March 23, 2025|

Filed under: Editorial, Featured

Passing the Buck Chapter 12: Lara Croft and the Temple of Incredibly Poor Life Choices

In “Passing the Buck: A Game Pass Study,” Wolfman Jew has bought a three month subscription to Game Pass. With only ninety-one days he can’t get back, it’s on him to try as much as he can. Every day he’ll play something, anything, even if it’s only for half an hour, and write down his thoughts. How many games will he play? How many will he finish? How many revelations will he find? And how much of his sanity will be left by April Fool’s Day?

A recent theme of this project is my slow increase in games. I add more new games a week on top of the ones I started earlier in the project, creating a strange flow where I’m trying to adequately juggle different experiences and reach the credits when I can. This has continued into Chapter 12; this time, I’ll be playing seven new games. I’ve got this week off, and the backlog of games from previous weeks shrunk dramatically in our previous episode. There’s simply more space in need of filling. And, if I’m being honest, maybe there’s also an idiotic macho thing involved. Several weeks ago I started a list of all the games I’ve played for the series. It would be fun to keep ticking that number up.

Now, the reason I went with seven was because in my head, I could start them one a day. Each one would get to be the start. Wouldn’t that be fun? Except… this would not work in practice. Almost all of these games are far longer than one session could support, and more often than not it’s best for me to give each one more time. Five of the seven are major releases by big publishers, so unless I really bounce off one it’ll need to stick around for a few days. I’d also like to beat at least a couple if I could, so starting early and working steadily is an important goal. This is just a better way. Smarter, more efficient, and better for my schedule—especially since I’ve got more time to give to this project.

Image: Source Gaming. Some of the delightful architecture in Mirror’s Edge.

Of course, I should have never expected any scheme in “Passing the Buck” to go as planned. One game became more important than I expected. Several were harder to get into and became far less important to the schedule. Several unexpected difficulty spikes flared up, even though that’s exactly what any player should expect from a game. And an intensive session on the last day of the week fully threatened to upend my process. That one especially exemplified the concrete issues at the heart of this week’s plan—and perhaps the issues at the heart of this entire quixotic process. Fighting so hard to get those numbers up of what I played and beat is an inherently doomed strategy, one I fully understood going in. And yet, I still pushed myself. Is this a bad idea? Probably! But hopefully we can get something out of it.

What I played:

Shadow of the Tomb Raider: In her haste to stop the organization Trinity from accessing an all-powerful weapon, Lara Croft inadvertently causes a series of natural disasters. As she hunts for a long-lost artifact in the Peruvian mountains to fix things, she snipes at enemies, jumps across jungles, and explores a cloistered community threatened with encroachment by the outside world.
Dead Cells: Truthfully, no substantial progress of any kind was made this week. I have to break the passive present tense voice that I use for these synopses because there’s simply nothing to report.
Age of Mythology: Retold: After resurrecting Osiris, Arkantos and his Grecian-Egyptian band move to the Norselands, stopping the cyclops Gargarensis from starting Ragnarok. But the villain attacks Atlantis to open its gate to the underworld, and while the population is evacuated, Arkantos becomes elevated to godhood and stops Poseidon’s living statue.
Jusant: A lone wanderer slowly climbs up a massive tower, one that was home to a society before some cataclysm turned its ocean into a desert. To climb, they have to find handholds one palm at a time, swing over gaps using their climbing rope, and make shocking leaps of faith.
Mirror’s Edge: The freelance runner Faith parkours across the roofs of a sterile and controlling metropolis, smuggling contraband and uncovering the mystery of a murdered politician. Her skills come to life through an inventive take on first-person platforming that make you tuck, roll, leap, and run across walls.
Kunitsu-gami: Path of the Goddess: A goddess attempts to heal a land that has been overtaken by a monstrous infection, piece by piece. As she cannot protect herself during each act of ritual cleansing, a warrior by her side must protect her by brawling enemies directly and ordering various aides around to protect the routes he can’t cover.
Spyro Reignited Trilogy: The original trilogy of classic PS1-era hero Spyro the Dragon gets remade in one collection. While each successive one evolves on the last, the core is the same: Spyro bashes and spews fire through individual levels in search of items to collect.
Crysis: Officially on a mission to rescue scientists from the North Korean military, the futuristic soldiers of Raptor Team soon discover that the island they’re infiltrating is home to a dangerous alien force. As the group is whittled down one at a time, one member has to fight his way through a massive, contiguous space in this benchmark shooter.
The Big Con: After learning that her family’s 1990s video rental store is ten days away from being shut down, rambunctious teenager Ali goes on a cross-country trip to steal enough money to cover the debt. This entails games and puzzles about pickpocketing, spying, changebreaking, and trickery as you slowly work up to your big score.
Minecraft: I attempt to continue recreating Johto from Pokémon Gold & Silver, only to struggle further with defining the game’s map. Because of this, all I manage to create are a few routes and Violet City, whose unconventional structure is challenging to depict.
Hi-Fi Rush: After defeating Vandelay’s howling mad money man Roquefort, Chai and the gang confront Peppermint’s brother Kale, who’s taken control of the company. They defeat him in a star-studded final battle, rescue Peppermint’s mind-controlled mother Roxanne, and Chai gets to finally, officially indulge his rockstar fantasy.

