The term "guilty pleasure" has kind of become a dirty term in the past decade, hasn't it?  A guilty pleasure is a piece of media that you adore despite knowing it is of dubious quality.  It is looking at something, understanding it's bad, and choosing to love it anyways.  It was, once upon a time, a very common term to throw around.  It has always exist, of course, people have always been viewing media that they know is bad but still love anyways.  However, it definitely became incredibly commonplace after the advent of the online space.  In the late 00s/early 2010s, there was a lot of talk of media being "good" or "bad" inherently, we had a new breed of critics with very on the ground, grassroots perspectives that focused primarily on explaining why things, particularly things from their/your childhood, were terrible.  In the face of such overwhelming criticism, it became common to cling to the stuff from your childhood, acknowledging that it might be bad but that it's still fun or still charming.  It became your "guilty pleasure".

But as time went on, this entire ideology fell to the wayside.  The more cynical critics of the early online space fell out of favor, both due to personal controversies and a reevaluation of their critical stylings.  Many critics, no longer bound by brands that often forced them to develop identical styles and voices, began to free themselves from their shackles and find their own space in this world.  And also Linkara was there, making the same awful content he always had and getting way too defensive when anyone criticized his low budget internet show that hasn't evolved at all in two decades where he gives bad opinions about comics.  We were, strangely, somehow entering a world where people were more critical and less critical than ever.  The rise of the video essay was occurring, which tended to focus less on berating media and more on trying to figure out what does and does not work about them.  We strived for a more tolerant society, even as tolerance itself became kind of a sticking point.  And the idea that things cannot truly be good or bad began to take root.  People scoffed at the idea that something might just not actually work, countering with some flavor of "well people like it, let them enjoy it".  Films that had been universally seen as bad were now getting defenders, not because of the film's actual quality but because of the fact that people enjoyed it.  In the midst of this, the term "guilty pleasure" started to seem outdated.  After all, why should someone feel guilty for liking something?  It's just their opinion.

I have never liked the abandonment of guilty pleasure as a term.  My opinion is that, genuinely speaking, it is rather healthy to acknowledge when something is not good but you still enjoy it in spite of that fact.  I earnestly believe that it has been harmful to people's perceptions of things to allow them to openly adopt the stance of "I like it so it's inherently good".  I think in our quest for tolerance and acceptance of all viewpoints, we have incidentally bred a very selfish and self-serving relationship with media, something I have talked about at length on this blog before.  I think that understanding that something is bad for xyz reason, if anything, allows you to appreciate the things you love about it.  So often we assume everything exists on a binary of right and wrong and that something being bad means it's wrong to like it.  As such, I want to talk about one of the greatest guilty pleasures in my life, an ambitious, misguided, wonderful work of art that could only happen in an era where the advancement of technology created a place for creativity that said technology could not hope to accomplish.  Today, my friends, we're talking about...

Lifeline: Voice Action Adventure - The Best Worst Best Horror Game You'll Never Play

What Exactly IS Lifeline?

Lifeline: Voice Action Adventure is a 2003 survival horror game released for the PlayStation 2.  Taking advantage of the massive technological leap between the PS2 and its predecessors, as well as the advent of microphone based games, Lifeline attempts to bring the potential of a microphone game into a place where it can be used for a proper "gaming" experience.  Microphone based games had existed before this, obviously, but previously they were pretty casual affairs.  The Nintendo 64's Hey You! Pikachu, a pet simulator where you go on adventures with the eponymous electric rodent and the Dreamcast's Seaman, a bizarre life simulator where you raise a fish with a human face to adulthood all the while it talks philosophy with you.  Lifeline was among a small wave of games in the sixth generation of game consoles that attempted to use this technology to create more traditional gaming experiences, which eventually lead to the GOAT Odama, shoutouts to the Odama speedrunning world champion.

In Lifeline, you play as a character known only as the Operator.  Set during Christmas of 2029, the Operator and his girlfriend, Naomi, were visiting a Space Station hotel that orbits the planet Earth, part of a series of extraterrestrial vacation spots from a Japanese space travel company.  The hotel is both a hotel and an active research station, and in the midst of the Christmas party being held on the station, an experiment goes off attracting aliens to the hotel and separating the operator from his girlfriend.  Getting injured in his attempts to run away from the aliens, the operator seals himself within the station's security office, unable to move but being completely safe, to await rescue.  However, there's obviously two problems: one, if help does arrive, how will they know where the operator is, and b, he still has no idea where his girlfriend is.  Being trapped within the security office, he immediately begins searching throughout the station for any sign of other survivors.

This leads him to the station's "brig", wherein one of the station's cocktail waitresses is locked inside, having been suspected of being a stowaway.  This is Rio, one of the only survivors of the invasion and the only one that the Operator can find.  Rio is, unsurprisingly, a suspicious person.  We find her locked in the brig, she keeps a lot of secrets to herself, often dodging or deflecting questions about her past and why she was imprisoned in the first place, and it's clear she has some grander purpose that she is not telling us.  Nevertheless, you two quickly strike a deal: you are in the security wing of the station, which is where the evacuation pods are.  Rio has to head your way anyways if she wants to get off this ruined space station.  If you free her, and help guide her to your location using the security feeds, she will help you find your girlfriend and free you from the security room, at which point the three of you will get off this ship together.  Opening the jail cell, Rio steps out, and your adventure begins in earnest.

This is where the core gameplay of Lifeline comes in.  While Lifeline is a survival horror game in the style of Resident Evil where you must manage resources, heal yourself regularly, solve puzzles and so on, Lifeline is really more akin to a point and click adventure game.  Rio does not move autonomously, nor do you control her directly in any way.  You, as the operator, are responsible for telling Rio where to go, what to do, where to shoot, where to investigate, and so on and so on.  You must look around the area, scan for suspicious or interactable parts of the map, and then tell Rio to go there or look at that.  Along the way you will pick up new commands for Rio, allowing the player to interact with her more in-depth or more naturally, and often allowing Rio certain advantages, i.e. giving her AI an auto-function which will start off very clueless but evolve over the course of the game so you don't have to constantly micromanage her.

This gameplay is where the "Voice" part of Lifeline comes in.  Rather than simply clicking on the area and telling Rio "go here", you have to vocally guide her.  This is the core function of the game, you are always in conversation with Rio and she reacts to what you say or do.  It's made to feel like a partnership, she is on the ground trying to fight her way through this nightmare scenario while you have access to all the camera feeds and are trying to guide her to safety.  As previously stated, the intention is that as you go along and guide Rio, she will become more confident and independent.  Her character is even described as having "quick reflexes but poor decision making skills", meaning that while she is quick to respond to commands, she has trouble deciding.  And as you go along, she is meant to gain confidence in her own abilities, and the player will be given the option to trust in her judgement, let her move on her own.

Rio will also begin to open up more and more as you move on.  The player and Rio are meant to form a bond as you progress through the game, feeling more and more like partners.  It's shockingly immersive at times, giving you these quiet moments where you can just talk to her and find out more about her.  Discover the actual reasons why she came to this space station, what she actually knows of its operation.  As you go on, the story twists and turns, every revelation shaking the foundation of the world you knew.  The closer you get to escape, the more unlikely that escape ever coming seems to be.  Will you ever find your girlfriend?  Will you ever be saved from this horrifying encounter?  It's up to how you guide Rio.  This unique relationship between the two parties, the player and the game, makes Lifeline one of the most interesting works of art within gaming history.  A true blend of creativity and technology.  There's just, you know, one big problem...

Nothing About Lifeline Actually Works

If you know of Lifeline, you probably know it through someone else playing it.  It's very likely the reason you've heard of this game is through VTuber and immunodeficiency activist Ironmouse's disastrous playthrough of the game, wherein she got so frustrated that she had to adopt a whole new voice in order to finish the game.  If not her, though, it is probably through another YouTuber or Twitch streamer who is playing this game in order to gawk at the oddness of it.  They may commit to a full playthrough or, more likely, just play the game until it stops being "fun" which is roughly the first enemy encounter and then go "wasn't that weird, y'all".  Indeed, this is how I first got introduced to the game, actually.  Long ago, in the early days of livestreaming, a content creator I watched at the time played through Lifeline and, as is the typical reaction, proceeded to mock and berate the game.  This is entirely fair.  Lifeline is an absolute disaster.

Technological Hurdles

Lifeline is incredibly ambitious.  Attempting to create a fully interactive entirely voice controlled video game for the PlayStation 2, at a time where we had just barely begun to expand the technological limitations of video gaming, was admirable.  Like I said before, only a few years before Lifeline, voice controlled gaming was the domain of pet simulators.  No one had ever truly tried a game this in-depth before, a game this close to being a hardcore title, a game that, should it succeed, could revolutionize gaming.  It was, as you could imagine, an absolute disaster to program.  The game was very close to being cancelled at various points and was basically saved by sentimentality.  To quote an interview with the game's director of game design, Manabu Nishizawa, on the game's official site:

We made two prototypes of this game. We made it on a PC, not a PS2. We made the prototype to see if it was possible to "control a character by giving instructions using voice recognition." Three months after starting the prototype, a brown-haired girl wearing a black sleeveless top, culottes, and boots, holding a gun, stood on the PC screen. Hesitantly, I pressed the spacebar on the keyboard and spoke into the microphone, "Walk." The moment I released the key, I got goosebumps all over my body... I was truly surprised. Along with the subtitle "Yes" appearing at the bottom of the screen, the girl began to walk with a tap-tap. Still excited, I instructed her to "Stop," and she stopped instantly. "Walk" (tap-tap) "Stop" (stop) "Walk" (tap-tap) "Stop" (stop) "Walk" (tap-tap)... We repeated the test so many times that it was hard to tell which was the machine and which was the robot. I felt like I was experiencing the future. Looking back now, I think that if I hadn't had that moment of awe, Operator's Side would never have been completed.

 One of the key problems that the game faces is the voice recognition software itself.  It works okay in the most ideal conditions possible, in a room without too much white noise, with a speaker speaking very clearly, in an accent that the game is trained to understand.  The moment you deviate from those conditions, however, the recognition goes down the drain.  To bring it back to Ironmouse's playthrough, Ironmouse is Puerto Rican, and as such has a specific way of speaking.  She has a very thick accent and naturally talks with an exuberant energy to her.  The game is literally not trained to understand the nuances of her English, which famously caused her to have to adopt a very clear, slow talking American accent to push through the game.

The biggest surprise, though, is not that the game doesn't understand more specific accents from parts of the world the game was not really released in.  No, it's that the game struggles with accents that it's definitely meant to be programmed for.  My dear friend Thomas, friend of the blog, zine master extraordinaire, played Lifeline back in 2020 after getting on a voice-controlled game kick in the wake of his playthrough of Odama.  And, while Thomas didn't struggle to get the game to understand him nearly as bad as Ironmouse did, he did struggle to get the game to understand him a great deal.  So much so that some of his clarified speech for Rio's understanding became a meme, an older post I was writing about Lifeline was named "In Her Mouth" after the way he had to pronounce "Inner Mouth" to get Rio to understand him.  Thomas is from South Carolina initially, and does not have a particularly thick accent.  It seemed, genuinely, like Rio only has a decent time understanding you if you have literally no accent at all, i.e. are part of the Mid-Atlantic "no real accent" group.  And even then, like, I've seen people play this game from that group as well, it's still basically a nightmare.

