tomb raider | (2013)

As you can tell even from the screenshot taken by my iPhone, Tomb Raider is a gorgeous game. I often find myself stopping to admire the visual craftsmanship on display here, wondering why anyone would even entertain the thought of entering a new generation of video game consoles. Playing the game, on the other hand, makes me think developers need to step out of 2005 before they even consider designing software for upcoming hardware.

This is everything you’ve seen before: button prompts shoved in your face, things you can interact with have icons that appear when you approach them, and half-assed RPG mechanics that consist of little more than a skill tree filled with useless and/or redundant abilities. And it’s a reboot of an old franchise, which is the popular thing these days. But I really don’t want to go too deeply into the game. No, I’d rather focus on one particular part of the game that proved just how little game developers think these things out.

Protagonist Lara Croft has a torch. The torch can be lit at various sources of fire found scattered throughout the game. The torch, and by extension the fire, reacts to things fairly realistically. A few hours into the game you enter a room that has a few kerosene lanterns strewn about. You pick one up, and you learn that you can toss these in an arc much like a grenade. The room has a glass partition in the middle with a small opening at the top, which is meant for Lara to climb through to flip a switch or something (I’ve forgotten already). Once you’ve done this, it triggers an enemy to come in and turn on some poisonous gas that slowly starts filling the sectioned off part of the room that you’re in. You climb back out via the hole you entered from, and toss one of those kerosene lanterns through the same hole. The gas is flammable, and the entire room explodes, glass shattering, machinery destroyed, flames dancing everywhere.

There’s a little optional goal in this area where you have to find and burn five propaganda posters with your torch. There was one in the room you entered before you crawled through the hole. There was no fire source, but you could throw a lantern at the poster and burn it that way. Once the room explodes, you can progress to the far side of the room and discover another poster, unscathed from the explode-y, fiery destruction you just caused. Any remaining lanterns also got obliterated in the blast, so what do you do?

Man, there’s fire EVERYWHERE now. Just light your torch that way!

Nope.

Fine, let’s just ignore the fact that the poster is the only thing in the room that didn’t suffer from the explosion. But you mean to tell me that I can’t just stick my torch in any old fire and get a light that way? For the sake of video game-iness, I need to backtrack to the last “official” fire source to get my torch lit ‒ running past perfectly good fire ‒ then go back to burn that poster. It’s kind of ridiculous; this is a game with real-time weather effects that go so far as to make it look like raindrops are splashing against your television, but I can’t use random fire to light a torch. You know what’s even more ridiculous?

Shortly after that sequence, you find a tool that lets you make fire whenever the hell you want. Why couldn’t I just do that in the first place?! 

Yes, I’m nitpicking. Thing is, though, is that people want video games to be taken as a serious form of art. And with the way games continue to edge their way towards being more cinematic than actual game, it’s not something that’s outside the realm of possibility. But come on, things like what I explained above are the product of lazy design. At the end of the day the game is fine. It’s entertaining, moves at a fast pace, and even has some moderately challenging puzzles to work out. But here we are in 2013, about 50 years after video games came into existence, and fire still doesn’t work right.