Sunday, March 16: Started and completed Cozumel in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, continued in Dead Cells, completed Chapters 17 through 24 in Age of Mythology: Retold, and started and completed Chapters 1 and 2 in Jusant.

I was not a fan of Tomb Raider’s 2013 reboot. While that was also true of the series at large—my only prior experience involved flailing about in the first game as an eight-year-old—the game didn’t work for me. Recasting Lara Croft as a “survivor” rather than an adventurer felt off; it made her feel reactive and defined by things happening to her. This was somewhat a product of marketing over the game, like the ugly rape imagery in the notorious first trailer and the “a survivor is born” tagline, but I also felt put off by her shockingly violent death scenes (which have been toned down a lot this time). Not that I don’t like seeing a good impaling, but it felt emblematic of how “maturity” in the mainstream gaming scene was increasingly focused on cinematic, gritty, M-rated blockbusters. The only way for an icon like Lara to be a “real character” was to be dark and threatened, apparently. Add in the fact that the climbing and, well, tomb raiding felt incidental, and I was left with a game with good archery combat, annoying skill trees, and not a lot of the stuff that felt distinct. To this day, I have no idea why I bought it new. Most likely it was the positive critical reception, or that 2013 didn’t have a lot of exciting releases. Almost all of my favorites from the year were ones I played years after the fact, like Gone Home or Pikmin 3. Anyway, I finished it, had most of my fun in the Challenge Tombs, and sold it to Gamestop. After that, the only time I’d engage with the Tomb Raider franchise would be through the silly first movie, which I watched for a Source Gaming podcast several years ago.

Image: Source Gaming. Lara exploring an ancient site.

You might find it strange for me to make time for the third game in the “Survivor Trilogy” (Rise of the Tomb Raider left Game Pass before “Passing the Buck” started). You might also find it strange to learn that I actually had a good time with it. And at least so far, I think age is the reason. For one thing, as this series has shown repeatedly, the industry is a lot richer and broader. There are more games that can explore the material this game doesn’t, and it’s easier than ever to access them. Blockbusters feel less creatively threatening, even if their size is a genuine problem for the industry. Perhaps most of all, though Shadow of the Tomb Raider is just good at what it wants to do. The action pops, the game feel is strong, and it looks really pretty. And I’m enjoying the plot, which starts with Lara climbing into a tomb shaped like a giant skull and accidentally causing the end of the world. Now who’s reactive? This is definitely not a game “for me,” but I generally did enjoy the prologue and look forward to seeing what more trouble I can cause.

Image: Source Gaming. The staggering heights of Jusant‘s climbing never stops shocking.

While Lara’s escape from a tsunami of her own making was the most pleasant surprise of the day, the best newcomer was undoubtedly Jusant. This chill, indie platformer does what the new Tomb Raider games don’t by making the climbing the entire experience. The mechanics are inventive, the use of the climbing rope as a physical object ingenious, and there are just so many nice little details. You know, movement in games is really special to me. You see Mario jumping, and I see a ballad of puzzles, challenges, and self-expression. Movement that is a problem and reward all in one. The movement in Jusant captures this perfectly. It’s extremely fun, and it’s hard, and mastering it makes it even more fun. I’m not invested in the plot beyond the broader aesthetics of surveying a lost world, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. What matters is the feeling of climbing, wall running, and making those all important jumps. Realizing when to put in a life-saving piton and when to rappel down far enough that you can swing to the other side. This stuff is just catnip to me, and I’m happy I’m getting an experience like this right at the end of this project.

Monday, March 17: started and completed Chapters 1 and 2 of Mirror’s Edge, completed Chapters 25 through 29 in Age of Mythology: Retold, started and played several stages in Kunitsu-gami: Path of the Goddess, and rescued Jonah and completed the Underworld Gate Challenge Tomb in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

I really wanted to like Kunitsu-gami. The genre mashup gameplay sounded crazy; it’s ostensibly a 3D brawler, but that hides an extensive fusion of real time strategy and tower defense where you protect a goddess by directing various helpers around the level. The art style and graphics were distinct, with incredible enemy design, and it seemed to harken back to an era of Capcom that was less risk-averse, the one that gave us God Hand and Zack & Wiki and Ōkami. Everything about this production would give a gaming executive a migraine, and that made it one of the most intriguing games of last year. I even put it as a suggestion in my holiday wishlist. And yet, I just couldn’t get into it at all, right from the start. The menus, the structure, the way you’re taught… it just didn’t work at all. It was like punching a brick wall. I found the RTS stuff cumbersome, the sword fighting dull, and my enthusiasm was sapped quickly. As much as this series was made in part to push me into trying new things, it almost feels like I have less patience for certain games now. I’ll try to give it another chance again later in the week, but this was a bummer of a first impression.