Not that any of this matters anyways, as the AI in the game is also, famously, terrible.  Rio has been criticized by the majority of people who have played this game as being kind of a complete and total idiot.  Rio is not only difficult to communicate with, but difficult to work with.  She will completely ignore your instructions often just because her AI has difficulty finding the place you want to go or, barring that, just doesn't know how to actually access the information you need her to access.  She struggles with the most basic tasks often, seemingly completely unable to do anything on her own.  The game somehow wants you to both micromanage her and also not to micromanage her, as Rio will get defensive if she feels you're being too overbearing.  Which is, of course, troublesome for this kind of game, since you are literally guiding Rio by the hand the entire time.  Moreover, Rio often approaches situations like a sledgehammer, even when the various puzzles in the game require more finesse.  It is not uncommon for Rio's own AI to just screw up a puzzle by turning an element too much or hitting too many buttons.  The biggest fight in this game is, often, just the fight to get Rio to do anything right.

Combat

But there is also actual combat you must contend with.  Boy is there combat.  So the way that combat works is that Rio is on the floor actually fighting the aliens.  The problem is that she doesn't know where to aim really.  Each alien type has different body parts that she can fire out, and some deal more damage to them than others.  And, moreover, if you successfully destroy a body part, you can disable certain attacks, essentially making the alien less dangerous.  This is all information that you, as the Operator, have accessible to you.  Your security feeds are always scanning the monsters for their biology and their weakpoints.  Once you have the loadout of what you're dealing with, it's up to you to instruct Rio on where and when to run, dodge, and fire.  This is why "in her mouth" is a joke, you often have the option to fire directly into the mouth of the aliens, which can be devastating if performed correctly.

As you could maybe imagine, given the previous statements on the limitations of the vocal recognition software and Rio's own AI, this has every opportunity to go horribly wrong.  While Rio's inability to solve puzzles and scan environments can cause a lot of frustration in to the player, the fact that these are relatively low stress environments with which to interact with her gives the player the grace with her to enter an ideology akin to "I just gotta be patient with her and we can get through this".  Combat is, literally, life or death.  Rio can only take a few hits before she dies, and she not only needs to be dealing damage to the opponent, she needs to be avoiding their onslaught.  Regular enemy fights can be insurmountable walls as early as an hour into the game, as you try to manage a woman who is haphazardly utilizing a handgun she just received and who, famously, does not take orders well.  If you can get the game to recognize your commands, Rio is quick to follow.  Unfortunately, that's really the hard part isn't it?

The attempts to allow Rio to function on her own in combat also do not work.  Near the end of the game's "first act", you will find a command which allows Rio to behave autonomously in combat.  This is, at first, seemingly very handy as giving commands in the midst of combat is very difficult.  Unfortunately, this is not a system of "you tell Rio to act on her own and she makes optimal moves".  Instead, the game chooses to present a system in which Rio's AI will level up the more you trust her to handle things on her own.  So when you get the command, Rio's automatic combat AI is absolutely worthless, she misses like 70% of all shots, it hasn't learned to target weak points, it is basically flying blind.  But as you rely on her, the game will start to make her smarter, enable her to make better decisions in combat.  Hypothetically, this is an interesting mechanic to explore.

There are two major issues with this though.  The first is that you receive this command at the end of the game's first major area and, more importantly, after you would fight the first boss of the game.  This means that Rio is already a substantial portion through the space station and past many of the "gimme" enemies the game has to offer.  There is no effective place to allow Rio to get smarter in combat, by the time you have access to this option which, supposedly, is meant to be helpful you are already past the point where you could realistically start providing Rio a path to allow her AI to grow.  It's rather unfortunate that the AI is not, say, recording the way the Operator tells Rio to fight and putting together a series of "x enemy = this strategy".  I'm sure that would be a technical nightmare even today, much less back in 2003 (although today they would just shortcut it using AI and everyone would hate it), but it also makes this command next to useless.  Alternatively, maybe we should've just started with it, instead of having to unlock it as we progress in the story.

But even if you did want to work with this command, you run into a second issue: grinding.  You could, hypothetically, grind Rio's AI on enemy encounters as soon as you receive the command and buff her up before progress.  Many standard enemy encounters will respawn after you enter and exit so many rooms, so you could just fight those and get Rio where you need her to be.  It'd be time consuming but you could do it, right?  Except, no.  You couldn't.  Because Lifeline is a survival horror game.  Lifeline is not especially stingy with resources, mind you, it clearly understands that you need a bit of a safety net because of how frustrating it can be working with the voice control.  But it does have limited resources, there are limited healing items, limited inventory slots, and a lot of things that can go wrong within these specifications.  Having the time to train Rio isn't the issue, having the resources to train her is.  You could spend all your time grinding her AI to get good at the combat to take the burden off yourself, but you are also very likely to run out of heals.  Moreover, as Rio upgrades her weapons, she loses out on infinite ammunition.  So, not only is grinding a bad idea for the potential to run out of heals, it is a bad idea because you can literally softlock yourself at a certain point by running out of ammunition and not having a gun powerful enough to go forward.

The difficulty of the game is also, just generally, unnaturally high.  The way you control this game is obviously a huge part of its difficulty, Rio is constantly fighting you whether she knows it or not.  But the game is just hard.  Enemies ramp up way too quickly, evolving from simple slug like enemies that take a few shots to kill to massive monsters with six to eight moving parts before you're even out of the first area.  And, unlike other survival horror games of its era, you are not intended to skip encounters.  Whereas something like a Resident Evil game or a Silent Hill game is primarily about avoiding unnecessary firefights to conserve resources, you are often locked into an enemy encounter in Lifeline when one occurs.  You would assume that, given the game's incredibly unique gameplay style, that it would go a little easier on the player.  Create a margin of error to allow them to progress given the hurdles.  Instead, Lifeline is the kind of game where enemies are so prohibitively difficult that every single encounter could take 3-5 tries to get through.  And this is saying nothing of the bosses, which can legitimately take hundreds of tries to get through depending on how much Rio wants to listen.

Rio

Rio herself is also a very questionable of this game, both in her characterization and in her function to the player.  Rio is always depicted as someone who knows more than they're telling.  They're keeping secrets, it's clear that their reason for being here is more than just being hired as a cocktail waitress, and the player is meant to be suspicious of her and her motivations on some level.  As the game goes on, the player discovers that Rio is heavily involved in what is going on with this alien invasion.  Many years ago, Rio was living on Earth with her family.  Her father was a brilliant scientific mind whose research unlocked the alchemical secrets of the Philosopher's Stone.  Stay with me.  Upon this discovery, a target was put on his back, and one night one of his rivals broke into his house and murdered his wife and shot his daughter Rio.  Rio's father cut a deal: let him use the Philosopher's Stone to save his little girl, and he will go with the men willingly.  Rio was saved, but effectively orphaned, and has spent her entire life hunting down the men who kidnapped her father trying to save them.  She has, in effect, been playing dumb the entire time, playing the convenient role of a sexy 20-something cocktail waitress to find her way to the man who kidnapped her father and see justice done.  She not only knows way more than she's letting on, but is even implied by the story to be a genius who is the only person besides her father that can truly unlock the secrets of the Philosopher's Stone.

This is, quite honestly, unbelievable.  Not because of how absurd the plot is, it's a Japanese survival horror game, the plot being absurd is par for the course.  It's basically accepted within Resident Evil that the last 1/3 of the game is going to have a crazy last minute plot twist that kills the tone and atmosphere of the early bits.  No, it's unbelievable because the game is telling you things about Rio that you know are just simply not true.  We know she isn't some sort of genius, we know she isn't just convenient playing dumb.  We've been guiding her for hours at this point.  She doesn't understand how to work a safe!  It is bold of the game to try and convince us that Rio is some sort of genius double agent who is so good at playing dumb that she fools us all when we have spent so much time with her being actually very very dumb.  It is one of the most egregious examples of a game's story and a game's gameplay actively conflicting with one another, a level of ludonarrative dissonance that tends to make players furious when they get to it.

But what Rio's actual purpose in the game is?  That's the part where it gets a little uncomfortable.  As the game goes on, Rio starts to develop a romantic attachment to the Operator.  Despite knowing he is in a happy and healthy relationship and finding his girlfriend being a pretty driving part of the plot, Rio cannot help but catch feelings for the person helping her through this nightmare.  She begins to ask the Operator personal questions, slowly peeling back layers of their own psyche, finding things she truly likes about them.  She is committed to the goal of aiding them in finding their girlfriend, but it's clear that she also wants to pursue a relationship with the Operator.  It's a tale as old as time: you fall in love with a taken guy as you're trying to help him find his missing girlfriend.  There's just like one thing about this whole story that makes it very weird: the Operator is the player.

This is, perhaps, the most confusing decision about Lifeline.  Lifeline, despite its more absurd and frustrating elements, is pretty committed to being a survival horror.  The situation is intense, the resources scarce, the monsters terrifying.  It is very much a hardline horror game with sci-fi elements to it.  Except it tacks on a virtual girlfriend simulator.  In the midst of this horror game.  Like it's not a separate mode when you can just relax with Rio and talk to her, Rio is meant to be your virtual girlfriend right in the middle of you trying to make sure she doesn't get killed by discount Xenomorphs.  It's weird.  It's just simply weird.  Like, I know why they did this, gaming was a very different thing in the 2000s, we were way more sexist.  The first iterations of the show that would eventually become the Game Awards literally had a category for "sexiest video game women".  It was assumed that video games, especially games in more "hardcore" genres, had primarily male audiences in the 15-34 year old demographic, and that said audiences' primary want for a female character was not exactly great writing.

But also this is just absurd?  Like, it's not just a natural thing, either, it's not solely a matter of "as the game progresses and you hypothetically grow more attached to Rio, romance can blossom".  The game actively wants to pursue this element.  There are dozens of commands that you can give Rio, many of which are gameplay related, some of them are fun little easter eggs, but a pretty substantial portion of what you can tell Rio fits in the category of "romance".  Or, worse "objectification posing as romance".  You can tell her to bark like a dog.  You can tell her to pose sexy for you.  You can engage in conversations which are entirely about you, the player's, romantic life.  It's weird.  It's really weird.  It is the kind of thing that a certain section of the audience is going to defend with their lives and that section of the audience is, hopefully, not around that much anymore.  It is part of a pretty poor trend of how we used to depict women in gaming that I would like to think we have moved away from, and it seems like we have given how often weirdos online complain that games aren't for men anymore.

If you could not tell, from this extended section, Lifeline is a pretty bad video game.  Mechanically it barely works, it doesn't give the player much leeway despite the way they have to control the game, it focuses on what are probably the wrong parts of its premise given the voice control nature of it.  It is truly one of the messiest video games of all time.  You cannot help but admire its ambition, its attempts to pave the way for an all-new style of gameplay that no one has ever really tried before.  But it's difficult to want to applaud it after you've spent three hours fighting Rio to do anything, your voice sore and your hopes shattered.  Its reputation is more than earned and I completely understand why people view it as, at best, a novelty and at worst one of the worst games ever made.  There's just one thing about it for me personally, one teensy-tiny ripple that I can't get over...

