and can’t be changed. Also, even when a particular rule change is possible, it isn’t always easy. Text has physicality. It can be awkward to rearrange it into the configuration you want. By the same token, text having physicality means that it can be used physically without regard to its semantics: pushing a word into a pool of water to fill it up, for example, or using a sentence to support a falling object. The best puzzles require you to manipulate form and content at the same time.

The most important predicate for these rules is YOU. Every level has a YOU statement, usually (but not always) BABA IS YOU — Baba is a sort of white oval-shaped quadruped. Apparently there’s some controversy over whether Baba is a sheep or a rabbit, but as far as I’m concerned, Baba is simply a Baba. (In the original game jam version, Baba looked kind of like a robot.) At any rate, the YOU property defines what the player controls, so if you break it apart, you wind up in control of nothing, a dead state emphasized by replacing the background music with an ominous rumble. But you can often push another noun into the place of BABA, effectively swapping your identity, turning some other game element animate while rendering Baba inert. Baba can then have other properties assigned to make it useful, or can even be transformed into a different object, with sentences like BABA IS KEY.

I’ve said before that one of the most distressing notions to my mind is that of a person turning into an inanimate object, a mere tool that someone thinks has more utility than the person did. This is the height of horror to me. Somehow, Baba is You doesn’t provoke this reaction. I think it’s partly because of the high degree of abstraction, but also partly because of the ease with which inanimate objects can be made animate. The rumbling void of absence-of-YOU remains fairly disturbing, though. There are a few puzzles that actually require you to temporarily abandon your presence in the world, to destroy the YOU rule and wait for autonomous movers (that is, things with an IS MOVE rule) to put it back together somewhere else, and it’s always a little scary. What if you got the positioning wrong and never come back? The game lets you undo arbitrarily many moves, so it’s not like you can’t get things back the way they were, but it has an effect nonetheless.

I’ve seen the game recommended to mathematicians in particular, and there’s something to that. The whole thing is not just mathematically abstract but aggressively formalist. Making any headway requires subduing your intuitive understanding of these icons and embracing the idea that they only have whatever meanings assigned to them, which can be changed if convenient. A few puzzles even tweak your assumptions by not giving things the properties you expect — for example, giving you a locked door that you can’t figure out how to pass until you realize that you can just walk right through it because there’s no DOOR IS STOP rule — but that sort of trick is kind of cheap, so it isn’t used very often.

Where it really starts getting mathematicianly, though, is in the later portions of the game, where it starts going recursive, and applying rules to layers of the game that you thought were outside them. (And we’ll be getting substantially more spoilery from this point on.) Like when it introduces the word TEXT. Text has always behaved like there was an implicit TEXT IS PUSH rule, but once you actually have the word TEXT to play with, you can alter its behavior in other ways. You can even turn all the text in the level to another object with a sentence like TEXT IS ROCK, although this is the very worst thing you can do, because it immediately erases all the rules, including the YOU rule. What about ROCK IS TEXT? What text does the rock become? The text ROCK, it turns out. Anything can be turned into its name. This is the sort of surprising-yet-inevitable result that really seems like a joke until you start finding puzzles that rely on it.

And that’s not the end of it. We get a word WORD, which is distinct from TEXT in that it’s a predicate, not an object type: any object of a type that IS WORD can be used in a rule as if it were text. And so the lines between the physical and the abstract blur a little more — although, frankly, the icons used aren’t all that much less abstract than the words. Both the text ROCK and the little monochrome picture of a rock are just representations of rock-ness, which is, again, an empty concept, its meaning totally contingent on the rules in the level.

Then there’s LEVEL, which is where the game really starts exceeding expectations. What happens when you can assign an attribute to the entire level you’re on? The answers largely make sense. If you make LEVEL IS WIN, you win the level. If you make LEVEL IS PUSH, then you can move the viewport around by pushing at the edges of the screen. And if you manage to make something like LEVEL IS FLAG, you wind up changing the level’s icon on the overworld map, which seems like a neat little easter egg, until you realize that it has consequences. The overworld map has always had the two basic rules, BABA IS YOU and FLAG IS WIN, off in the corner, and they seemed like mere decoration, because there is no baba or flag at that level, just a cursor. But once you can make a Baba and a flag? You can actually win the map.