Image: Source Gaming. I should be clear, though, that this game does look absolutely stunning.

If Kinutsu-gami is a game out of time, Mirror’s Edge often feels dated. It’s all about parkour, the thing to do around the time of the game’s 2008 release date. Combat is terrible when it happens, which is often. The design of the main character, the story beats, the aesthetics of its animated cutscenes; everything points to that late Aughts energy. And yet, it’s also incredibly forward thinking. This is most obvious in the parkour gameplay, which puts to lie any claim that platforming is inherently bad in first person. Faith runs, leaps, climbs, and slides gloriously, and her kit fits into that same role Jusant has of turning movement into the main thing you learn and solve. Complexity arises from what you do as much as where you do it. This kind of design philosophy diverged hard from the mainstream gaming ideal of the time. And a lot of the other elements follow that, like excellent graphics. It’s all pristine white buildings, big blocky colors, and very little ambiguity (the exception being the sewer in Chapter 2, which is ugly and a nightmare to explore). Even the conspicuous red objects denoting where you should go, a predecessor to the omnipresent yellow tape of modern video games, aren’t merely functional but actively add to the palette. Faith lives in the kind of world Roy Lichtenstein would be actively ripping off and claiming as his own. While I was hoping to like this enough to see it through to the end, now that it’s in my hands I’m making it a priority. Now the only problem is figuring out whether I played this before, because I’ve got a distinct memory that I tried and very quickly gave up on it. At the very least, my Xbox has no recorded Achievements from the thing, so if I did play it the experience was so short that this is still new to me.

Image: Source Gaming. Sliding on a rope never feels as good as it does in this game.

Tonight, I got a message from Microsoft; thirteen days until the subscription runs out. I’m not sure exactly how much of Monday the 31st it’s counting, but whatever. We are two weeks away. Kunitsu-gami is the forty-eighth game I’ve covered, and I’m still raring to go. To be honest, I haven’t really spent that much time playing over the past couple days—at least, it doesn’t feel like it. To be honest, it feels almost ethereal, the number and amount and all. This project has been such a staying force in my mind not just since it started, but in the months of work leading up to it. I’ve gotta figure out what to do afterwards. I gotta figure out the most efficient way to buy everything I’d like to buy.

Tuesday, March 18: started and got 31% completion in Spyro the Dragon in Spyro Reignited Trilogy, completed the “Age of the Trident” campaign in Age of Mythology: Retold, started and rescued a hostage in Crysis, and completed Chapter 3 of Mirror’s Edge. I think this is

Spyro 1 (or, at least, this remake thereof) is alright. I don’t think the underlying mantle is amazing—the level design is kinda bland and samey, perhaps the consequence of being such an early 3D platformer—but this is a triumph of game feel. Spyro moves with a pleasant agility, his fire breath is fun to use, and there are dozens of little tricks and details that make it fun to play. My favorite is a little animation if you walk the lil’ dragon up to the edge of a surface; he’ll do a small motion. It’s small and something most players won’t notice, but I think it’s central to the game’s modest charms. Even if the levels aren’t particularly imaginative, they’re absolute eye candy and a joy to see. I’m not sure how far I’ll go with it, though that’s not meant as a dismissal. This is a collection of three remakes, like Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy, and I should sample all three. That shouldn’t be that difficult if we carve out one day for each. My struggles with Crash were intense and consistent, and I certainly made my feelings known, but those came from realities endemic to Crash’s gameplay. Spyro doesn’t have that. It’s kind of standard for 3D platformers, and that’s something I can gel with. Would I be falling into a rut if I described this as I repeatedly did of Avowed, as “comfort food” for its genre? Because that is exactly what it is.

Image: Source Gaming. The remake of Spyro the Dragon in the Reignited Trilogy. I should confess that some of my screenshots may appear slightly blurry; that’s just the result of the movement. It looks very crisp in motion.

I did expect to enjoy the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, but I only picked it because it was high time I played a Spyro the Dragon game. And while I didn’t expect to have fun in Crysis, it’s here for similar reasons. This was “the” benchmark of technical achievement for games when I was a teen. It was this legendary game that only the best PCs could run and can at times still be a bit hard to wrangle. Crysis was a cultural touchstone for PC gaming and it’s worth pursuing on just that metric, but it has always had this aura to me, someone whose experience with playing on computers began at Age of Empires II and ended at Age of Mythology (though I did spent a couple months in 2017 exploring Steam through Undertale, Pony Island, Anodyne, and the pretty okay rabbinical detective noir The Shivah). I should note that this isn’t that Crysis; this was the mildly notorious 2011 Xbox 360 port that tapered down its content to optimize on console. In my mind, it was Crysis’ graphics and open world island that made it unadaptable, but while those are shockingly impressive for 2007, it’s actually the physics. Huge numbers of things in the world are physics objects, allowing for action movie bombast as you watch entire installations explode and debris realistically collapse. This and an excised level were the main changes. It’s impressive even in this compromised form, but trees merely collapse, not shatter into pieces. There’s a part of me that’s a bit sad knowing I’ll probably never get to experience the real thing, though apparently the Switch version comes closer. But that’s silly. Compromised experiences are valuable in their own right, and it still keeps the very intense combat that was always the core.