Lifeline Is One of My Favorite Video Games Of All Time

I started this post out by establishing that Lifeline is a guilty pleasure for me, a game I love despite knowing it's pretty terrible.  But the extent of my love for Lifeline is far greater than I think I implied at first.  I don't just like Lifeline despite acknowledging its faults, I love this game.  To the point that, for a while, Ed having awful taste in video games was a joke amongst my friend group.  Everyone else who has played this game that I know despises it with a burning passion and meanwhile I'm out here like "y'all this game is a masterpiece".  Granted, a lot of the reason why I love this game is just the absurdity of its plot.  I do get an ironic sense of joy out of how bold the decisions made in this game are.  But I also do genuinely enjoy Lifeline.  For as much as some of my appreciation of it is ironic, much much more of it comes from a place of sincerity.

Plot

But first let's talk about absurdity of this game's story.  The game starts out pretty normal, you're trapped on a space station hotel in the midst of an alien invasion, you have to rely on your new friend Rio to rescue you and got off this floating tincan, standard sci-fi stuff.  The first big twist comes, however, when the military finally arrives.  The military set up roadblocks for Rio to proceed, effectively insuring that you, and your still missing girlfriend cannot be saved.  The reason?  They are planning on shooting the space station out of orbit.  See, the space station is not simply sitting up on outer orbit, a derelict ship that the Japanese government can evacuate and then abandon.  It is actively on a crash course for Earth.  And this was done intentionally by the station's head scientist, a man named Joe Powers.

Joe Powers is, as you might've guessed, the man who abducted Rio's father.  He has been attempting to conduct experiments on the Philosopher's Stone for decades now, and he believes that he has finally cracked the code.  His plan is to seal himself within one of the station's safety pods, a near indestructible containment unit created in case the Station ever fell from orbit, at which point the ship would crash into Earth, allowing Powers to get rescued with the stone in tow.  He then wishes to continue his research on Earth, developing a powerful weapon with which he can become the richest and most influential person on the planet.  A role he will presumably be able to maintain forever, as he has just unlocked the secret to immortality.

The Japanese military, as you might imagine, does not want a piece of space debris the size of a 5 star hotel crashing into the planet, bringing about the end of the world because of what is contained within it.  So their plan is to evacuate anyone not involved with the science division of the station and then nuke it out of orbit, destroying Joe Powers, the philosopher's stone, and the aliens that have arrived on the station.  Rio, however, won't let this stand as she needs to still find the Operator and his girlfriend, Naomi.  So she petitions for them to allow her past the blockade.  If she finds the Operator and his girlfriend, they will use the escape pods in the security wing to escape.  If not, they will go down with the ship.  The military hands her a gun and a uniform change and lets her past.  With the knowledge that no one will save them, Rio steps into the lab sector.

After fighting through more enemies, Rio encounters a bizarre sight: a brain in a jar that is capable of speaking through a digital voice.  Rio attempts to ask the brain questions, but it shuts her down pretty quickly.  This brain, you see, has become jaded.  Angry at the world.  Which is, you know.  Valid, given whoever this brain used to belong to is essentially dead, only existing as a floating brain in the jar.  It's incapable of connecting to other people, of understanding their plight.  Only driven by its deep-seeded hatred of one specific man: Joe Powers.  Joe Powers did this to this brain, removed the body down to its most basic components as a punishment.  A punishment for deceiving Joe Powers many years ago.  A punishment for choosing to hide its research somewhere, somewhere Joe could never find it.  For the brain, you see, is Rio's father.  And he never gave Joe Powers the Philosopher's Stone.

So, as previously stated, long ago Joe Powers descended upon Rio's childhood home, murdered her mother and shot her.  As she lay bleeding out, Rio's father cut a deal: if he could use the stone to heal his little girl, he would go with Joe willingly.  That is, for many years, what Rio believed happened.  However, it turns out that shortly after healing Rio, the stone completely disappeared.  Joe Powers has not been running experiments for the past decades to unlock the secrets of the stone, he's been doing it to create a new one.  And his failures to do so are all over the space station.  You've been fighting them throughout the entire game.  Dear reader, there is no alien invasion.  Every single monster you have fought is a failed experiment to recreate the Philosopher's Stone.

Joe Powers has been, essentially, finding people who need help desperately.  People dying of cancer, people who can't walk anymore, people who are on the brink of death.  The people who, even in the future where we can put a hotel in space, have no hope of a cure or a fix for their condition.  He contacts them and states that he is developing an experimental treatment in his lab orbiting Earth.  He pays for their transit and brings them aboard, at which point he imprisons them in his lab and begins running tests on them.  The Philosopher's Stone, among it's many other properties, is meant to heal those who come into contact with it.  Grant them a full life.  Even grant them immortality.  So, if he finds the right formula to create it, he'll know because it can cure these people with no hope.  But he never really did.  So what happened instead was that each and every person he experimented on mutated into a horrible monster.  And on the night of the Christmas party, one of them finally escaped.  Breaking the containment of Powers' lab and invading the rest of the space station.  Throughout the game, you have not been killing aliens, you've been killing horribly mutated humans.

So what happened to the real Philosopher's Stone?  Well, I want to bring you back to the night Rio's father got kidnapped.  Rio got shot and her father had to rush to save her.  Now, he could've simply used the Philosopher's Stone and been done with it, but that would mean Joe Powers getting his hands on a potential weapon that could end the world.  So, working fast, Rio's father implanted the stone into Rio's heart.  It has been keeping her alive this entire time.  Not only that but, unbeknownst to Rio herself, it has given her superhuman abilities.  It's why her reflexes are so quick, why she can take so much damage before going down, why, despite being dumb as bricks as we've already established, she can analyze an enemy well enough to know what the Operator means by "left Thorax".  Rio is a super soldier.  The most powerful object in the history of the world lives inside the heart of a cocktail waitress who believed that she could easily infiltrate a space station to get revenge on its head scientist and NO ONE would ever notice her.  This game is so funny.  Anyways, Rio's father hopes that Rio lived a long and happy life, unaware that he is talking to her, unable to recognize her even if he could see.  And so Rio does the hard thing.  She does the right thing.  She puts her father out of his misery, draining the brain.

There is just one last hanging thread we need to address, though, isn't there?  What happened to Naomi?  She has been missing this entire time, after all, not dead just.  Missing.  Leaving both the Operator and Rio hopeful that she can be found.  Our answer comes late into the game, as we approach the security sector and prepare to face Joe Powers.  And it comes at one of the lowest points of the journey, when Rio has been pushed to her limits and seems on the verge of collapse.  She is cornered by one of the most horrifying beasts on the station, and it looks like, for the first (or more like five hundredth time, to be honest) time, we aren't going to make it out of this.  Then the monster who cornered her gets destroyed by another monster, one we've seen a few times across our journey.  One that is bizarrely non-hostile.  And in this moment, it's looking to Rio with a need to help her.

This monster is, unsurprisingly, Naomi.  In the midst of the chaos of the initial attack, Naomi had been captured and brought down to Powers' lab.  She was, in a sense, Powers' final test subject, the proof of concept that he had successfully created a good enough rendition of the stone.  While the stone did mutate her considerably, it largely kept her humanoid form intact, not transforming her into a mindless beast.  Because of her love for the Operator, Naomi has actually successfully retained her humanity, trying to find her lover.  As such, she has been assisting Rio in her goal of making it to the Operator, trying to ensure all three can get off this ship together.  Bonded by their mutual connection to the Philosopher's Stone, Rio can understand Naomi, who currently can only talk through a bizarre backwards language.  Unfortunately, Naomi's time is almost over.

Naomi has realized what she has become.  She seemed a bit confused by it for a while, not aware of what she was, but now she sees she has become a bizarre alien monster.  What's more is that she's fading away.  Not in the sense that she is becoming more monstrous, but in the sense that she is unstable.  Her new form is breaking down, at any moment she will fade into stardust.  Protecting Rio is, if anything, her last stand.  She believes that Rio can absorb her essence to revitalize her, and so sits with her as she dies, sacrificing herself to give power to the true wielder of the Philosopher's Stone at her lowest moment.  She asks Rio to apologize to the Operator for not being able to make it, and to tell him that she loves him.  And then she fades away, her essence giving Rio a much needed power boost, allowing her to move on.  We mourn Naomi for a brief second... and then Rio realizes that her hurdle has just been cleared for her, meaning that she can now go after the Operator unfettered.  I kid, I kid.  Rio is actually super messed up by Naomi's sacrifice, it's like the weight of everything that happened, all the people who have died or that she has had to kill, hits her at once.

Unfortunately we can't linger on that too long, because who appears at this moment to try and put a bullet in Rio's head?  Joe.  Powers.  This is it, Rio's final confrontation with the man she's been hunting for decades now.  He goes down immediately.  Something I do appreciate about the decisions this game makes is that they stick to the idea that Rio's ability to survive things is because of her superhuman biology as given by the stone.  Every other character in this game just dies to literally nothing.  Rio drops Joe in one shot.  And then rescues the Operator, boarding the two escape pods still on the ship.  Unfortunately things cannot be that simple, and Joe returns to life, resurrected and mutated by his incomplete Philosopher's Stone into a massive monster.  Rio and the Operator work together to defeat the Titanic beast, and fly off from the ship, having survived.  Everyone might be dead, but hey, at least Rio now has a chance, amirite?

The plot is stupid.  Like, just so absurd.  It probably sounds absurd just describing it, it twists in so many ways and introduces just absolutely insane concepts.  Like, they really went all in on the Philosopher's Stone.  But it is actively hilarious experiencing it.  I think Lifeline has only not gotten a reputation for being one of the great "so bad it's good" stories in gaming just because by the time you hit the ridiculous parts of it, everyone is so frustrated by dealing with Rio that they just are done.  That literally did happen to most of my friends who experienced this game, they were out of it for hours by the time the game started compounding ridiculous elements to its story.  Though the absolute insanity that is "Joe Powers" hits everyone eventually.  I adore this story though, it's insane, but in such a fun and sincere way.  It commits to having the most absurd storyline possible in a way that I admire greatly.  I will go to bat for Lifeline's story, it's so fun.

Ambition

But, more importantly, I do genuinely and sincerely love this game.  Why?  The very thing that arguably is the reason why it's so bad: its ambition.  Lifeline is an entirely unique thing.  A game that could only exist in an era where we hadn't yet decided what makes "good gameplay".  I feel like people forget how experimental games were on the PS1 and PS2.  How often developers tried to take advantage of CD techonology to allow you to load up music CDs to meaningfully impact gameplay.  The attempts to do motion control/camera based gameplay.  And yes, even the attempts to make voice controlled gaming a valid gameplay style, something that could be nurtured to create really in-depth experiences.  Lifeline is ahead of its time, voice controls would continue to be experimented with in a significant capacity for a long time and nowadays we could in fact probably make this game work.  Hey Konami, remake Lifeline.  Don't do that, Rio will just be a generative AI, it would be disappointing and unethical.

Lifeline's unique setup, a story and gameplay style that puts the player into the game, is incredibly fascinating to me.  Even though the execution might leave a lot to be desired, when I am playing Lifeline, even in my most frustrated moments, I don't feel that the game is a failure.  The relationship it forms between player and game is challenging, it argues for a level of immersion that a lot of people would likely find unsettling.  Including myself.  As much as I adore this game for this very reason, I also find it deeply unsettling how much it asks the player to be involved within its world.  How much it asks the player to form a personal connection with Rio, not just as an observer experiencing a story, but as an active participant in her life.  It wants the player to form a genuine relationship with this character, both in the sense that you're meant to form a partnership and the game wants you to be romantically involved with her in some capacity.

