![]() That’s a good thing, too, because you’ll be doing a great deal of traversing the great outdoors and exploring ancient ruins in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The exotic Peruvian jungle is the backdrop for Lara’s return to the lush forests, ruined temples, and interactions with native tribes that feels much more Tomb Raider than the mountains of Russia. The dubious Order of the Trinity, led by Pedro Dominguez return as the game’s main antagonists, but this time their clash with Lara Croft takes place in a starkly different setting. It’s dark and shocking at times, and there’s a sense of desperation in the urgency of Lara and best friend Jonah’s plight. ![]() It’s all very high-stakes stuff, and much of Lara’s character development throughout the game centers around her coming to terms with taking responsibility for her actions and dealing with the consequences of her behavior. She’s given a major reality check early into Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s story, however, as her lust for an ancient artifact leads her to unwittingly put into a motion a series of cataclysmic events that devastated an entire city, and actually threaten to destroy the world. She’s well and truly a hardened badass archeologist –young, but confident in her ability and matured from her experiences over the past two games. Lara Croft’s coming of age story is now officially over. What was less clear, though, was just how much the experience was going to push beyond the familiarity of its formula to show me something new, and in doing so, elevate it beyond merely a great game to something truly excellent. After just a few hours of gameplay, I had no doubt in my mind that this is absolutely the most accomplished culmination of that design we’ve yet seen. Shadow of the Tomb Raider marks the third installment in the new rebooted series, and I was particularly keen to see how developers Eidos Montreal & Crystal Dynamics had iterated on the foundations of a formula it had first implemented so successfully five years ago. The gameplay mechanics and level design were also brilliant, modernizing the series with a blueprint that sought to balance exploration, puzzle-solving, and combat in a satisfying loop. It breathed life into a franchise that had felt increasingly dated. I adored its darker, grittier narrative direction and the decision to evolve Lara Croft into something deeper and more complex than her original 90s, impossibly proportioned fantasy design. Over the course of the next several centuries, Eike then becomes an immortal wanderer who permanently loses all his long-term memories on a regular periodic basis.2013’s Tomb Raider reboot was one of my favorite games of the previous console generation. Once the air clears, Wolfgang Wagner's younger self is revealed to in fact actually be Eike himself (it is subtly hinted earlier in the game in a conversation between Eike and Helena on her deathbed shortly before her death, that Helena finds that Eike's voice sounds shockingly similar to Wolfgang's). This enrages Homunculus in turn and just before (s)he transforms into the Stone again, (s)he curses Wolfgang "to suffer the eternal night of youth" (the blessing of eternal youth but saddled with perpetually recurring amnesia) thus filling the room with smoke and lightning. Homunculus callously derides him for his spontaneous emotional outburst and an enraged Wolfgang then tries to reseal him/her with a pentagram. Instantly becoming extremely depressed, he immediately experiences a nervous breakdown and fervently wishes to be young again like Eike (who he had met earlier and who impressed him with his youthful energy), so as to have a "do-over". ![]() Upon learning of this from a newly awakened Homunculus (who appears once the Stone evaporates into smoke), Wolfgang suddenly realizes that he has ultimately wasted the majority of his adult life for literally nothing as he has neglected his family by spending virtually all of his time over the years seeking to cure his wife's progressively degenerative illness by attempting to create a Philosopher's Stone in his lab, only for her to die anyway before he ever managed to accomplish anything with Homonculus's revelation that the Philosopher's Stone is merely just the Homonculus' sealed form and not really an alchemical creation, it turns out that it was always impossible to begin with, already right from the very start. It is revealed in a flashback that Homunculus is actually a djinn or genie imprisoned in the form of what became known as the Philosopher's Stone, and not at all an artificial life created by Wolfgang Wagner. Unable to read the burned notes, Hugo apparently never learns about what his father was working on and thus never desires revenge or create a time machine, causing the Hugo and Margarete in the present to disappear. ![]() "Eike enters the ruined lab and burns Wagner's notes about the Stone, just as Hugo and Margarete enter.
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