On Thursday, we hit the proverbial wall.
Earlier that morning, a message was sent to my main squeeze while we were at work. It simply read "Tomb Raider tonight." It was not a question, but it wasn't me being forceful, either, just my very direct way of gauging here interest at this point since we'd barely even brought the game up in conversation in roughly a week. She was agreeable to some pre-weekend jungle adventuring, but that alone didn't answer the question.
The telltale sign was when we actually played it. She was content to pass the controller to me to kick things off, which included about ten or fifteen minutes of tooling around so we could become readjusted to the control scheme. I screwed around in the village section for a little bit trying to figure what to do next, and after a brief cut scene that rewarded us with a climbing ax, we raided our first tomb, and were greeted with the first of the game's fun little physics puzzles. Nature, the cruel minx that it is, decided it was time for me to take a quick break, so I relinquished the controller to my lady and promptly hit the can.
When I returned a few minutes later, I was a little saddened by the controller falling back into my lap right away. I played a little while longer, mostly just messing around in the environment before moving Lara further into the story and on toward a bad guy-infested radio compound. After a few fights with the island-dwellers that stood guard there, I tried to hand the reigns back over. "No. I don't like the fighting," she said. And with that, it was clear that The Great Experiment was failing.
So what happened here? My first reaction is that, well, she's not a gamer, and my earlier thoughts about neophyte players having a hard time navigating the complex controls of a 3D action game were right on the money. While I'm sure she'd be better with some practice (she even joked about it a few minutes after turning down another turn), the barrier for entry was found to be a little too high, and she had become discouraged. Part of that may be due to a person's individual personality, I guess, but it's not unreasonable to surmise that the older people get, the less likely they are to put forth that much effort into something that they do with their personal time unless they're immediately good at it. I probably wouldn't want to spend an entire day playing hockey if I was just taught to skate and shoot the puck that morning.
Should I blame Crystal Dynamics, or one of the console manufacturers (we were playing it on 360, incidentally) for this? I'm going to say no, but with some reservations. Tomb Raider is a very well known property, and every entertainment industry from comics to television to film try to use reboots of franchises as assured ways of attracting people unfamiliar with their larger concepts. While I don't necessarily find the game hard (especially, again, because we're playing on the lowest difficulty setting), if Tomb Raider's primary motivation was to attract new people into the larger realm of video games, it could have been much simpler. But it isn't. If anything, this TR is meant to cater to both a casual and hardcore crowd, at least I thought it would. Apparently, this casual crowd is bowing out early.
Of course, the possibility exists that she just doesn't like playing the game, which is pretty feasible. I'm going to politely suggest again that we give it another shot sometime this week, but Lara and me are walking that tightrope.
Your homework --which will be from now through the next 12 months-- is to download and listen to Retronauts Vol. III Ep. I, which is now loose upon the internet. I hope you contributed to its Kickstarter campaign, but even if you didn't, you're still able to reap the benefit.
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