And, as always happens when you win a level, you wind up in the map containing it. This is the start of the game’s secret second half. That is, it’s substantially less than half the game going by number of levels, but it’s easily more than half by play time. There is an “ending” you can reach without discovering this, that displays the credits and everything, but it’s kind of like the false ending in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night: you’re nowhere near actually done with the game. I’m really impressed with this, because it’s uncovered by exactly the sort of “Let’s try this and see what happens” experimentation that’s been necessary throughout the game, just applied in an unexpected place, in what had previously seemed like a glorified menu. But hey, breaking this kind of hierarchy is what the game is all about.

This leads into a sequence of three maps and a smallish epilogue map. (I’ve completed the epilogue and gotten the “real” ending, but there are still some puzzles I haven’t solved, so I don’t consider myself really done with the game. There may be more secrets I haven’t seen.) The interesting thing about these later maps is the way they increasingly blur the distinction between level and map, putting more puzzle-objects into the maps, and integrating the levels, previously self-contained, into a map-level over-puzzle. First there are levels that the cursor can’t reach without being carried by a YOU. Then there are levels that are easy to “win”, but where the main puzzle is clearly to turn the level into some other object. Then there’s the glorious moment when you figure out how to turn objects on the map into levels. I think the pinnacle of this is a certain level in the map called “Meta” where the conditions on the map affect the solvability of a level — previously, causality had only reached outward, not inward, a constraint that I hadn’t even noticed until it became necessary to violate it.

The true final level is a victory lap, easily beaten once you’ve reached it, rewarding the player with cake. (You can stick the WIN clause on a number of different objects, but the cake really seems like the right one.) It does, however, afford the player an opportunity to destroy the universe, which is really something that more final levels should have. After that, it’s possible to unlock a concept art room, which is something I generally find uninteresting, unless, as in DROD, it has interesting interactivity. That’s certainly the case here: you’re given the usual interface, the words IMAGE, IS, and a bunch of individual letters. To view art, you have to spell out numbers: IMAGE IS O N E, IMAGE IS T W O, etc. You can get all the way through TEN this way, but there’s no L, so you can’t make ELEVEN. It is, however, able to recognize larger numbers that can be made with the letters available, such as FOURTEEN. There’s an M among the letters, which puzzled me at first, because there’s no number with an M in it (other than ones containing MILLION, but, again, no L). Then I tried MINUSONE and it worked. Typical of this game, to keep on rewarding speculative experimentation like this even in the extras.

So it’s been well over a week since my last post, and I just wanted to pop in and say that I haven’t given up on Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness yet. I stopped at a natural stopping point, just as it goes all open-world, so that when I get back to it I’ll be able to play that section from its beginning. But I’ve spent the last week or so completely absorbed in a different game, which, for various reasons, I will not be posting about here. I finished that last night, just in time for the release of two other games I’ve been greatly anticipating, one of which I even kickstarted. But I’ll post about those. I just wanted to get this exposition out of the way so I wouldn’t have to include it in a post about a game.

More ways in which the sixth Tomb Raider game differs from the first five:

The business of perfectly lining up a running jump across a gap by walking all the way to the edge and then taking a hop back seems to be impossible now, because there’s no way to take a hop back. Moving backward always takes a small step back, like in Walk mode.

No Secrets. That is, there are no officially-designated secrets. There are certainly places where you can solve optional puzzles to pick up a few more healing items, and the result may be that I spend more time backtracking and exploring alternate routes doing the equivalent of secret-hunting than I would if the game tracked secrets and thereby told me that I was done.

Adventure-game-style interactive dialogue sequences, where you pick what to say next out of a simple menu of, usually, two or three choices. A sign of an intended genre shift, perhaps. Lara is playing detective here. It seems like most of the choices I’ve seen so far are basically fake: you get a choice of two topics, and immediately after Lara’s finished asking about the one you choose, she immediately asks about the other one. But I’ve already seen one case of an NPC varying her behavior, choosing whether to give you the notebook Von Croy left for you or not depending on how nice you were to her.

In addition to a Walk mode, there’s a Stealth mode, where Lara creeps along and flattens herself against walls like Solid Snake. I’d say this is another sign of the genre shift, but it also seems like an attempt at doing a better job of the stealth sections of Chronicles. I haven’t gotten much use out of this yet, so I don’t really know how well it holds up. The police are sometimes amazingly oblivious to Lara’s presence even without it.

