It’s more Rise of the Tomb Raider, an enjoyable game even despite the shallow story and how it insists on trying to play itself. The Temple of the Witch is a condensed version of Rise of the Tomb Raider’s biggest problems. ‘I wonder if I need to use rope to anchor those platforms somehow.’ Then do it yourself, Lara. The moment I got stumped on a particular piece of a puzzle scene, Lara would speak a quizzical line aloud to herself that gave away the next step. But Rise of the Tomb Raider wouldn’t trust me with a plastic spoon and an open jar of peanut butter, and that’s still true here. A few asked me to pore over the logic of the scene, an assemblage of all the best things about the Tomb Raider series’ best puzzles: the interlocking mechanics of Lara’s tools, the gears and cogs and platforms that require study and experimentation. It’s a pretty hokey visual palette that, while interesting to look at, doesn’t serve as a meaningful playground for storytelling. The stuff sends her tripping, warping the world and creatures around her into a saturated hellscape, where every skull has glowing eyes and drips with black ooze-the kind of nightmare drug realm I imagined the slightest inhalation of second hand joint smoke might banish me to in my peak D.A.R.E.
Lara enters the Baba Yaga’s turf in pursuit of the old feller, and is immediately dosed by some potent fiction flower pollen.
And since everyone in the Tomb Raider universe is driven by blind, burning vindication, grandfather abandons his living family to do some good ol’ fashioned revenge killing. He set out to find the Baba Yaga, a witch ripped straight from the popular folk tale who apparently A) exists and B) murdered grandpa’s wife way back when. Early on, Lara meets a young woman looking for their lost grandfather. The DLC is structured like the rest of the game: a few puzzles, some climbing, a bit of reminiscing about Lara’s Very Dead Dad-this time though, some of it is presented through the lens of psychedelia. It’s just a $10 ticket to romp around a much smaller bouncy castle, crowded by a handful of sad, strange-looking Siberians with perfect English accents. But I already did plenty of that in the main game, and there’s nothing substantially new introduced in the DLC. But in (almost) completely ignoring the main protagonist as anything other than a walking, talking, bow-and-arrow, The Temple of the Witch-like the primary campaign-manages to be a decent place to shoot arrows and climb around while ogling the intricate vistas.
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