But, in being uncomfortable, it makes you ask questions.  Should a game break these boundaries.  Should the player be immersed to this degree.  Especially with the rise of AI chat bots and people's obsession with their virtual girlfriends as a result, this boundary is very much broken every day whether we like it or not.  There is a conversation to be had around Lifeline, around when a piece of art goes "too far" in immersing its playerbase.  But at the same time, it makes one wonder if this is valid.  If you can cross boundaries for the sake of an artistic work regardless of if those boundaries are wise.  In other mediums, crossing boundaries is not just common but is a challenging part of the artistic process.  The boundaries that Lifeline crosses might very well be unwise to cross but that doesn't mean they never should be, you know?  And while some of the reasons Lifeline crosses this boundary are pretty gross, others are infinitely compelling.

Lifeline creates such a unique situation that even when it fails to work, as it often does, I can't help but admire it.  Like I said before, even as it is its most frustrating self, a game in which the core functions of it often don't work, I find myself more intrigued than annoyed.  It's such a specific work of art, the kind of thing that gets created when someone has a ton of ambition, a ton of creativity, and is standing upon the threshold of being able to realize it but is just unable to solidify it.  It is something that just could not exist anymore, a game trying something completely all its own with the weight of a major studio behind it, but without the baggage that comes with understanding what "good game design" is.  It's a symbol from a messier time, when trying something was a goal within itself.

I'm not someone who hates the modern game industry, who favors an older time.  I can pretty confidently say that we are frankly spoiled nowadays, games that would've been industry defining hits in the olden days are now just normal every day occurrences.  We are so inundated with good games that partaking in the hobby at all is proving taxing.  But we are too polished nowadays, too familiar with what "good game design" is.  We know what does and does not work and are often too scared to deviate from that.  Lifeline represents a much messier, much worse, but much more creative time.  A time when gaming was allowed to be weird, allowed to try things without the worry that they wouldn't go well.  It's art in its truest form in a lot of ways, the fact that it is a bad game almost comes secondary to how unique of a work it is.

This is also just something about me as a person.  While I certainly enjoy "good" games, interesting games are the ones that really stick with me.  Everybody can make a Metroidvania, not everyone can make an entirely voice controlled survival horror game.  I've played many games since playing Lifeline, many many games.  Just in the past 6 years the number of games I've beaten numbers in the hundreds.  And yet, most of those games roll off my back.  While most of them were good, often excellent, Lifeline is just so weird that you cannot help but love it.  In my mind, it's a masterpiece.  Just a true, unadulterated, unfettered work of art that no one has or likely ever will come close to recreating.  Is it horrible?  Absolutely.  But it's also very beautiful.  It is one of the worst, and yet one of the best.  And I wish I had the confidence in Konami to remake and finally realize its potential without resorting to generative AI for Rio's listening and responses or else I would be like "no but seriously, make a remake that fixes what is wrong with Rio".  But I'm not sure I would even want that, truly.  I think it being kind of awful is part of the charm, you know?

Tomb Raider II: Starring Lara Croft - A Gaming Diary

I cannot describe to you how amusing it is that Tomb Raider II's subtitle is actually "Starring Lara Croft".  It's no secret that Lara Croft the character is much larger than Tomb Raider the franchise, there are numerous people who are very familiar with Lara who likely have not and will not ever pick-up a Tomb Raider game.  Which is a shame because there are not one, but two Tomb Raiders on the horizon currently.  And also the survivor trilogy is incredibly easy to get ahold of on modern platforms.  And also the first six games have all gotten remasters, with 7-9 looking like a remaster is probably incoming, play Tomb Raider.  I digress.  But I always figured this was something that came about over time.  That after the original trilogy at least and the quality of the games going downhill, you saw a separation of Lara Croft, the beloved adventure heroine, from Tomb Raider, the now failing action-adventure series.  But no, as soon as the second title in the series, the Tomb Raider franchise was starting to sell itself on the name recognition of its protagonist.  Lara Croft had already eclipsed the franchise she was a part of.

Anyways, so excited to be returning to Tomb Raider.  I very rarely think of myself as a fan of any series, I've famously stated previously that fandom is a poison.  The people who claim to love something the most are almost always, without fail, the people who limit that thing because they don't really like the thing, they like what that thing was to them at a pivotal moment of their lives.  They don't want art, they want comfort.  But maybe it's just that I didn't enter my Tomb Raider era until I was already an adult and had a more healthy relationship with the art I engage with, but Tomb Raider.  I am proud to say "I am a fan of Tomb Raider".  This series rules.  I own basically every Tomb Raider game, I've mentioned that previous, so there's going to be a lot of Tomb Raider on this blog longterm.  I hope y'all are ready for me to be annoying about Lara again, she's my hero.

Review:

If you were to look at the first two Tomb Raider games side-by-side, you may not see much of a difference.  Tomb Raider was a franchise that came out very close together, the first five games in the series ultimately releasing one a year every year for 5 straight years, and so it seems like Tomb Raider is a franchise whose improvements, if any, would be very small and very nuanced.  However, it is my opinion that Tomb Raider II is a far more significant upgrade upon the first game than it can seem just watching the two side by side.  Although Tomb Raider II definitely seems identical to its predecessor, having near identical gameplay and visuals, the game is so much better in so many ways.  Its greater focus on combat, more intense platforming, greater focus on collectibles, and more interesting level theming and design make Tomb Raider II a massive leap from the franchise's first entry.  That being said, its actual plot is much much worse, with it going a bit too silly a bit too quickly, and its an incredibly difficult game, starting you off at around the 3/4 point of the original game in terms of difficulty.  However, it's an action filled romp that takes more everything else about the original game and kicks it up to an eleven.  It's not my favorite Tomb Raider, but it may shape up to be my favorite of the classic series and a top 3 contender overall.  8.9/10

Diary:

4/26/26

We're SO back. Just want to start by giving a big shoutout to Stellalune and her lovingly crafted Tomb Raider website for providing really comprehensive walkthroughs.  If you read my diary on the first Tomb Raider from last year, you'll know her website was a big help there too and given how Tomb Raider II is already shaping up, I think she'll be even more of a help on this project.  But also she's been keeping up this Tomb Raider website since 1998!!!  You reading this, yes you, there's a very good chance that you are younger than this Tomb Raider website.  It's insane.  If you need some Tomb Raider stuff, please use her resources.  Especially with new games on the horizon, man, it's a good time to be getting into Tomb Raider.

It feels so good to be back.  Tomb Raider is something that, I'm sure, can seem archaic to modern gamers.  It's a tank control game, which I know is like shorthand for "a 3D game which existed before we had proper 3D movement and thus is bad" to most people, it has this very slow, methodical gameplay, it's pretty difficult.  Tomb Raider is something that, if I'm speaking objectively, probably needs a remake.  And of more than just the first game, which has now been remade twice.  But I love how Tomb Raider plays.  I think because everything you do in Tomb Raider is so deliberate, it makes it age extremely well overall?  Like this isn't just a hardware limitation but rather a deliberate gameplay choice.  I love this whole "platforming as puzzle" feel, having to line-up your jumps and take in the environment to figure out where to go next.  I'm bad at it, there was a certain platforming challenge in the first level of Tomb Raider II where I just totally missed what the game wanted me to do and went "we ball" through a room of traps.  I shockingly made it almost all the way through without damage.  But like, Tomb Raider, in my opinion, has aged extremely well.

Tomb Raider II also throws you right into the action.  Tomb Raider 1 definitely did have a bit of a buildup, you started out not having to do a lot of platforming and fighting and then it slowly built up over the course of the first couple areas.  But Tomb Raider II just starts you in a big platforming puzzle being chased by a tiger.  It advertises that this game isn't going to hold your hand, it expects you to understand Tomb Raider going into it.  Probably a good assumption given how much of a smash hit the first game was.  Part of me does want to criticize this game for doing it this way, I do genuinely believe that each work should approach its audience as if it's their first time in the world, which I understand is a little restrictive to some but I think is beneficial on the whole.  But Tomb Raider II does do a good job of onboarding people onto Tomb Raider, it has a famously good tutorial, the Croft manor.  It opens up with an obstacle course that teaches you basically every mechanic you need to know to play the game in a really fun way.  It even gives you a timer to see how quickly you can beat the obstacle course (I am bad at it so I didn't get a good time).  And then you get to explore Croft manor too, and like actually explore it unlike the first game's tutorial where certain parts where locked off.  So good.  I need to go back and do the Croft manor DLC for Rise.

This game is also so much harder right out the gate.  A big part of that is that Tomb Raider II kind of starts you out with a big Indiana Jones-esque temple run where Lara has to quickly make her way through a bunch of booby traps in a lost section of the Great Wall of China.  But also just in general, the game kind of starts you out at the difficulty level of about the halfway point of Tomb Raider 1.  There are way more gunfights in this game, way more tricky platforming sequences, way more interesting puzzles.  It takes a second to get the flow of Tomb Raider II down as such, again it doesn't ease you in at all.  But I do really like that the game also trusts the player can handle this out the gate, especially since it does give you a much better tutorial section compared to the first one.  It makes the game immediately more fun and exciting, as you're having to do more complex and interesting parkour out the gate.  Lara has always been cool but she feels so much cooler in Tomb Raider II because of this.  Also this game starts Lara with all the required equipment from the first game, which I just think is a neat touch.  It both is like "yeah, Lara did Tomb Raider 1 and still has all her gear" but also is kind of a sign to the player to be like "yeah, we trust you've done Tomb Raider 1".

I'm also very impressed by how much grander the scope to this game is already?  Like, Tomb Raider II, and by extension the classic Tomb Raider series, was often criticized for how little changes game to game.  It was an annual series back in the day and a lot of reviewers saw the series as consistent but entirely iterational, we would probably see the games as little more than DLC/expansions nowadays.  I mean, that's absolutely what we would see them as given how people reacted and still react to Tears of the Kingdom.  But I think Tomb Raider II is such a big leap from the first game in terms of scope.  First off, it includes more elements of contemporary shooters, given it includes more shootouts.  While there remain environmental drops and, by extension, environmental storytelling related to those drops, the vast majority of the ammo and health packs you get come from combat now.  This adds to kind of the new feel of combat, whereas Tomb Raider 1 was more about "being mindful with your resources and using them smartly", Tomb Raider II wants to be more of an action game it feels like.  It doesn't lose any of the things that make it Tomb Raider but it definitely is signaling "use your resources" more than the first game.  Though admittedly, I do miss the first game's design ideology of "solving optional puzzles to get rewards early", in II it's more like "beat optional enemies to get items early".

But also, the level design is just way more ambitious.  Like, level 1 was a huge temple run with loads of traps and enemies to deal with, something that would take almost an entire area of the first game to really conceptualize.  And then the second level is parkouring through the canals of Venice, but also you have this long section where you take a motorboat around a very open area of Venice.  The whole thing is like one massive puzzle, with you having to find the multitude of switches to reach the objective, said switches being hidden behind locked doors that require you to find the keys to open them.  It speaks to the increasing complexity of the game over the first one, having this large open ended puzzle box you need to solve.  Also it ends with you driving a boat over a ramp and launching it out of a covered bridge, which is super cool.  As well, the game has a lot of dark areas now where you have to use flares to see where you're going/find secrets, which gives the game more of an exploration feel to it.  This would become a series staple after this point, afaik, with the modern games giving Lara a near infinite number of flares with which to explore dark areas.