Image: Source Gaming. Things still blow up good, of course.

Removed from the whole “revolutionary take on game engines that helped chart the course of PC gaming” thing, Crysis is very much of its time. Even more than Mirror’s Edge. It’s a shooter in a post-Halo world through and through, all regenerating health, small weapon pools, what might have been the most open “level” in a shooter thus far, and enemies that can rip you to shreds in an instant. A lot of my time was spent—at least, when I wasn’t being sniped and sent back to the checkpoint—hiding from fire. As I’ve gotten older, my tastes in first-person shooters have calcified into the atmospheric or the aggressive. Metroid Prime and Doom. This is a very well crafted version of something I don’t quite like. But I… do want to keep on with it, at least to an extent. Take it more on its terms. We’ll ideally start and finish the last new game of the week tomorrow, and with that, we’ll be able to really explore these as they go on.

Wednesday, March 19: started and completed The Big Con, completed the flashback and entered Kuwaq Yaku in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, completed Chapter 4 in Mirror’s Edge, did more work in Minecraft, and continued in Crysis.

You know, I wasn’t feeling The Big Con a ton across its roughly three hour runtime. To be clear, it’s a good game. The mechanics are interesting, it’s very charming and queer, the Nineties-inspired four color art is fantastic, and its isometric levels remind me of EarthBound. But… I dunno. A lot of the dialogue was a bit too self-referential. Okay, far too self-referential. There’s literally a scene with a guy who thinks he’s in a video game and is lampshading all the tropes you’ve been going through for the past couple hours, and you have to do the same to let his guard down and fleece him. My enthusiasm for this kind of thing has eroded steadily over the last few years, especially as the entire world of pop culture becomes increasingly meta. It feels like so much of our intake is designed to keep us always “on,” always plugged in. Metaverses and crossovers and live services. The biggest movie of last year’s most notable casting coup was having Channing Tatum “reprise” a character he was famous for not playing. Sometimes it feels like the subversive pop cultural revolution my teenage self always wished for was made on a monkey’s paw. There’s also this line of dialogue from the heroine that seems to riff on the single most notorious racist statement of 2015 American politics, and I’m really hoping this is me bringing my own baggage into this and not a deliberate creative choice. Anyway, perhaps it’s a bit hypocritical to admit that one of the things that brought me back was a reference itself, but please forgive me because it was a reference to goddamn Road House. Road House! In a game that’s only a few years old! I guess it fits the 1990s setting, but still. I didn’t think anyone who isn’t in my personal orbit cared about that movie. They certainly should.

Image: Source Gaming. Poster in the center. That’s the Road House poster. The bar is called the “Triple Truce.” Why did none of my friends alert me to a game with Road House references?

While the story is impactful and a great depiction of the excitement, discomfort, and foolhardiness of youth, the real draw to me is the gameplay. The Big Con is an adventure game; you have to solve puzzles by finding certain items and doing a bit of pixel hunting. It’s more streamlined than something like Day of the Tentacle, as the story is split up into chunks. But while these individual problems are sometimes required, they are not your overall goal. You need to make a certain amount of money to complete each area, and as you are an aspiring thief, this means finding scratch. You changebreak cashiers, asking them to break bills and finding ways to kill their concentration. You listen in on people to find ways to cheat them. You solve those point and click adventure puzzles as big scores. Most of all, you pickpocket people through a mini-game, one that’s really fun (until it stops being fun in the final acts due to the higher difficulty, though you can skip the prompt in the options). And since the game employs a structure akin to 3D Mario, most of these are effectively optional so long as you do enough of them to pass the threshold. Maybe you’ll overhear a woman mention her girlfriend and mosey on to the clothing store to lift her wallet, and maybe you’ll abandon that quest to eavesdrop on folks in the cafeteria, since all of them know a piece of a quiz going on nearby. I did both. This is a fascinating system, since it takes a genre that’s normally very structured and fuses it with one that prioritizes player agency. Well, mostly. As it goes on the game makes more and more of its content mandatory. Perhaps that’s an inevitability for the sake of the narrative. But it’s a bit annoying. That’s the point where I had to use the accessibility option.

Image: Source Gaming. On its own, the mechanic really is just a pretty basic mini-game. I repeatedly played a far, far worse version of this exact prompt many times in Fable. It’s when you combine it with everything else that it gets fun and thematically on point.