There’s no infinite-ammo pistols, but there is brawler-style hand-to-hand combat. If the Von Croy Tower section of Chronicles had this, it would have been very different.

Limited grip strength, like in Shadow of the Colossus. If you spend too long dangling from a ledge or climbing a drainpipe, you fall down. And with this comes an upgrade system: certain actions — for example, crowbarring a door open — are considered to be exercise that increases your strength, like in Quest for Glory. Apparently there are also exercises that upgrade your jump distance, but I haven’t found any of those yet. I’m not sure how I feel about this. It’s certainly not mimetic, and seems mainly suited to nonsensical gating. Also, I’m a little worried that missing some upgrade opportunities early in the game will lock me out of goodies later. But on the other hand, it’s nice to have some kind of progression other than accumulating ammo.

The levels seem very short in comparison to the older games. Probably the target hardware put limits on how much nicely 3D-modeled stuff they could hold in memory at once. Admittedly, most levels in the previous games were effectively several levels strung together, with chutes or self-locking doors keeping you from going backwards. Past a certain point, Angel of Darkness does the opposite, creating a large explorable space out of multiple nonlinearly-connected levels that you can travel among freely. This, too, seems like a genre shift. Tomb Raider games have a very specific structure, and it’s breaking that.

Going straight from the fifth Tomb Raider game to the sixth, it’s immediately striking what a change it is. After five games in basically the same engine with incremental improvements, suddenly there’s been a complete overhaul in the look of the thing. Environments look 3D modeled, instead of cobbled together out of tiles (however artfully). Lara herself is a bit less of a cartoon. The dialogue never cuts off slightly too early. Even the menus look slicker and higher-resolution. It’s all very next-generation — it’s been three years since the last game, and instead of the Playstation, they’re now targeting the Playstation 2. I wasn’t really paying attention when it came out — I don’t even own the game on physical media. (It periodically goes on sale for less than a dollar on Steam.) So all of this came as a surprise to me. The whole thing is just modern enough that it can run under Windows 10 without installing any additional DLLs, albeit only if you fiddle with the graphics settings a bit first. (The main thing you have to do is enable VMR9, whatever that means.)

The controls are basically the same as before — you’ve still got the core movement/jump/action controls, in the usual places. Crouch/crawl is in a different place. Hitting the Walk button now toggles walk mode on or off, instead of walk mode being active only while you keep the button pressed. More generally, the new-model Lara just handles a little differently, like driving a different car than the one you’re used to.

And she’s less of a pure puppet now. That is, the controls are less tightly coupled to her actions, more contextual, more semantic. I’m thinking there’s a sort of spectrum ranging from “the player’s controls map directly onto specific motions on the part of the avatar” to “the player’s controls are treated kind of like verbal commands, subject to interpretation”. Old-school Lara was near the former extreme, but not quite at it: the Action button was always quite contextual, and actions like pulling levers would automatically cause her to adjust her position. The opposite extreme is where, say, Arkham Asylum lies. When you press the Punch button in Arkham Asylum, Batman does not simply thrust his fist forward in front of him. He chooses a target and then does whatever is necessary to punch that target, turning his body or taking a step forward or even doing a somersault if that’s what it takes. Angel of Darkness is still nowhere near the Batman model, but it’s a step or two closer. You no longer have to manually turn around and back off a ledge to dangle from it: just standing at the ledge and pressing the Action button suffices. Even the movement keys are a little more contextual: you can vault onto a crate just by trying to move into it. This is fairly standard among modern 3D platformers, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it in a Tomb Raider.

The story is apparently considered to be still within the continuity of the first five games (unlike the later reboots), but it doesn’t seem very interested in filling in the gap between Lara’s apparent death and her turning up at Von Croy’s apartment in Paris. Yes, they’re still trying to make Von Croy a thing. That is, they do kill him off pretty quickly, but that’s happened before, right? His death kicks off the immediate plot, which is the hunt for a serial killer. Lara’s looking for the killer while the police look for her, believing that she’s the killer — which is a reasonable guess on their part, because, as I’ve pointed out, Lara is a serial killer. She’s just not the one who killed Von Croy, although she probably would have in the last two games if she had the opportunity. You might argue that she’s more of a spree killer — she doesn’t choose victims, she just charges into a building and slaughters everyone she comes across — but she’s done that repeatedly, which to my mind makes her a serial spree killer, which is something that I don’t think exists in real life. At any rate, she’s upset about the murder of Von Croy, possibly because she didn’t get to do it herself, so off she goes running across the rooftops.