The plot is way sillier though.  Like, supernatural elements in Tomb Raider are very common and, especially in the earlier games in the franchise, they go way over the top.  Their template was Indiana Jones, a franchise which features, amongst other things, indisputable proof of the Abrahamic god's existence.  But whereas the first game sort of eased you into it, starting as just a more generalized archaeological exploration before slowly introducing the Atlantean element to the story, Tomb Raider II opens with an FMV of a Chinese emperor getting stabbed with a magical dagger and turning into a literal dragon.  And from there it evolves into "fighting through the canals of Venice to uncover a cult of clown monks armed with guns who are seeking entrance to the chamber where that dagger is buried.  It's a lot dumber than the first game, I almost admire how bold of a swing it is but like.  It's the only part of this game where it just going "you've played the first one, you know what you're getting into" doesn't really work for me.

All this being said this game is clearly the worst Tomb Raider just by how many good boys Lara has to kill.  I think I'm up to 11 dogs killed so far, it's so sad.  Lara often being forced to mass murder animals is always the saddest part of these games but all these dobermans especially are just upsetting me.  They deserved better.  RIP to all the good puppies, they make this really upsetting crying noise and everything.

4/28/26

Y'all, I think I'm bad at the video game.  So like, I had a lot of trouble with Tomb Raider 1 too, especially as I got into the late game.  There were entire play sessions that constituted one single level in that game due to both how difficult the game gets and how precise the platforming needs to be.  And also my stubborn refusal to just save scum and create a new save after every obstacle until I've given enough attempts at a section to where I feel like I've "earned" the save.  Tomb Raider II essentially starts at the difficulty level of late game Tomb Raider 1, roughly the late Greek/early Egypt stages, so I've been having a time!  I played for four hours last night and I accomplished in total about a single level, as I played half of one level and half of another.  To be clear, I'm not getting discouraged like I did with say Fire Emblem when I was just making no progress, it's very quick to get back to where I was usually once I know what to do.  But I am a bit like "welp, guess we're strapping in for the long haul, huh?"

That being said, man, the level design in this game is good.  So the first thing I got stuck on in this session was a large ballroom.  Level 3 is the hideout of the main antagonist and leader of the cult Lara is fighting, Marco Bartoli, which takes place in an old, flooded mansion hidden deep within the Labyrinthian canals of Venice.  After weaving through the manor's various rooms and hidden corridors, filled with death traps, Lara finds her way into the abandoned ballroom.  The ballroom is home to a large puzzle where Lara must climb all the way up to the top, hitting the various switches along the way, until she ends up in the rafters.  At which point, she hits the final switch and must work her way back down safely to retrieve a key that was unlocked by hitting all the switches.  It's a very fun room.  It's also a room that really highlights the difficulty of this game as, again, this is level 3, and it's a room that has a large, complicated puzzle and a very difficult platforming section where any wrong move can instakill Lara as she just falls to her death.  But like, I really enjoyed doing it in spite of that fact and how many times I had to reload.

So remember what I said about how it can be disappointing that Tomb Raider II has fewer secrets like the first one?  Because now it's more of a shooter with a lot of combat being vs. people who drop items when they're dead?  Well in classic Ed commentating on a game fashion, the next session just proved me wrong.  Not only does Bartoli's hideout give you the possibility to get the Uzis very early on, as they are hidden in an alcove that requires the player to go "I bet I could get up there", a massive boon given how rough combat can be.  Especially for me, who is bad at combat in every game, I am burning through health packs as soon as I get them in this game, y'all.

But moreover, the ending sequence to Bartoli's hideout is entirely optional if you are clever.  The level ends with a sequence where you're intended to search through the library finding hidden passageways until you find the key to a detonator.  At which point you can blow up the manor and use it to find an entrance to Bartoli's true hideout, an old abandoned opera house that his father used to perform at.  However, if you're clever about observing and going around the environment, you can just completely skip having to find the detonator key and, moreover, you can avoid a number of tricky shootouts by taking a shortcut out of level 3.  This shortcut was pretty handy for me especially, as I forgot to save at the beginning of level 4 and accidentally kept reloading my save at the end of level 3 when I meant to restart level 4 upon death.

Speaking of level 4, the hardest enemy in the game so far is in level 4 and it's just one random goon.  You start level 4 high up above a canal and directly underneath you is a guy who just patrols back and forth, watching the canal for disturbances.  If you get in the water AT ALL, he's going to fire at you, and trying to confront him will eat most of your health as you are literally helpless in the water.  It's very much a "play smarter, not harder" situation, you can and probably should maneuver around this level to where he only gets a shot off on you here or there.  You should not do what I did, which was continuously jump down over and over, risking my life to climb up onto the ledge the enemy is at to take them down, wasting my precious healing items in the process, only to realize on the sixth run that I can simply snipe them from a vantage point but STILL lost most of my health trying do so.  My friend Thomas is probably reading this right now and going "hehehe", I've given him so much guff over the years for not using stealth in games and just trying to action movie his way through and now here I am doing the same thing.

The opera house is a very cool setting, by the way.  Something I really like about Tomb Raider II so far is how open ended they have made the level design in comparison to the first one.  I mentioned before about how there was this open ended Venetian canal section in level 2 and now in level 4 we have this really open opera house portion.  I haven't gotten into the meat of it yet, I did the break-in portion of the level in this play session but have not experienced the full opera house really.  But I do know it's this massive five story building that you get effectively free reign of and you must figure out how exactly to approach it to progress.  Tomb Raider II really feels like the franchise is actually hitting its stride and I can already see the bridges forming between this kind of level design and the modern Tomb Raiders I'm more familiar with.  It makes it kind of crazy to me how many long time fans of this series see the reboot Raiders as being "not real Tomb Raiders", maybe it's because I played them first so I'm seeing the DNA they share more than the DNA they don't but to me, it does tend to feel like the Survivor trilogy is more Tomb Raider than Uncharted.

5/2/26

Man.  The opera house level was SOMETHING.  So, I got through the Venice section of the game in tonight's section, which is good.  I'm glad the first "act" is kind of over and done with.  But also, doing half of the final level in said Venice section was like 3 hours of my play session tonight.  And looking ahead at the walkthrough I'm using, it seems like after this section, at least for the next several levels, we're going to be skewing shorter.  I loved the Venice levels, don't get me wrong, I loved how ambitious and grand they seemed, how open ended they were.  But also I will be happy to not spend an entire play session on essentially one singular level for a while.  Progress good.  Progress makes game clearing fun.

Granted, part of the reason why progress has been so slow going is on me.  Like I've said, I don't really enjoy the idea of save scumming, I like to complete a substantial portion of the game between saves.  I tend to only really adjust my save if I know I'm about to face a rather tricky obstacle, a rather tricky enemy, or have played through a bunch of level without a save.  So like, a lot of the reason my progress stalls so much in Tomb Raider is that I have to redo sometimes 10-15 minutes of gameplay over and over to get back to where I am.  I get very quick at doing that bit of gameplay over and over, mind, but still.  I would probably be getting through this game faster if I saved way more frequently.  I don't know if that would be a more "fun" experience, but it would be a faster one.

I did adore the opera house level, though.  Like for as much trouble as it gave me, I really enjoyed making my way around this flooded, abandoned opera house that has been co-opted as a hideout by the evil cult.  It starts you from the onset with your two key objectives: you're missing a circuit board for the switch in the sound booth, and a relay box for the elevator down to the lobby.  Your goal is to find both of these things.  And you basically have free reign from there.  There is a concrete order of operations that you must do, don't get me wrong, some things don't become open until you do other parts of the opera house.  But on the whole, you have free reign of the area.  It's not just a good showcase of one of the highlights of Tomb Raider II, it's more open ended level design, but it's also really fun and really clever.  It really tests on how well you know how to play Tomb Raider.  There are a lot of platforming challenges that require full understanding of the precision and movement, a lot of gun fights that reward you for playing smarter and not harder.  It's a really fun level, I adore it.

Speaking of gun fights that reward you for playing smarter and not harder, I got to the first boss of the game!  It's a gun toting muscle bound member of Bartoli's crew that wields twin revolvers, which is how you know he's serious business.  The way you are intended to fight him is to use the environment to your advantage, weaving in and out of the maze of shipping containers, trying to get the drop on him and take a few shots before retreating.  However, that also can leave Lara very vulnerable to him, as you can't always see what you're doing from inside the maze, and he's not alone.  He has two dobermans which Lara has to kill, I'm still mad about how many dogs die in this game.  However, you can also trigger the boss and then find a worthwhile vantage point to snipe him from, with him not being able to do much of anything but run around the maze aimlessly, trying desperately not to be a sitting duck.  It's difficult to even really know if these things are intended or if they are just cheese that players can easily find out, as Tomb Raider, even in this incarnation of being more of a shooter, still favors sniping enemies safely from above than facing them head on.

After that, we reach the game's second act, an abandoned offshore oil rig that Bartoli has been using to find his father's lost ship.  His father, Gianni, was the original leader of this cult, and he sailed off one day with an artifact called "the Seraph", which is something of a key needed to unlock the vault which contains the dragon dagger.  Lara kind of ends up being whisked away to this oil rig by accident, she snuck onto the plane to confront Bartoli, only to be taken out by one of his goons and imprisoned in the oil rig herself.  It ends up working out though, as she now has access to the shipwreck where Bartoli's father disappeared.  Meaning that she can get the Seraph before Bartoli can.  It also introduces one of my favorite gaming tropes that I think everyone else hates besides me: a section where you lose all your resources and have to sneak around a facility slowly regaining them bit by bit.  People often criticize these sections in games and act like "who likes this" it's me, I like this, I like when a game goes "how well do you understand our movement/design options instead of just using your tools to push through."

I think in my next play session I'm going to get to Lara's iconic wetsuit?  That's exciting.  They've introduced underwater combat with a harpoon gun, and obviously I'm about to enter a shipwreck, so it only makes sense.  Like I said at the beginning, now that we're out of Venice the levels seem to be getting considerably shorter.  I doubt it'll increase the pace of progress going forward, I am bad at games and stubborn at using the tool that would make these levels go a bit faster.  But I'm optimistic that the second and third "acts" of this game will have a bit more forward momentum.  That being said, despite my feelings like "oh I haven't been making like any progress" I do want to say that I'm still very into this game.  Currently I think my rankings of the Tomb Raider series have this behind Rise, and it's honestly a pretty close race.  Second games, man.  Sometimes the sequel is just better, who would've thought?

5/4/26

Tomb Raider II has its own Snake Eater moment.  Like, literally it is the Snake Eater moment, just without the song.  This is not a drill.  In the game's seventh level, you are attempting to make your way up to the oil rig's helipad, trying to find a way out of the facility so you can dive into the wreck where the Seraph is being held.  And the way they do this is by having Lara climb a giant maintenance ladder in the middle of the facility all the way up.  I have never played Snake Eater, for the record, it's going to be on the list eventually but I know this scene, obviously.  So the entire time I'm climbing I was singing Snake Eater.  I can't believe one of the most famous video games ever stole from Tomb Raider II and nobody knew about it.  For legal reasons, this is a joke, climbing a ladder isn't exactly a patent.