I’d like to, ideally, get as much done this week as possible and make the next more simple. Some of these games are likely to spill over, so using this time is paramount. At the very least, I’d like to really make a push to try to finish Mirror’s Edge by Saturday. It’s strange; it feels like I’ve accomplished very little of what I wanted to, even if I have played extensively and clearly have made progress. Well, usually. I’ve been open that I don’t care about beating Dead Cells, but the last half hour or so of my time today was spent dying again and again in Crysis. You’re beset by two tanks, get a rocket launcher, and it only has enough ammo to destroy one of them if you make every shot. Enemy fire is painfully accurate. Your armor suit barely holds enough power to shrug off a couple extra hits, and the energy that powers it is sapped even by running. Thinking of games purely in terms of how much you did in a short amount of time isn’t a great way to engage with them, but it’s impossible not to here. And my time with these games was mostly taken without real gains.

Thursday, March 20: completed Chapters 5 and 6 of Mirror’s Edge, completed Track 10 of Hi-Fi Rush, completed Chapters 3 and 4 in Jusant, started, completed Summer Forest World, and got 18% completion in Spyro: Ripto’s Rage! in Spyro Reignited Trilogy, and reached the Hidden City in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

I gotta say, was definitely not expecting the middle third of Jusant to take quite so long. I was debating whether it’d be better to beat it or Hi-Fi Rush today (ideally, the latter tomorrow and this on Saturday), but the outer and inner chasms of the mountain are mind-bogglingly big. If this is yet another game inspired by Ico, it captures the absolute, unbelievable, towering scale. You are an insect in this world. On the plus side, I get to spend more time with my favorite game of the week, and especially its piton system. It’s one of those amazing “all in one” game mechanics, the kind I’ve written about a lot in the past. At most points, you can stick a piton in a wall as a de facto checkpoint. Since the rope is a real physics object, any of these can act as a new place for you to swing—or take up too much of the rope’s allotted space. I spent all of today playing with these features, but the most memorable moment came when I climbed back from an optional side area in Chapter 3. Ideally I should not be seeking these out with so little time left, but… look, I can’t not do it a bit. The room was right there. Anyway, I killed the rope from my descent so I’d have room enough to explore the room, only to find out that the climb back up is very hard. You have to set up pitons to slowly work your way from one handhold to another, and the structure makes it hard to get a good swing or get your pitons in a good height. Plus, the climb’s so high that if you make that second handhold, you’re gonna end up with too little slack and will need to slink back down and pull out those earlier pitons. I got a bit frustrated with the challenge for a bit, to be honest, but I did it. And it felt great. Again, Jusant belongs in the pantheon of games built around examining movement. But maybe I should only do one chapter apiece for the next two days. Maybe.

Image: Source Gaming. This is gonna go down as one of my most memorable experiences from games this year. I can’t deny being annoyed for part of it, and scared about whether I could actually get back, but god, figuring it out was so cool.

My understanding was that Spyro the Dragon, like its PlayStation counterpart Crash Bandicoot, got a big glow-up in its second game. Obviously, we’re only seeing the remake of Spyro: Ripto’s Rage here, but it is definitely true here. Everything’s at least a bit better. The world is significantly larger, hence my having only gotten 18% completion rather than 31%, but so far the level design is also more interesting with some limited but nice enough attempts at storytelling. There’s a better understanding of its collectibles. The new mini-games are mostly not good, but they are more distinct. Tom Kenny gets to do just a bit more as Spyro, the video game character he was always the most destined to play. I do think the game struggles to some extent with its pace and structure, where it’s linear but also kind of a collect-a-thon. Maybe the game should’ve ditched the collectibles and woven them into the more linear areas, since the pace is most rollicking when you’re zooming around. But Spyro’s speed makes that a lot easier to take.

Image: Source Gaming. Spyro: Ripto’s Rage is just a fundamentally “bigger” game than Spyro 1 in all aspects, including more interesting fights.

Let’s take the rest of the week into account. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is definitely not getting finished by Saturday, even though I’ve definitely made sizable progress. Lile Jusant and most other things, I need to skip most nonessential content, which means I’ll lose out on potentially interesting side quests and the Challenge Tombs but will also get to avoid the boring RPG elements. In addition, after thinking about it since Sunday night, I’ve also decided that I’d like to eschew my rule about deleting it after the week. I can’t explain why. Now, Mirror’s Edge, Jusant, and Hi-Fi Rush all can be beaten in the next few days and ideally will. These are all games with interesting ideas—I absolutely love that the new villains of Mirror’s Edge are evil corporate parkour masters; it’s a great way to up the stakes and add an appropriate new enemy—but they need to be finished. If I can, I’d also like to keep going outside my FPS rut with Crysis. Kunitsu-gami, on the other hand, is probably staying cut, which hurts.

Friday, March 21: completed Tracks 11, 12 and completed in Hi-Fi Rush, completed Chapters 7 and 8 in Mirror’s Edge, completed Chapters 5, 6, and completed Jusant, and continued in Crysis and Dead Cells.

