Shadow of the tomb raider

The day after my last journal entry, so the 8th, I was thinking about starting Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I decided this wouldn't be a very good idea as groceries were in two days and getting deep into something new then would be poor timing if I had to go back to the usual fare. Sensible enough. Ten days later, on the 17th, a whole week after groceries, I was finally well enough to give it a go. smh.

It's... simplistic narratively is probably the word I'm looking for. You're thrown in assuming you remember Rise (which I didn't), but no big deal if you don't. You are Lara Croft. You are chasing bad guys and looking for knowledge probably in tombs. That's all you need to know. It's not doing anything groundbreaking story wise but it's very much a product of coming out after Uncharted 4 and boy can you tell. A lot of Rise's criticisms was it being too survival and combat focused (already dressed down from the first of the survivor trilogy, which I never played) so Shadow focuses much more on exploration. This delivered, as in the first six hours I had had a grand total of one combat encounter with human enemies in the prologue and two encounters with jaguars. That ratio was wild, but the pacing is pretty decent between, explore an area with a puzzle, now you can explore this town, now you can fight these enemies between you and the next objective, here is a breathtaking panning shot of an ancient ruin (thank you), here are tombs and crypts to go off and look at now if you want, and so on. It also acknowledges what all women want, which are knives and axes. Truly I've seen Lara excited three times in this game and one of them was for a ceremonial knife and the second was for her climbing axes.

It does keep giving me headaches if I play too long in one sitting. I think there are simply too many jungle polygons. I love when there's gendered pronouns of all male enemies looking for her who is systematically taking them down from stealth I love getting to be a woman in a male dominated action game space thank you. I might have to look into temporarily remapping some buttons (not through the game, through console) as your effective eagle vision, survival instincts, is triggered by R3 and boy I wish I could toggle it I'm being forced to press R3 all the time and after three days my thumb is making its objections known. R1 might be the best option for it, it's used for zoom and crafting special ammo only, we'll see...

Also it's funny to me that I am totally chill with the following things: jaguars, jumpscares from ancient civilisations that appear out of the jungle to massacre the evil organisation and are absolutely going to turn on me at some point (par for the course in this kind of game it's going to get Fucking Weird), more jaguars, but I drew the line at piranhas. Genuine skin crawling fear. I absolutely hated the section I had to swim past a bunch. I just know they're going to do more later. :|a also Lara almost gets crushed in tight caverns way too many times in the opening hour and wow I did not like that either. Space, please!!!

It's going, though. I've done most of the combat trophies by checkpoint restarting (recommended), I have one or two left. We'll see how much I get through over the weekend.