I was correct in that I was getting close to wetsuit Lara.  At the end of level 7 you find out that Bartoli is torturing a monk from the Tibetan monastery related to the dragon dagger he seeks.  After the monk reveals that his family bloodline is responsible for the protection of the Seraph, and that his father was the one to kill Bartoli's father and wreck his ship, Bartoli gets the jump on Lara and the monk.  The monk sadly loses his life, but Lara escapes, and follows Bartoli's men down to the shipwreck.  It's here that we get an extended underwater segment.  I am once again going to make people upset at me but I do not care: I kind of like underwater levels in video games.

I distinctly remember when DKC Returns was coming out, some people at Retro were talking about the lack of water levels in Nintendo Power and they literally said "well nobody likes a water level anyways" and I think for a long time I agreed with this.  Like I just did not like water levels because I always expected them to be the worst parts of the game.  But nah man, I love water levels, I love swimming in games, I love the atmosphere of being underwater, I feel like they're the unsung heroes of gaming and people just look down on them because they remember like the water levels of NES games, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  Or getting lost in the water temple in Ocarina of Time.  But water levels rule.

And like, this one has you deep sea diving into a shipwreck!  It's so cool.  It's very tense because Lara has a limited oxygen meter so you have to move quickly when you're underwater and try and make your way to the next safe spot before you run out of air.  You're being chased by sharks and barracudas and you have to swim quickly.  You keep switching between the parts of the ship that have been insulated from the ocean where Lara can move normally and going underwater, even switching between inside and outside of a ship.  It's a very fun level, in my opinion, I really like level 8.  The only real problem, to me at least, is that underwater combat is very bad.  Unlike regular combat, where Lara will automatically aim at enemies, you have to actually aim underwater.  This ultimately just leads to a lot of wasted ammunition as you try and figure out how it works and honestly most players are likely to find a vantage point above water and pick off enemies like that.  Especially when you have an enemy as small as a barracuda.

It feels so nice to be able to do two levels in a session.  It feels like I'm making actual progress.  I probably would've even been able to do 3 if I weren't so stingy with saving!  But like, where's the fun in that.  I try not to save scum unless I'm playing like a famously difficult retro game where save stating after every jump is just the best idea.  I think genuinely having a section of like big, complicated levels followed by a section of smaller, more linear levels was actually so smart, like, I liked Venice but I was also like "maaaaaan, I'm kind of ready to be past this" and then it goes right into more breezier levels!!!  It's nice to feel like I'm making progress, y'know?  This game is just good, y'all.  It's already bumping up to my second favorite Tomb Raider game and I feel like, even as I play more of the series, it's going to stick in that spot?  I don't really know, obviously, there are still 8 more Tomb Raider games to play but I'm liking this one a lot.

5/6/26

This is going to be a short update because I literally did one level tonight.  This isn't because the level was hard or anything, I would probably say this is one of the easier levels thus far.  It was a lot of small, enclosed spaces and you may think that would make it harder but usually, when you're enclosed, the game is more reliant on traps to kill Lara.  Enemies are fairly sparse in these tighter levels.  Enemies are sparse in this section of the game in general, like, we are stuck underwater inside of a shipwreck and the game has been kind of light on enemies for that reason.  Bartoli could only safely get so many of his goons inside the ship after all.  But compound that with how many small, enclosed spaces there are?  It's been a breeze.  The only hard part in this level was when you had to retrieve a key which had been thrown overboard and were pursued by sharks and barracudas.

The eighth level of the game, the Wreck of the Maria Doria, takes us further into the wrecked ship that serves as the Seraph's final resting place.  In particular, it takes us through the parts of the ship that any patrons that were on its doomed voyage would've been using for recreation.  The ballroom, the swimming pool, the rest room, not to be confused with the restroom.  This "rest room" is like a big parlor where people could play cards.  Something I don't think I've mentioned as of yet is that the Maria Doria is upside down.  Like when it sank, it sank upside down, and I noticed this before but when you're going through maintenance corridors it's like "what does it matter that the ship is upside down".  Vs. now that you're going through a bunch of the ship's more noteworthy locations, you really start to appreciate the ship being upside down.  Something I really enjoy about this level is how many of the hazards are clearly just broken lights from when the ship was operational.  Like, when it was rightside up, these were just normal lighting fixtures but now that it's upside down and time has taken its toll, they're horrible death traps of glass.  That being said, I don't know how Bartoli's father could afford this ship.  I know he ran a cult but like, bro was a stage magician.

We finally have the full suite of weapons in Lara's arsenal.  Something I find very funny about the walkthrough I'm using, shoutout to Stellalune once again, she's the GOAT, is how much Tomb Raider II clearly wants you to pick up the weapons in the game.  Besides the grenade launcher, that is, which is the final weapon I got my hands on even though I technically could've grabbed it as a reward in the first level for finding all the secrets.  In the first game, there were like two weapons that were required, and honestly I forget if the shotgun was even actually required, and then one that was pretty easy to get ahold of but technically missable.  In this game, though, it feels like every level I read the line "if you didn't get the Uzis in one of the previous levels, this goon will drop them".

In particular the Uzis are the weapon that the game seems to want you to have, which is very funny when the Uzis were the hardest to obtain weapon in the original game, being part of a tricky platforming challenge that left Lara a sitting duck near the endgame.  It's nice because, especially now that we're in way more gun fights, having access to the better weapons is pretty paramount.  I have been burning through ammo really quickly and I do not care.  But also I can imagine it makes doing a minimum weapons run pretty frustrating.  Real quick, I do want to correct something about the harpoon gun from my previous mention of it.  It does auto aim, it is just that it's so easy for Lara to get just a bit off kilter and then your aim is useless.  It's just super finnicky, I admire the effort to make underwater combat but it needed some fine-tuning.

5/10/26

Classic Tomb Raider fans will literally tell you like "oh the modern Tomb Raider games don't even feature any tomb raiding, they're just generic third-person shooters that occasionally have puzzles to them" and then the second game in the franchise, one of its high points, mostly takes place on a boat.  I get that, as someone who initially got into the franchise with the Survivor titles, I'm biased towards defending them with regards to how they carry on the torch for Tomb Raider.  I see the things which are similar more than the things which are different, yadda yadda.  But like.  Y'all at a certain point you do gotta just look at the franchise and go "huh, maybe there isn't that much Tomb Raiding in the classic Raiders either".

I am still on the boat, if you couldn't tell.  I don't mind it, this is a great location, I love this sunken ship.  Though I will say I'm starting to question the geography on display here.  I've been kind of suspending my disbelief for the last couple levels, like, you swim into a ship who has already been half buried in the ocean's sand and rocks and slowly make your way through the ship's middle decks, right?  But then, at the start of level 9, you leave the first part of the ship and swim over to a second part of the ship which is primarily comprised of the ship's cabins, its engine room, and the ship's theater.  Bizarre the theater wouldn't be with the ballroom and the swimming pool as part of a recreational deck, but I digress.  It seems like the ship split it two, it's whatever.  And then you get to the 10th and final level of the Ship act and like, all sense is just thrown out the window.  This part takes place within a giant cavern that somehow the ship has found itself in and you you're just climbing about a series of disconnected parts of the ship.  It's not a problem that the ship doesn't make a lot of sense but like, it is kind of silly how they've just fully given up on making the ship seem real for the sake of platforming challenges.

Things got a little tense at the end of the 9th level, the Living Quarters.  I've mentioned before that med kits are a pretty tight resource in this game.  I am, as you all know by now, bad at video games and so I am usually using a med kit as soon as I receive it in a lot of cases.  And at the end of level 9, I had run out of med kits and had gotten myself in a tricky situation where Lara ended up at 1 HP, forcing me to run the final gambit of the level on hard mode.  It was VERY touch and go and I genuinely thought I was going to have to reload a previous save, which would've been from the previous level at that point because I make the fatal gaming mistake of not having multiple saves.  I have so many bad gaming habits, y'all.  I think the fact that I was a Pokemon child just ingrained in me like "you have one save file, and that's what you get".  But surprisingly it only took me like three tries to get through the rest of the level.  It's so weird because like, I don't enjoy when games are designed to put me in scenarios like this really.  I've always been critical of Soulslikes and I'm a well known Cuphead hater.  When a game's whole point is to get you into these tight scenarios I'm more bored than anything.  But when I do it to myself?  I'm all about that.  I'm all about the consequences of my actions bby!

5/16/26

I finished the last wetsuit Lara level in this section.  A sad day indeed.  I am actually a huge fan of how good the fits are in this game.  They're not particularly practical by any means, like.  It's pretty clear that each of Lara's fits is designed for visual appeal rather than function.  She wears her parka half zipped up so that you can still see her cleavage, in what has to be one of the most obvious decisions in gaming history.  No wonder Life with Derek did an entire episode like 8 years later on whether or not Tomb Raider was progressive.  There's your Life With Derek mention for your bingo cards.  But also Lara looks good in all of them.  It's the classical pulp hero/heroine idea of "not actually having to wear practical clothes because your iconic fits are just so cool why would you ever change into something more "practical".  Like, Lara is such a good pulp heroine, her being cool is always at the forefront.  I like Survivor Lara, obviously, I love those games a whole lot, but I'm glad a version of this Lara is coming back to the forefront moving forward.  Even if I'm scratching my head at the Herculean task they're undergoing of trying to make one singular Lara Croft timeline out of the three separate Laras.

I am so happy to be done with the sunken ship act.  The last level of this act is likely the worst level of this game, and is definitely the worst level of the game so far.  Like it's not necessarily a bad level or anything but the thing that I've liked about this section so far is that it's this super interesting underwater adventure; you're traversing through a sunken ship and making your way through a bunch of interesting locations on this lost luxury cruise liner.  And the final part is just a big cavern where a chunk of the exterior of the ship has found itself in.  Tomb Raider has a lot of levels which are just "a big cave" and this is certainly one of them.  It's also just a level that feels overcomplicated, like.  Tomb Raider level design is very centered around backtracking through levels after completing objectives but this one definitely felt a bit tedious.  It's probably the worst individual level I've played through so far in a Tomb Raider, frfr.

I'm finally getting into the habit of saving pretty frequently.  So, and this is a dumb thing to admit because usually I don't care, but there are achievements in the Remastered Collection for beating the game in under so many saves.  That's why I've been like "well, I need to be sparing with my saves, I don't want to miss out on the achievement!"  I'm not going to be achievement grinding in these games.  I only really achievement grind if, a, I like the game a ton and, b, getting all achievements isn't too crazy.  And while Tomb Raider II is definitely a game I like a lot, I expect it to make my best list this year, the achievements for this seem absurd.  The game is hard, I am not good at it, I will move on once I beat it.  So now, while I'm not aggressively saving, I'm still staggering my saves a bit, I'm more comfortable going "I've beaten a good chunk of this level, I can save".  It is not making my progress faster, mind, despite the game's eleventh level being kind of short all things considered I ended up spending like two hours on it.  But it's making it so I don't have to redo absurd amounts of level over when I die.

Luckily, once you get out of the final sunken ship level, you get into an absolute banger of a level.  After retrieving the Seraph, a statue of an angel, odd thing to be the key to a Chinese treasure but whatever, we make our way to Tibet.  This is where we get Lara's absurd and amazing parka fit, she's running around the Himalayas in a half zipped parka, it's so funny.  I only got around to one of the Tibet levels in last night's play session, I wish I had gotten to more but game is hard, y'know?  Tibet has kind of a weird juxtaposition of enemies too which can make it at times easier and at times very tricky.  It both has the return of wild animal enemies, which don't deal a lot of damage but are very mobile and can chip you to death if you're not careful; and also the strongest goons we've seen so far, equipped with machine guns which can just zero-to-death Lara like it's nothing.  You can tell that the stakes are kind of kicking up as we approach the end game, Bartoli has decided to invade the Tibetan monastery where the treasure is hidden away, lack of key be damned.  I say end game, I'm pretty confident I have like 6 more levels of this game left.