Hi-Fi Rush ends as only it could: you fight a bad guy played by Roger Craig Smith, there’s an excruciating quicktime event, and the soundtrack blasts Nine Inch Nails in what’s gotta be the best use of a licensed song I’ve seen from a game in quite some time. I feel like I spent all of Hi-Fi Rush bouncing between compliments and complaints. Its basic brawling is really fun, and the stuff around it drags. Its story isn’t much to write home about, but it’s also charming with fun performances. Its graphics are incredible—to be clear, there’s not a caveat there. The graphics are just incredible. This is another game I’d put, happily and with respect, in the “B-Game” pile. The kind of game that should be the backbone of Game Pass and indeed was for a time. I’m not sure if I’ll rejoin Chai, Pettermint, and the rest in the sequel the revived Tango Gameworks is presumably already making, but… honestly, maybe? It might just be the fun ending or the music or something else, but I do want to see where this goes. I wanna see how this world might change and evolve, with refinements to what’s there and new directions.

Image: Source Gaming. The at times really cool, at times obnoxious final boss fight against Kale Vandelay.

Also finished: Jusant! Damn! Beating two games in a day always feels great, so even though I wish I had played more—largely because making a single jump in Mirror’s Edge‘s eighth chapter took over a damn hour—I can always look at those final climbs and feel wonderfully accomplished. You know, there’s a certain kind of game that clearly relishes in being a game. Beyond most games, I mean, since they are by design made by people who want to make games, i.e. “not David Cage.” It’s a special kind. Almost everything Nintendo makes is like this. FromSoftware and Capcom and Supergiant, too. For all the flack that “walking simulators” get, plenty of them fit, especially Gone Home and Firewatch. It’s hard to quantify exactly what distinguishes these and I’m certainly not ready to provide any rigorous explanation at 9:40 PM, but Jusant is totally in this field. The final climbs are these powerful, cinematic, dramatic bits, but they’re also elaborate and inventive puzzles. The way you move and leap, the sudden mechanics that come out of nowhere, and the way the game builds spaces wide enough that you have to find ways of using the pitons. I’d say it is also a game that tells its story through the gameplay, and that’s kinda true, but I also have to cop to the fact that I didn’t read any of the notes and logs you find across the mountain. That’s largely a product of the fact that I have ten days before this project ends, but I was also happy to take Jusant on merely vibes and feel emotionally stirred. The desiccated ships and seemingly abandoned homes and beautiful alien flora and fauna tell a grand story on its own.

Image: Source Gaming. A harsh and rewarding climb in Chapter 5.

This “quiet rejection of greater optional content” is a bit of a theme this week, and it’s one that’ll only get more so going forward. In the penultimate level of Hi-Fi Rush, I put aside my natural inclination to grab any doodad I find in a game because exactly how am I going to actually use any of the strewn about currency? In Shadow of the Tomb Raider I recognized that although the Challenge Tombs might be fun and grand, I’ll get similar cinematic adventures in the main story. And though it pains me, I think I might have to place the entirety of Crysis on that pile. It’s simply very hard and very expansive, so even after lowering the difficulty I’ve accepted that might have to be a casualty of this week. We’ll try to decide tomorrow. With two games done, my only other hard goals are to finish Mirror’s Edge and make some real, powerful, respectable forward progress in Tomb Raider. Lara and I are finding that damn box.

Saturday, March 22: completed Chapter 9 and Mirror’s Edge, started, completed the first world, and got 13% of Spyro: Year of the Dragon in Spyro Reignited Trilogy, and failed to find the Silver Box of Ix Chel, completed the optional mission “Stay of Execution,” entered and escaped the oil field, entered San Juan, found the Box, lost the Box, escaped the landslide, and reentered the Hidden City in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Yep, that was about half of a Triple-A game I beat in one very long session and with no box to show for it. Despite my claim from Thursday, I actually could beat Tomb Raider tonight. If I really wanted, I could blast through it and hoped to, much like how I beat Inscryption at the eleventh hour. But I’m going to take it just a bit slow this time. I’ve got this entry and most of a conclusion to write, plus editing and remaking the header with an image of Lara that was at least thirty percent more visible. Let’s just take it calm, try to manage time better, and be okay with breaking the rule I set about giving up on this after one week. And again, I’m not sure why this game has made me abandon a rule that exists to make my life easier. Perhaps, like Lara, I’m haunted by the need to pursue things, even when they are poor or unhelpful or do me harm. Perhaps I’m desperate to complete another game before the month is out, especially a big budget one. The ultimate reason is probably that its flavor of “bog standard cinematic shooter” is more on my wavelength, but we can’t get into that right now. It can’t overshadow the end of Mirror’s Edge and the remake of Spyro 3. Those deserve my time. So, since this is my week off, and since I went out of my way to prepare most of this on Friday night, I’m going to break another rule, at least in spirit. I decided from the start that each day’s entry could only take three paragraph, with an exception made for intros and conclusions. That is technically true here; I’ll use the other paragraphs to write about those games now. But the reason for that rule—to not spend hours late at night writing—will be abandoned. The bulk of the conclusion was done tonight, too, and it’s my way of using Tomb Raider to anchor the week and tie everything together. The letter of the law is in place, but the reasons for it are fully and entirely abandoned. But hell; we’re ten days from the finish line, and I made this hell by starting seven entirely new games in three days. I won’t tell if you won’t.