More tomorrow, probably.

The theme for the final level of Tomb Raider: Chronicles seems to be “doing things over”. It starts by in effect telling that you’re about to redo the last level. Titled “Escape with the Iris”, that level indeed concluded with Lara reaching the exterior of the VCI tower with the Iris in her inventory. But the final level starts with a helicopter attack driving her back inside. You spend the rest of the level trying to escape again, in a different way.

The ultimate boss monster is a bald-headed cyborg, a puzzle boss who can’t be killed by normal means, which is far more satisfying than the powered-armor guys I mentioned previously. Not long after you’ve killed him, you run into another one, with a different puzzle. There’s a couple of major sections where you need to execute a difficult bit twice: a set of moving laser gates that you have to go through and then return through, a button at the top of a tricky set of jumps that you need to press twice. This is exactly contrary to the usual Tomb Raider design, in which difficult feats generally result in opening up doors that let you skip them in the future. Yet more evidence that the chapters were designed by completely different people, I suppose.

Going for 100% Secrets adds its own do-over-ness. For the first time, the game here becomes Cruel in the Zarfian sense. It’s generally been Tough, or at worst, Nasty. Sometimes you slide down a chute and can’t get back up and any Secrets you left behind are lost to you, but at least it’s obvious when you’ve passed a point of no return. Here, Lara finds a shooting gallery, and shooting at some targets unlocks a door nearby for some reason. But if you shoot them fast enough, it unlocks an additional door, leading to a Secret. This happens fairly early in the level, so reading about it in Sinjin’s guide later on caused me to play most of the level a second time.

I really don’t know if I’d have had the patience to finish this game without that walkthrough. The puzzle to defeat the second cyborg seems particularly obscure to me, and I don’t know how anyone figured it out. Even worse, there are rooms where loading a save will trigger bugs, similar to the Crane Guy thing but less benign — more confirmation that they were making this primarily for the Playstation, where you can only save at checkpoints, and the PC version was an afterthought. I’m in the habit of saving a lot, so I’d inevitably trigger these bugs, then get stuck, then hit the guide and see that it says “DO NOT SAVE IN THIS ROOM OR YOU WILL TRIGGER A BUG AND GET STUCK”. And then I’d have to do the room over, which is at least thematic.

At any rate, I’m done. And for all my complaints, I did find the general experience of putting Lara through her paces pleasant, despite all the attempts at ruining it. I may just continue with Angel of Darkness next. Because apparently even the entire experience of playing through a Tomb Raider game is something I now feel compelled to do twice.

Here at the fifth episode, Tomb Raider has just acquired some continuity of story, and I have to admit that I’m a little confused about it. Back in Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, we saw the 16-year-old Lara Croft delve into a hidden compound under Angkor Watt with her mentor Von Croy, looking for an artifact called the Iris. Things went badly. Lara escaped; Von Croy did not. Years later, Von Croy shows up again, alive but possessed by an evil god, filling the role of main antagonist for the rest of the game.

And now, in the final chapter of Chronicles, Von Croy shows up once more, as head of Von Croy Industries, experimenting with the powers of the Iris in a technological setting. But it’s still a flashback. I had thought that Von Croy was supposed to have been presumed dead until his reappearance in TLR, but this new encounter must have taken place beforehand. Was I simply reading too much into it? What was I supposed to have concluded from the scene of Von Croy caught in a deathtrap as Lara flees?

Maybe I’m expecting too much consistency. There’s certainly a lack of consistency in the world between chapters. For example, the sinks. I mentioned before that the Russian submarine had bathroom sinks made of entire map tiles. The Von Croy tower has bathrooms with custom-modeled sinks that could have been used in the submarine too. Or take the fire extinguishers: in the current chapter, shooting a fire extinguisher causes it to explode with enough force to break through walls, something I might conceivably have guessed if I hadn’t shot at fire extinguishers to no effect in a previous chapter. It all smacks of poor communication between the people responsible for making the different parts. It’s less a single cohesive game than four short games in the same engine packaged together.