The big feature of the first Tibet level, though, is a snowmobile section.  PS1 games loved their snowmobile sections, I swear.  And you know what, fair, the snowmobile is a very cool vehicle.  You spend the majority of this level riding a snowmobile, it can be beaten without it (and an achievement is locked behind beating the snowmobile level sans snowmobile) but for a first time playthrough why would you ever do that?  Other than the snowmobile kind of being clunky to control, it is a vehicle section in a non-vehicle game and those are almost always a bit clunky in older games.  But it's just cool.  And do a surprising amount with the snowmobile, like, you have very interesting paths you can only take with a snowmobile that seem like they would be impossible, you have a number of big cinematic jumps. you instakill enemies while riding the snowmobile, later on you unlock a snowmobile with front mounted turrets for some vehicular combat.  It's such a cool level, Tomb Raider II seems way more focused on "Lara doing cool stuff" than the first game and I appreciate it.

In the next play session I will, finally, be diving into a tomb.  Again, I am shocked at how little tomb raiding is in the series' second and often considered best entry.  Like the modern Tomb Raider games are usually criticized for how little tomb raiding goes on in them and meanwhile over half of Tomb Raider II was in Italy and the middle of the ocean.  And it's such a wild swing, Tomb Raider was basically all tomb raiding, you moved through ruins and made your way deep underground into lost cities and stuff.  But in this game you spend half the game in the "modern day" and then finally, 12 (24) hours in you're entering ruins.  I'm stoked though, I think it plays better when Lara is allowed to have more of an adventure in the present that ends in ruins.  Gives the game more of a Indiana Jones-esque story structure, something that is kind of lost in the first game where you're just jumping from ruin to ruin.  Tomb Raider II is so good y'all, easily second favorite Tomb Raider game so far.  Of four, but still, I expect it to be top 3 when I finally get caught up on this series still.

5/19/26

I'll beat this game someday, y'all.  Someday.  Like, classic Tomb Raiders are hard, and from what I understand they will only get harder from here.  I looked up "what is the hardest Tomb Raider game" and Tomb Raider II only ranked as like the second or third hardest game in the series.  3 & 4 are apparently going to be a RIDE.  And I am famously bad at video games, if there is one thing you can take away from this blog it's that.  But man, spending an entire play session per level is getting to me.  This happened when I played Tomb Raider 1 too, it's why I've adopted a "play games on rotating days" for this game (and also because it's fun to alternate).  For those who are curious, right now I'm playing Strange Horticulture alongside this and loving it.  Such a good puzzle game.

Now that I'm slowly approaching the endgame of Tomb Raider II, I'm starting to realize that the game gives you just way too many resources.  I have over 1000 bullets in weapons I haven't even had to bust out yet because as I want to sort of use weapons in order of weakest to strongest.  I.e. I'm not using the Uzis until I run out of Automatic Pistol ammo, and then once I'm out of Uzi ammo I'll move onto the M16, etc.  It's funny because like, in Tomb Raider 1 it did feel like I was discouraged from using my resources, every weapon was kind of a late game weapon or, if it did need to be brought out in the early game, it was just an "in case of emergency, break glass" sort of deal.  But this game like really overcorrects, I know I've been having a hard time so it's ridiculous for me to say like "oh, I'm too strong in this game" but legitimately I feel like the only danger I'm ever in is platforming related.  Enemies can be a problem but more often than not, I struggle with enemies due to how few heals I have on me, and I mostly lack heals because I keep making critical errors when it comes to platforming.

The Monastery level was sick.  It's another one of those levels where the entire thing is built around one central puzzle.  In this case there is a door that requires you to find five keys around the Monastery to unlock it, each key being hidden behind its own series of puzzles.  And these puzzles are fun enough, as is normally the case Tomb Raider is at its strongest when you're placed in a central locale and you have to keep going through the various corridors and rooms to solve puzzles, ultimately ending up at the centerpiece of the level.  But the reason the Monastery in particular works is that Lara is placed in the midst of a war.  Bartoli's men have found their way into the hidden Monastery and are attempting to invade it, all the while the monks that call this area home are defending their sacred temple.

This level is designed in such a way where the player could approach it one of two ways.  The monks will defend their temple from ANY perceived threat, but, if you're not a threat to them, they will instead swarm enemies, providing Lara with a rare opportunity for backup.  You COULD go in guns blazing, killing every person monk or henchman, and that's certainly the "easier" way to do it.  The monks are numerous and can overwhelm you easily but they also only have close range weapons and can be manipulated.  But if you hold your fire, play smarter with your aim, you can gain a powerful allied force.  It also doesn't have to be exact, the monks seem to have a bit of leeway if you accidentally fire at them and then holster your weapon.  It's if you dedicate fire to them that they'll freak out.  It's a very neat level, a little bit of a headache to manage if you aren't on team "kill everyone" but worth it.  If nothing else, Bartoli's men will often be so distracted fighting the monks that you can easily loot their bodies while resupplying.  For the first time in the entire game, I have a reserve of healing items.

5/20/26

Y'all, I'm excited to say that we have Yetis.  I'm actually kind of surprised that "the yeti" wasn't, like, a boss fight that then became a regular enemy?  That feels very in line with the structure of a Tomb Raider, you know, you fight a more supernatural threat as a boss earlier on in the game and then it becomes a regular enemy.  But this game just has yetis as standard enemies out the gate.  I've already killed like 20 of them.  Lara has no regard for the fascinating life she finds, she only wants carnage.  Quick aside, I was happy to finally be out of the part of the game where you have to kill dogs en masse because that's, you know.  Sad.  But now she's just killing endangered Snow Leopards and that's worse.  That's so much worse.  Lara's complete disregard for animal life is why these games need remakes.  I digress.  Not only are there yetis but there is kind of a fun bit of environmental worldbuilding on why yetis, despite being a concrete species, are so rarely seen.  The monks actually keep them imprisoned within their sacred lands, having rounded them up in large cages that are all triggered to release when someone tries to make progress.  The yetis that hikers spot are simply those which avoided this fate or escaped it.

This section has one of my favorite things that the first Tomb Raider had: a pair of levels which take place in the same geography and you wrap around to setpieces you had seen but couldn't access in the first level.  The 13th and 14th levels are part of a paired set, throughout the 13th level you repeatedly see parts of the temple that you cannot access.  A frozen lake with a gong hammer underneath.  A bridge above you that leads to a locked door that you never open.  A large hanging fire on a statue that you can't interact with.  You see all these pieces but can't really do anything with them.  And then in level 14, you finally come back around to this area and do something with all these pieces you couldn't do anything with before.  It's very neat to have in what is usually a very linear adventure series, Lara tends to always be delving deeper so having areas that she returns to later in the same area is always just a really cool moment.  I imagine they intended this to be one big level but needed to separate it to let the game keep pace and not be stuck loading this huge level, but breaking it up like this also ends up working super well for the game's needs.

I also love that, in level 14, there are none of Bartoli's men left to fight.  In level 13 you encountered sparse numbers of them, the very few who had successfully made a push past the monks and pursued Lara into the depths of the temple.  I want to say that, in total, there are 7 gun toting enemies in the entirety of level 13.  By level 14 though, it's clear that Bartoli has ordered a retreat and so the gunmen have dissipated.  Lara is going to get whatever necessary treasure is hidden within the Tibetan monastery and it is in Bartoli's best interest to stage a tactical retreat and remove his dwindling numbers from Tibet to instead stage an ambush when Lara heads off to China to retrieve the dagger.  Something I think is just across the board better in Tomb Raider II when compared to the first game is how much more willing it is to tell the story between the story beats.  Like in the first game, Lara had to be present for every bit of storytelling it felt like, whereas in the second game, the game is more willing to explain what's happening through the gameplay and you can infer through it what is happening in the larger narrative without needing NPCs to show up and tell Lara what is going on.

There was a very cool secret in this section.  I have been trying to get most of the hidden collectibles, I haven't been getting all of them, mind, I missed some in the early game and I also definitely gave up a couple on certain levels where the reward wasn't worth it.  For context, if you find all three hidden collectibles in a level, you get a pretty substantial reward.  These collectibles replace the secrets from the first game where hidden throughout the level, there were optional puzzles/platforming challenges that would net you additional rewards like early weapons or additional ammo pickups, in this game you have to find the three collectibles and then once you've found the third one, you get a massive reward, usually 4-6 ammo pickups.  This might be why I'm not stressed about ammo.  I digress.  Anyways, one of the collectibles in level 14 is over a giant pit with seemingly no way to cross.  It's just a massive room with a collectible on a raised pedestal you can't get up to above a pit that has ladders to climb out of but I'm pretty sure you would die if you fell into it.  So how do you get this collectible?  Invisible bridge.  Just like Indiana Jones, you are required to take a leap of faith across this pit and, if you do it from the exact right spot, the spot directly across from the collectible, you will land on an invisible bridge that will take you safely across.  It's a classic adventure staple and I was so happy when I figured it out.

5/29/26

I promise you that I like this game.  I know updates on this blog entry in particular have taken so long and been very scattered, I've been super busy in May.  We've been throwing out a bunch of stuff in our basement it's been a lot, and I'm usually like "I want to sit down and commit a lot of time to Tomb Raider because I know that I might play for four hours and not even beat A level, let alone enough of the game to where it feels like I made substantial progress.  But I have a fire under me right now as I want to beat Tomb Raider before June starts.  I already know what diary game I am playing after Tomb Raider and it is a game that in a certain friend group, we traditionally play in June.  It's technically a game I meant to start already because the franchise's anniversary was this month, but since I missed I want to play it in June.  And to be honest I think I can handle it, at the time of writing I only have two and 1/3 levels of Tomb Raider left, so I feel like I can finish it either in the next play session or the next two play sessions.  Not that it really matters because I have a lot of June left and I'm not exactly going to be only playing that game in June but, you know.

So I finished Act III, the Tibet act.  I had basically been done with the level last time I played before I got ganged up on by Yetis and lost the level right before I had to call it a night.  Disappointing, to be honest, I could've probably powered through the remainder of the game in like one sitting if I hadn't died there.  I digress, the rest of the level was kind of bog standard Tomb Raider platforming with the exception of the boss of the level.  The boss of Act III, the Talion guardian, is a giant bird man monster that is super cool and feels very mystical.  Like something I do like about this game in comparison to the first is that they are letting things be more mystical, even if it's definitely not full-on magic.  In the first game they kind of explained the mysticism away as being scientific experiments from a long dead civilization but in this one they're just like "yeah, magic is in the world, but it's not like a massive driving force".  The only unfortunate thing is that the Talion Guardian is a very easy boss that has a very clear exploit, it can literally be taken down with your standard pistols no problem because the arena has a built in spot where Lara can just stand and shoot at the Guardian and it can't find her again.  But still a very cool creature, I hope that this game gets a remake/remaster after Legacy of Atlantis so we can see this thing in a more modern context, its design will probably be sick.