Image: Source Gaming. While most of the Spyro mini-games aren’t great, and this one isn’t either, I can’t help but be charmed by Spyro’s skateboard skills.

Playing Spyro: Year of the Dragon has made me realize that the Spyro franchise, at least going on these three games, has a somewhat… obligatory structure. Like, the games have a story predicated on overcoming villains, but Gnasty Gnorc and Ripto and the Sorceress are incompetent cartoon villains barely able to threaten the NPCs you help. The levels and McGuffins have almost no weight to them; they might as well just be placeholders. I mean, the hub worlds are literally called “worlds.” This is not a complaint. It’s also something that Spyro: Year of the Dragon does push back on a bit, with a somewhat more involved villain and relevant collectibles; you’re birthing stolen dragon eggs and getting NPCs to help you find new worlds. I don’t need 3D platformers to have an involved story, the best justification for doing something in a game is for that thing to be fun, and the Reignited Trilogy has that in spades. But it is strange. Again, though, don’t take this as bad, and I’m happy that I got to try and enjoy a Spyro game after however many years.

Image: Source Gaming. As Mirror’s Edge goes on, it adds in snipers. Some of them are a bit too accurate, but they mostly act as a good way to ratchet up the challenge.

On the note of things that combine high polish and some questionable bits, Mirror’s Edge was a mostly very fun trip. The issues are pretty clear: the story’s somewhat bland, backflipping off a wall is inconsistent, and the combat is far too extensive. Faith, like Sonic the Hedgehog, slows down way too much when she’s killing baddies. But, damn, what amazing design. It’s incredibly fun, and I love how the game constantly throws in new ideas alongside more complex level design. This was made even more clear after I hit the credits. I needed better images to use in the headers, replayed a few minutes of older stages, and it was obvious in retrospect how the early levels are easier, more gracious about handling failure, and ease you into things. Kinda staggering getting to see that in such stark terms. I always understood why, but the past week has shown exactly why fans had clamored so loudly and for so long for a sequel. Maybe we could see Mirror’s Edge as not of its time or merely good or innovative but something of a doorway. At a time where shooters were being thrown into a funnel of tastes and mechanics, and where platformers were struggling to define themselves, this showed a fascinating potential path for both genres. After years of wondering about the game and maybe having failed to get it once, this let me into a world that had always intrigued me.

Outro: Objectively, my week went great. I played so many games, and while I’d have liked to play a few for longer, the fact that I also beat so many feels great. Shadow of the Tomb Raider was also a surprisingly pleasant experience that I didn’t expect to like so much. But…

Look, I would be lying if I said that I felt particularly positive this week. It’s not just I’m driven to try and play and finish and write, driven in ways that are sometimes harmful. Just like Lara and Ali Barlow and and Faith, I can’t help myself but do these things. But this week, I needed any kind of distraction available. It’s hard to put this into words, especially in a space that isn’t particularly well suited for personal or social discourse, but I spent the past week seeing the field I’ve devoted a third of my life to be irreparably assaulted, devalued, and broken. Every time I was struggling through Mirror’s Edge‘s bad atrium level or shooting my way through Crysis, it was impossible not to think about the grim future of Library Science. My despondency and anger is beyond comfortable description. And perhaps that’s part of why I can’t help but feel disappointed in my work this week. Perhaps writing about a game will help.

Image: Source Gaming. About the only image I took using Shadow‘s Photography Mode.

This week started with me airing twelve-year-old issues about Tomb Raider (2013). It was a game that frustrated me in its presentation, marketing, and design. At the time, it felt like a present of gaming that was stretching into the future, one where blockbusters were stuck on a road of gritty, cinematic airs. The tacked-on RPG elements and skill trees were irritating, though I had no idea they would infect the rest of this industry so thoroughly. I played it and felt some kind of creative loss, and this ennui might have influenced my writing as a critic. But that was also a long time ago. Tomb Raider‘s in an odd and somewhat precarious place, ever since it was purchased by the dystopian and currently collapsing Embracer Group. The games industry and I have both changed, and the Triple-A scene feels less like a threat. It’s easier to see the points of distinction between the blockbuster games. And most of all, playing this game has shown me that there are things about Tomb Raider‘s Survivor Trilogy that do distinguish it from the crowded field of big budget games.

