Irish Coffee, April 1st, 2013

Not funny, kind of lame, and very short. Welcome to Monday's blog! No, this isn't an April Fool's prank. I don't think I have the faculties for such a thing at the moment. Try as I might, I can never write a decent blog on Monday. Funny seems to leave my fingers, and each word is a mountain to climb. Though today's issues might have more to do with the ten-or-so pounds of Easter Dinner's baked mac and cheese presently residing in my distended gut. Fat-glazed fog. Least I wrote this fucker. Oh, and mild Tomb Raider spoiler ahead. See you tomorrow. 

I just finished playing Bioshock Infinite, but I want to talk about Tomb Raider, a game I finished just minutes before stepping on to Irrational’s floating city. Specifically, I tend to feel a little empty inside when I finish a particularly engaging single player campaign, and while this feeling was equally pronounced in both Tomb Raider and Bioshock Infinite, something bothered me quite a bit more about Tomb Raider's departure.

Been one hell of a week.

Tomb Raider’s story certainly isn’t more engaging than Bioshock Infinite’s, and I don’t know that the former has the smarts of the latter. I say “don’t know,” because I don’t think even Irrational Games has a firm grasp of the paradoxical clusterfuck that constitutes the closing minutes of their latest offering. But Tomb Raider suffers from an often used, and unfortunately necessary feature shared by many action games: After the end credits role, you can once again enter the game world.

Ostensibly, this feature exists for the collection of items you might have missed, and general achievement hunting, but by its very nature it casts a cold pallor on the game you’ve just finished playing.

No one wants a game world to feel empty. The entire goal of game design (from indie to AAA monster) is make a world feel populated and alive. As mentioned, I often feel a little empty inside when I finish a particularly engaging title, and I jump at the opportunity to go back to the game world to fill the void. All that I find when I utilize this feature is a shadow of the world that I lived in minutes before. Never more empty, never more devoid of life, my avatar trapped in a purgatory that they can never escape. There is no goal marker, there is no ending, there are no battles to fight. There is no “life” for the character anymore.

The unfortunate side effect: If I choose to stop playing the game for an extended period of time after a brief visit to the netherverse, the netherverse becomes the defining memory of that game. Lara didn’t escape the island with her friends, she’s still trapped there. Hunting for a finite supply of collectibles in an infinite world. Fucking depressing, really.

And I’m more impacted by the departure of Tomb Raider for this reason. Its characters didn’t mean as much to me as those in Infinite, not did the plot hold the depth of Infinite's. But seeing Lara running around a lifeless game world left a bad taste in my mouth. The empty island almost begging me to start a new game.

But this is a personal problem, and not a broader game industry issue. Not much more can be expected from me on a Monday morning. I have completed two pretty fantastic AAA titles over the past week, each one draining my emotional reserves with their passing. I had damn good time with both, but I’m going to need some more time with Tomb Raider before I can move on to a third game.

I’ll be funny tomorrow, I swear.