After that Lara steals a Jeep from Bartoli's men and drives off to where the Dragon dagger we've been hunting this entire game only to get immediately clowned on.  After all of this, after hunting down Bartoli and racing across the planet to try and stop him from getting the dagger, the dagger is surrounded by trapdoors that make it so nobody can get to it anyways and, should they try, they will get thrown down into the caverns below that are full of puzzles and death traps.  It's so funny, like, it kind of feels like Lara is the only thing that has actually caused Bartoli to progress.  I kind of feel like if she hadn't gotten involved, Bartoli would've never actually had a chance.  This isn't a problem I'm actually pointing out, for what it's worth, this isn't like how the Big Bang Theory really thought they were cooking by pointing out that Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark goes the exact same way whether Indy is there or not.  I just think it's a bit amusing that our main character is probably the only reason the villain has a chance of succeeding.

But also I'm glad the dagger was booby-trapped because man Level 15 rules.  The longest and most complicated level so far, the Temple of Xian is a massive fortress full of death traps and amazing iconography.  It's one of those areas that can only exist in fiction because it involves people building into a volcano and having structures exist within the lava.  Actually come to think of it, is the world in Tomb Raider hollow?  Is it a Hollow Earth?  There are many giant empty caverns under the surface where civilizations have built great structures that would be impractical to build under the surface if it weren't hollow.  Anyways, so far I've had multiple spike rooms, I've had to outrun like 8 boulders, I've had to dodge mechanical terra cotta warriors, it's been dope.  And I've yet to get in a gun fight, because at this point Lara is just fully ahead of Bartoli and his men.  I'm actually super glad that we aren't dealing with Bartoli's men in this level, there are too many death traps and required HP losses for there to also be gun fights.  Also, the entire thing is built around this super cool Dragon statue, love a dragon.

I think I can commit to beating the game next play session.  Now, I want to be clear, I am bad at the game.  I have take an additional 15 hours at this point over the project HLTB average just because I keep dying.  But I have about 1/3 of level, then a level that is very open but also doesn't seem that long all things considered, and then the final level which is just a build up and then the final boss from what I'm reading from the walkthrough.  I should be able to do that in one single 4-5 hour play session.  So, as is normal in the penultimate section, some "final thoughts".  Tomb Raider is a series that can seem to be very iterational, that especially in the classical days of the franchise it feels like a series that is largely the same but with minor iterations between the entries that make them better.

But I think Tomb Raider II is a lot better than 1 and I wouldn't be surprised if it remains my second favorite Tomb Raider game long term.  The actual plot and especially the way the plot is structured is better in Tomb Raider 1 but in every other way Tomb Raider II is just so much better.  The level design is better, it's a better shooter, a better platformer, it has some more interesting level ideas.  It's more difficult than the first game but in a way I find very compelling.  It's great.  Y'all should get on Tomb Raider, it's such a banger of a franchise and it feels like it has kind of fallen to the wayside.  Like it's crazy Tomb Raider is objectively one of the most iconic franchises in the medium and yet I've met so few people who have ever played one, and even fewer who have ever played a classic Raider.  Just a whole part of gaming history that most people have seemingly skipped.

5/30/26

Okay, so.  I didn't beat the game.  I always underestimate how bad I am at the platforming/how easy it is for things to go wrong in said platforming.  The number of times I line up a jump perfectly to then just hit run then jump instead of jump then run, I swear y'all.  You'd think after sixty hours of playing these games (yes it's that much, I'm embarrassed too), I'd finally have a grasp on the nuances of the controls and not be making these errors but you know.  Never underestimate my ability to screw up.  At least I am finally just saying "screw it" and saving incredibly frequently.  I spent 18 or 19 saves on the Temple of Xian level alone.  I swallowed my pride, choked on the lies, but the lack thereof left me empty inside.  And it still took me an additional like two hours to complete in this play session.  RIP me.  I'm very bad at games.

Again, if Lara had, instead of rushing to the dagger, taken the single key to the vault where the dagger had been held and thrown it to the bottom of the ocean, Bartoli would be completely out of luck.  So, Lara climbs her way out of the Temple of Xian only to find that Bartoli and his men are at the dagger, conducting the ritual that will allow Bartoli to become a dragon.  Something that they only are able to do because Lara already set off the booby trap guarding the dagger at the beginning of the level.  It's just so funny how much of this was unlikely to play out like it has if Lara hadn't gotten involved as, at the very least, Bartoli would probably have gotten to the booby traps at the Temple of Xian and then fell to his death.  Like obviously this isn't a problem, we wouldn't have a game if any of this didn't happen, it's just so funny how Bartoli is always this many steps behind Lara and because of that, he reaps the benefits of her getting places first.

The inner chambers of the Temple of Xian were sick.  Like, I'm a big fan of this level in general, it's a very fun "booby trapped temple" level with new traps and obstacles around every turn.  And I really like the fact that the only enemies down this deep are animals who have made this place home.  Even if it means, yet again, Lara is killing endangered wildlife.  I killed A LOT of Siberian Tigers in this level, y'all.  But the level ends with this incredible set piece of Lara having to make her way through a lava filled room with twin dragon statues on either side that she has to climb up.  This is something that the modern Tomb Raiders do miss from the classics, I feel, it's not that they lack in really iconic and interesting set-pieces but their focus on realism does mean that outside of the dedicated puzzle rooms, they tend to be set in very logical and standard locations.  Whereas the classic Raiders could go a little more classic pulp more often.  And also it's super fun how you climb up the dragon statues only to then slide all the way back down.

Speaking of really cool setpieces, level 16 owns.  It's really hard, mind, especially for a bad at platforming boy like myself, but it's also super cool.  So after Bartoli stabs himself with the dagger, his men carry him away in a portal that opened when the dagger was activated.  This portal leads Bartoli and, by extension, Lara into a kingdom in the Heavens, a fortress for the dagger's master where an army of stone soldiers awaits them.  This is the Floating Islands, a jade kingdom in the sky.  It's actually so cool, like, I'm bad at the platforming so this has been an uphill battle to get through it, hence the other reason I didn't beat the game this play session, but it's super cool having this area of just intense platforming where any misstep is just instant death.  You have to really be deliberate with your movements.  Or just screw up constantly and make sure you have a save that isn't too far back, that works too tbh.

That being said... the final enemies of this game are kind of pushovers?  Like I get why you wouldn't want to design enemies that are overly problematic given that this is a pretty harsh platforming challenge.  Having enemies that can be serious walls for Lara would only ensure that the end game is miserable.  But like, there are two kinds of enemies in this level: sword wielding soldiers who slowly fly towards Lara and spear wielding soldiers who attempt to rush her.  Both of these enemies are very intimidating if Lara allows them to get up close to her, however, the level design makes it so that you'd only end up in that situation if you were intentionally trying to die.  The sword guys move too slowly to be a threat unless you didn't see them approaching, and the spear guys can't handle Lara jumping off the platform they're already on.  Meaning both parties can easily be dispatched, even using Lara's standard pistols.  Although I have no reason to do that, because I am drowning in ammo, because I have been doing my best to find all the drops in a level, but still.

5/31/26

I should've just pushed through and beaten the game last play session.  I am not kidding when I say this that, even with how bad I am at this game, I had maybe an hour left of game time.  I cleared it during a meal.  It would've been so much more resonant if I had cleared it all in one sitting but I was like "well, it's after midnight, usually this is when I stop gaming and get some writing done, plus I'm kind of hungry, I should stop".  An incorrect assessment, I should've just simply beaten the game.  The final boss level took me less than 20 minutes, and that was just me being dumb and not playing my best.  I kept trying to make all my Grenades work when I just simply could've been mobile and played smarter.  The epilogue took five minutes.

It's actually kind of wild how short the final level is.  Like Tomb Raider 1's final boss level was a full proper level where you had to do the most difficult platforming in the game, make your way out of the currently sinking Atlantis, and then have a one-on-one duel with the main antagonist who mutates into a flying monster to dispatch you.  It feels so "final", like all your skills you've amassed across the entire game actually matter.  So in a game like Tomb Raider II, where the level design is, at least in my opinion, more interesting and more about testing the player's skill, you'd expect it to be an end game that absolutely test your merits.  Takes Lara to her most extreme yet.  Instead the final level is a single, small, very linear level where you fight four kind of strong enemies, 6 incredibly weak enemies, and then the final boss which if you've even been storing up some Uzi ammo, you're probably going to blast through.  Kind of a disappointing ending to what is otherwise a pretty banger game.

And yeah, the final boss is a joke.  I wish it was cooler, I really do, because the final boss is a DRAGON.  Who doesn't love dragons, dragons are inherently cool.  But like, the problem is that they made him too mobile.  The dragon, what remains of Bartoli after stabbing himself, walks around the arena with giant pounding steps as Lara tries to outmaneuver him, ducking under the arena into a pool of water underneath to swim away from him when he's caught up with her.  However, because of this the dragon is just so easy to work around as he just wanders the arena randomly until he gets a lock on Lara.  I think this boss fight would've just been better if it was more of a puzzle fight, like, the dragon is stationary in the center or has limited movement, but is able to follow Lara more effectively, and so what Lara must do is dive underneath it to maybe hit switches that will cause it to be knocked out, allowing Lara to go up and get the drop on it.  Tomb Raider is missing puzzle fights, that's the consistent problem with its boss design.

The epilogue is kind of cool though.  First of all, we get to see Lara in her satin blue robe.  Love that for her.  I try not to comment on Lara's attractiveness too too much when talking about her because it rarely matters but like, the girl is hot and she owns it and we love to see a queen dominate.  But also, she's cornered in her mansion, low on supplies, as the last remnants of Bartoli's cult crash through her gate and try to take revenge for her fallen boss.  Now, this isn't a full on stealth section like the stuff at the oil rig was, Lara quickly grabs her shotgun and way too much ammo for it to mow down the intruders (and their dogs, I'm still so sad about having to kill all these good boys and girls), but it's still a super neat segment.  Seeing the heroine cornered and having to fight her way out of her own home to finish the job.  And it also lets you see the Croft Manor at night, which is a rarity for this franchise as typically you only ever see it during the day.  It's a very easy section, however, most of the remaining men are very early game enemies and the shotgun, while not my favorite weapon due to how slow it is, is amongst the most powerful.  It dispatches any regular enemy in 1-2 shots.  But still, a fun little sequence to end off Tomb Raider II.  And also we get Lara teasing us about the camera almost following her into shower, clearly poking fun at all the rumors surrounding the Tomb Raider games which didn't make sense as if any one of them were true it would immediately cause Tomb Raider to receive an AO rating and be pulled from sale.

So that is Tomb Raider II.  I like this game a whole lot.  It's a lot harder than the first game, at some points to the point of being grueling.  But I think it demonstrably improves on every aspect of the first game outside of the story.  It has super engaging and fun platforming, a heavier focus on the gun gameplay, more interesting level concepts.  While the plot is just so much worse than the first game, I think it is structured better in this one, having Lara go to more real world locales before delving into the more mystical and abstract parts hidden in the world.  It's a game that is really hard to contextualize how much better it is than the first one, as comparing them side-by-side they do seem very equal, with maybe very slight improvements.  But in my mind, Tomb Raider II improves upon its predecessor significantly, creating a more challenging but more engaging game overall.  I fully expect Tomb Raider II to be on the year-end list this year, it's excellent.  8.9/10