I think it starts with the violence. I saw the gore in the reboot as excessive and at times bordering on the pornographic. I’m pretty sure I’d feel the same way about the death animations—I mean, they were really extreme—but I think there is something there. While Uncharted (the obvious counterpoint for the Survivor Trilogy) openly riffs on Indiana Jones, Shadow of the Tomb Raider makes me think of more violent, gritty action. When Lara covers herself in mud to more easily gut Trinity goons from the shadows, she’s following Arnold in Predator. Her climbs through cramped holes are nasty, horror movie scenes. This reaches a fever pitch after things for Lara have gone south. A new friend has been killed, the Silver Box seems lost forever, and she and her best friend Jonah have been separated by an attack chopper. She finds herself at an oil field. Flames are everywhere as Trinity sets fires indiscriminately. Rourke, the sleazy militant arm of the cult, has tapped Lara’s phone and crows over having allegedly murdered Jonah. As she comes to an oil platform to do her normal Tomb Raider reboot climbing, the platform explodes and sends her into the water. The Drowning Lara can’t stop thinking about her culpability in this world-ending calamity, a recurring theme in the game about how exploration creates pain to explorers and that which they explore. And then she rises from the water, backed with flame, hate, and determination. There’s a man in front of her in need of stabbing. Good thing too. He’s packing a machine gun.

Image: Source Gaming. I planned to use this in the header, but it works better here.

This extraordinarily strange roaring rampage of revenge—one that seems as indebted to Spec Ops: The Line as it does First Blood and Apocalypse Now—is incredibly cool. It’s violent, dark, and crazy. Lara kills dozens of people and blows up the oil field in the aim of survivalist fury. That’s not even the start of the crazy, as about twenty minutes earlier Lara gets Mark of the Ninja-esque drug arrows that get guards to kill each other in fear. It’s also not the last word on her. After it turns out that Jonah is alive and they weren’t going to kill off the second main character offscreen, he helps give her that archaeologist spark back, and they go to the San Juan library / strange Catholic crypt. But during this insanity, it really hit me. In 2013, I saw the violence as a cheap and largely meaningless flavor Tomb Raider was desperately trying to grab. I never considered that this was a legitimate and deliberate artistic choice. I never considered that what irritated me was something that might be irritating in execution and not inherently bad.

What does that violence mean? Well, it’s been too long for me to speak for the first one, but at least in Shadow, I think is the game’s vision of archaeology, colonialism, and power as intertwined in a fundamentally destructive way. The conflict is set around Piatiti, an indigenous Peruvian community that’s existed in isolation for four hundred years. They keep themselves cloistered from two threats, imperialist outside encroachment and a doomsday weapon they’ve sworn to keep from the world. But this silver box can influence people into wanting to use it, and the promise of permanent safety and preservation has so affected one member that he left the tribe, founded an clandestine conspiracy, and has a list of bodies to his name in the interest of protecting his birthplace’s isolation and safety. One of those is Lara’s father; this conspiracist was frightened that the man’s unbridled archaeological fervor would expose Piatiti. He was probably right to be frightened, since we see the Croft estate, and it’s filled with essentially stolen artifacts. Lara has if nothing else inherited her dad’s obsession with archaeology as an avenue of finding and understanding things and will think nothing of throwing herself into anything so long as it allows her to solve a riddle or uncover an item. She is destruction in the name of knowledge. It’s why the inciting incident is her helping end the world. There’s an ancient magical item, and her taking it causes all these world-ending natural disasters, but she can’t not get it before the bad guys. I mean, that’s what any explorer would do.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the prerequisite, Uncharted-esque escape sequences. It’s mixed.

Shadow features multiple towns you can explore. There’s the trailing mission in a Mexican city that gets wiped off the face of the Earth, as well as the two towns in Peru. Again, I don’t know if this was something Rise of the Tomb Raider had, along with any revelations about Trinity and the Croft family that were not referenced in this game. They have people you can talk to, and side quests you can help with (or ignore if you’ve got a deadline). I assume part of this is the game trying to find new ways to add content and get you to play for longer, and it’s certainly a better way to do that than telling you to get X numbers of plants or hang Y guards from a tree, but it also is a clear attempt to make these spaces more than just playgrounds for Lara. You could point to the NPCs’ naturalistic dialogue as adding to this, too, as well as regular comments about how the locations you explore have history that matters to people she meets. They’re not dead.

I shouldn’t necessarily overplay these additions. This is still a game with a secret tribe of “animalistic” cave people who are about as exoticized as anything I’ve seen in this kind of story. It’s also a game that has to pull back a bit, with Lara having to be an ultimately good person, though I don’t think that’s an inherently bad compromise. But I think about how this game came out in 2018, at a time of some degree of reflection in the games industry. That’s the year God of War became serious and contemplative; it’s the year Rockstar upped their penchant for drama in Red Dead Redemption 2. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is definitely part of this and making an effort to examine its property—and, maybe, the high adventure genre it’s part of. For the most part, it succeeds, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the game wraps a bow around this thorny question.

Image: Source Gaming. Wanted to get an image of Crysis that showed off its graphics a bit better.

I normally spend time on self-reflection, and it would have value now—especially since my sleep, which was always something to protect during this project, has gotten somewhat worse. Figuring out what’s going on and recentering myself and all that. But it’s past 11:50 right now, so maybe we’ll just have to table that for next chapter, like everything else. All that matters is this: one more week. Just one! We’re gonna close back up to only four new games, alongside whatever from the previous weeks I’d like to do. See you then.

Read all of “Passing the Buck” here!