It makes mechanics like picking up artifacts, which are really just the same as they were in 2013's Tomb Raider, feel strange. With that in mind, what we have now is Lara – a well-meaning but obscenely-wealthy, white, British woman coming into this Peruvian village where you can dig through their boxes for "artifacts" and through their pottery for "salvage," while fighting a humanoid and clearly intelligent creature that looks like a less-civilized – read: "savage" – version of the out-of-time villagers in the secret village Lara has discovered. In addition to the Trinity soldiers, Shadow of the Tomb Raider features its own supernatural enemy. There, people live as if it was 2000 years earlier, without technology or modern tools. Throughout her adventure she meets Central and South American people and eventually finds – what else – a hidden city. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara has traveled to Peru. The enemies were a combination of the invading Trinity soldiers and the Deathless Ones, cursed soldiers.
They were leftovers of an ancient Greek culture. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, your allies were the residents of the small town of people living in the secret basin in Siberia. The supernatural enemies, the Stormguard, were literally undead. None of those men were natives of the island. When Lara washed up on the shores of the Yamatai kingdom, the only inhabitants were shipwrecked cultists that had found their way the same way she did – by accident.
I'd say that's overall a good thing, but in this case, it ends up feeling really weird and problematic. One of the things that have progressed throughout the Tomb Raider trilogy is the presence of people in the games that Lara can talk to instead of shoot. It's a tough job, and I admire the team that created Shadow of the Tomb Raider for taking on such a task, because they have a lot of work to do to keep our attention this time around. It's neither the rewrite of the original nor the maturation of the sequel. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, then, has the tough task of standing out against a revelation and a refinement. The open world was better, the tombs were more interesting, there were more characters, and there was just plain more to do. Rise of the Tomb Raider was a refinement of that idea. To many others, though, Lara Croft was finally a character we could get behind. We were seeing Lara as we'd never seen her before, in this huge open world and dealing with things she'd never dealt with. 2013's Tomb Raider was an absolute revelation.
I want to be totally realistic here – this is definitely the toughest game for Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal so far. What we end up with, though, is a game that is evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, and one that stumbles as it tries to push Lara forward. As Lara travels once again in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, this time to the muddy jungles of Peru, the creators are trying to make her world bigger, and to give Lara more internal conflict to deal with.