One thing chapter 4 does that we’ve seen already: it makes you go weaponless for an extended period. At the beginning of the chapter’s second level, you have to leave your gun behind to pass a security checkpoint, and only get it back very close to the level’s end. This marks the franchise’s foray into stealth mechanics, which it frankly isn’t very good at. There’s a lack of clarity about what makes a guard notice you — did he turn around because I got too close, or because I was making too much noise, or was he just scripted to turn around at that moment as part of his patrol cycle? Chloroform can be found in certain supply closets, but in all but two cases, I found it basically impossible to administer. Fortunately, it’s usually pretty easy to just outrun the guards, or shoot them once you get your gun back.

I sometimes feel like the game overestimates the difficulty of its combat. I guess it’s probably harder on the Playstation, where you can’t save the game at will and thus might have to face several enemies in a row between checkpoints. But there’s one particular sort of enemy, a guard in bulletproof battle armor, that the cutscenes try to set up as an Extremely Difficult Foe, but who can be downed with a single headshot. Headshots aren’t trivial — they require you to aim manually in first-person mode, which is fiddly without any sort of analog input — but it’s still anticlimactic to defeat them so quickly after they’ve been built up as such a threat.

One last thing I’d like to note before signing off for the night. At one point, Lara’s guy-in-a-chair (a new character, appearing only in this chapter, occasionally bantering with Lara over her headset) warns her not to kill a certain technician, because they need to insert keycards simultaneously to open a door. Just approaching him without shooting causes Lara to force him to cooperate at gunpoint, and clock him unconscious afterward. But if you want all the level’s secrets, you have to shoot him instead, forcing your remote helper to open an alternate route with more guards. Without Sinjin, I don’t think I would have ever tried this. If all it did was force you to take a more difficult path, I think I’d regard it as a punishment for the player, indicating that not shooting the technician was the correct approach. But since the difficult path is needed for 100% secrets, it feels more like this is the approach that the game wants me to take, and that seems like it’s saying something about Lara’s character. That she isn’t just callously indifferent about the lives she takes. That she prefers to kill, even when she doesn’t need to, even when it makes things more difficult for her. I think I like her a little less now.

By now, I’m well into the fourth and final chapter of Tomb Raider: Chronicles, where Lara puts on a shiny black castsuit and an electronic headset and visor, as depicted in the box art, and creeps around a high-tech office building filled with lasers. But before describing that in detail, I’d like to complain about the puzzles in chapter 3 a little more.

Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever needed hints so much in a Tomb Raider before. One of the puzzles was to get through an underwater passage in a mill pond, guarded by an aquatic monster, sort of like an ugly mermaid based on a sea horse. It swims around in a sort of patrol pattern, which led me to believe that I could sneak past it while its back was turned, but repeated attempts at this failed. Finally turning to Sinjin, I found that the key to the whole thing was something I hadn’t noticed at all: a coin lying on the pond bed, where it blended in far too well. I might have noticed it even so, were it not right in the creature’s patrol route, where there’s limited opportunity to poke around experimentally.

Shortly afterward, inside the mill, there’s a crank that opens a door that immediately starts closing, making you rush over to it within a time limit. The problem is that you can’t see the door opening from where you turn the crank, and if you don’t book it over immediately, it will most likely be fully closed by the time it comes into view. I suppose the player is just supposed to intuit what’s going on from the room’s design. I personally got as far as turning the crank and then checking the door, but not fast enough to see it closing. “I guess the crank doesn’t open that door”, I thought to myself. “I wonder what it does? I suppose it’ll be obvious when I find out.” Earlier games in the series had a solution for this: whenever you opened a door remotely, the camera would cut to show the door opening.

I have no real basis for this but my own thoughts, but I kind of suspect that the intention behind these sorts of puzzles was that, at this point the series, the target audience is die-hard Tomb Raider experts, who want a challenging experience. But (A) there’s a big difference between “challenging” and “obtuse”, and (B) difficulty was never really part of the appeal of Tomb Raider in the first place. A modicum of challenge is just a spice on the exploration.

When the art in the original Tomb Raider games works, it works really well. If you want a vast and irregular cavern, aglow in the sunlight from the cave mouth, it’s got you covered. At a sufficiently large scale, the fact that it’s chopped up into tiles isn’t a problem, it adds to the artistic feel. The tiles give it a look like a mosaic, like a faceted gem.

But when we’re dealing with things at a human scale, the tile grid can get a little ridiculous. The tiles are quite a bit larger than in something like Minecraft — it can be hard to judge by eyeball, but it looks to me like they’re a bit wider than Lara is tall, so let’s call them two meters. And so that’s the smallest any terrain feature can be. Every table, desk, and counter is two meters wide. The submarine level has a bathroom with a row of two-meter sinks.

