Ludwig Kietzmann
@ludwigk
Video game enjoyer and local library fan in San Francisco. Gaming comms guy for hire. Not actual gameplay footage. 🎮☕🍷🎥 🏳️🌈
Haven't a clue as to what I should expect from this laugh riot future classic
Adding more dialogue to Tomb Raider does occasionally lead to peak comedy
For lunch today, I'm making the salad from Rhythm Heaven Groove. It has 413 tomatoes, just how you like it.
We enter "Eckhart's Lab" to face the end - the end of Eckhart himself (stabbed by Lara), the end of Von Croy's killer (who was someone else entirely) and the end of Core Design's Croft.
Finally, some good ol' pits of fire and brimstone await us here in "The Lost Domain" (isn't that all of them in these games?), which I believe is this game's penultimate moment of peril. We're finally wrapping this up tomorrow!
The clunky boss fight as Kurtis in "Boaz Returns" almost makes me wish it was the snowmobile returning.
Our swim concludes with a simple statue-shifting puzzle in "The Vault of Trophies," the resting place of one last obscura painting. The villain cannot be allowed to get it, so Lara destroys it right away and ... oh? She's not? She's taking it back out? Oh ok
Back to Lara and "Aquatic Research Area." You're meant to drop some chum into a large pool to distract a leviathan, but it mainly seems to mind its own business anyway. Maybe it's the real chum we made along the way.
With some adjustments, we could have a gay Smash Bros. logo to light up the sky
Another Kurtis level sees the grunge rock cutout chasing a demon dog, which has breached containment in the "Maximum Containment Area." This boss fight must have been a blocker back in the day - it's truly a chef's piss mix of enemy behavior, movement speed, controls and camera, all in disarray.
The next level was going to be "The Sanitarium," but I've decided to start playing Dark Sector instead.
As you might expect (if you've ever played a video game), the "Bio-Research Facility" is home to all manner of overgrown fauna and fangs, thanks to the meddling of man. What's really important, though, is this evidence of Lara Croft's hitherto unexplored enthusiasm for coconuts.
"The Strahov Fortress" is more of a shabby warehouse in which one might store PS1 copies of Metal Gear Solid, which feels influential here, if not exactly honored.
The action moves from Paris to Prague with "The Monstrum Crime Scene," a highly expository level that lays out why we're chasing engravings, paintings, the cabal, the mafia and at least one more secret society. There's also more of this game's surly dialogue, this time inflicted on a reporter.
We return to ransack "Von Croy's Apartment" (which, given his demise here, is kinda like raiding a tomb?) and pick up a new lead in Lara's quest to clear her name. Her exit is temporarily obstructed by The Cleaner and a thrilling gun battle straight out of a John Woo film.
I've only played the one with Jean Reno before, so I'm giving the first Onimusha a shot. It's pretty weird, in a good way!
With the police descending upon the Louvre, Lara has to hold her breath and slip out of "Galleries Under Siege." A long and strange cutscene at the end has her meeting Kurtis Trent, who disarms her in a creepy, caressing manner and then runs away.
A quick swim in "Neptune's Hall" yields the final whatsit to unlock a scary door back in "Hall of Seasons." We shred a ghost in shotgun fire on our way out, now with one of the cursed obscura paintings in hand. (It does seem quite small, so maybe it was intended for a cursed nightstand.)
We barge into "The Sanctuary of Flame." The home of heat. Abode of burning. Fire's house. Like the last couple of levels and not unlike me, it is short and annoying.