But then, I don’t know how much we can really blame the grid. Even when the grid is broken, the artists don’t seem all that interested in keeping a consistent scale. The church scene, for example, has a bunch of pews placed at irregular angles, and they’re unreasonably enormous, as tall as Lara, as if a race of giants attended services there. Which seems to be the case, in fact: the skeleton of some forgotten king is laid out in a nearby crypt, occupying nearly two whole tiles from head to toe. The same model is used for those sword ghosts I mentioned before. They tower over Lara. You take it in stride, because they’re monsters.

I think back to the original Tomb Raider. There was a sequence there involving guardian mummies that come to life, and the gradual realization that, despite how they were posed, they weren’t mummies of humans. They were oddly-proportioned and their knees bent backwards and once they started moving, they moved in non-human ways, often running on all fours. But the first clue was simply how tall they were.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that scaling things weird can work, if we’re dealing with monsters, or monstrous things. It can create an uncomfortable sense of wrongness, and sometimes that’s what you’re going for. Heck, I can imagine something surrealist like Silent Hill using two-meter bathroom sinks and pulling it off. But sometimes it just comes off as ridiculous.

The Teen Lara section of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was a bit like the Teen Indy section of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade — the one where we see the origin of all of the character’s defining quirks and accoutrements in a surprisingly short span of time. But only a little, because Lara doesn’t have as much to pick up as Indy. We see her scavenge her customary leather backpack from another treasure-seeker’s skeletal remains, and that’s pretty much it. It always seemed a bit forced to me. That backpack isn’t nearly as important a part of Lara Croft’s image as Indy’s panama hat and bullwhip are to his. It’s like the writers wanted to pay homage to Indy, but had to settle for the backpack because they couldn’t think of a really iconic accessory for Lara to acquire. Or at least, nothing other than the twin pistols, with their sexy holster-straps on her bare thighs. Those are pretty iconic, but also unusable in this context. Because the chief distinguishing feature of the Teen Lara section is that she doesn’t have any guns.

The Teen Lara section of Chronicles must happen after that, because Lara has her backpack. But she still doesn’t have a gun. I guess this is why I’ve been thinking about puzzles so much: with gunplay gone, puzzles dominate the experience even more than usual. Curiously, this is also the part where they decided to greatly increase the number of monsters. Rock-throwing imps. Ghosts with swords, invisible until you get close. One section has you navigating a labyrinth, guided by a luminous wisp, while some monster stalks you — possibly a minotaur, but I didn’t really get a good look at it, because hesitating at all lets it get you. Mostly you’re aware of it from the sound of its approaching footsteps. It reminded me a bit of Amnesia, another game that doesn’t give you a weapon and makes you run away from things a lot.

The game’s first rope-swinging bit occurred here, causing me to fail repeatedly until I hit the manual and looked up the controls. (If you simply let go of the rope instead of pressing the jump button, you fall straight down, regardless of what it looks like your momentum should be.) Also, I have some complaints about how the camera behaves here, particularly in the part with the sword ghosts, where you sometimes just don’t have the option to get a good look at where you’re going. Possibly it’s always been this bad, but the sword ghosts make it more noticeable by punishing you for running into them in ways that walls don’t.

But this is also the section with the game’s best inventory puzzle. Understand that most inventory puzzles in any Tomb Raider are trivial — the sort of thing where a wall has a triangular hole, say, and then you find a triangular key. When you find an item, you either have seen where it goes and immediately know it, or you keep exploring until you find where it goes. But here, after an extremely difficult jumping sequence, pursued only because there was no place else to go, I found that the reward for my heroic efforts was a lump of chalk. Chalk? What use was that? Then I remembered some dialogue from the level’s intro cutscene, where Lara mentioned that a book she had found in the previous level showed how to draw protective circles. But again, what use was that? There were some imps nearby, but I couldn’t use the chalk against them. Then I remembered how the very beginning of the level had a pathway blocked by a ghostly rider, and a suspiciously off-color tile on the path he rode. I suppose not everyone would experience this like me, but I was quite pleased to be able, for once, to solve a puzzle in this game by thinking. I haven’t generally been fond of the talking bits in the Tomb Raider series — I think the designers are much better at telling stories visually and non-verbally — but it paid off here.