The importance of narrative storytelling in games is becoming more and more prominent as atmosphere and environment design get more focus. Why is this character here? How would they react to the player? How would the player react to them? In Lara Croft Go, the importance of context for its enemies and puzzle pieces amount to an immersive, organic world that gives players the satisfaction of outsmarting their very environment.
The best way to set up what Lara Croft Go does is to talk about how Hitman has handled a similar gameplay design. Hitman Go makes its entire structure artificially composed. You shoot enemies that are not supposed to be where they are. Nothing feels alive in the game because everything has a set path that it walks. Some enemies are always turning on the spot, giving you one calculated turn to try to get past them or take them out. A character might always move in a line, traversing it back and forth, allowing you to either sneak up behind them or take them out from the side. It’s an issue with stealth games as much as an issue with turn-based strategy.
Lara Croft Go rarely has these issues. Enemies are first and foremost a component of the environment. As you go deeper into your tomb expedition, the enemies become more and more grotesque from snakes to lizards to spiders. The spiders are the only enemy type that feel like a copy of an enemy from Hitman Go as it moves back and forth on the same set path. You can shorten and lengthen its path by altering the environment, but it will always traverse it like its life depends on it.
That’s the only element of the game that feels like it was made just to add a wrinkle to the route. Other components, meanwhile, feel natural to the tomb raiding experience. While snakes won’t move unless they see you one space away, later in the game you get access to a torch which allows you to scare the snakes backwards. They move away from the flame and become a puzzle piece for Lara to use. Back it onto a pressure-sensitive plate and a boulder might roll or a bridge might form. Making enemies act as pieces to a puzzle makes everything feel lifelike.
When you encounter lizards, they start following every step you make the moment you get into their vision cone. How do you get rid of them? You trick them into stepping on something that lets you get away, or that kills them, or maybe it was your final obstacle and now you can just run for the exit. Lara Croft Go allows for enemies to become pawns in the environment. More importantly, they make the player feel intelligent, crafty, and powerful.
Boulders are introduced later in the game, initially as a means of killing Lara. She has to outrun her first encounter with a boulder and it barely requires any craftiness. It’s the later stages where boulders feel less like booby traps and more like parts to the puzzle. They’re still booby traps, but the player recognizes what happens when one switch is pulled and can start seeing the chain reaction happen in the environment. Eventually, you get to a point where there’s no option but to release that boulder and try to utilize something that could easily kill you. Maybe a lizard is chasing you towards a pressure-sensitive plate that will trigger the boulder to fall. Time it right and the boulder will fall on the lizard.
Moments like this are what empower players in ways that few turn-based games do. The environment is a factor in your struggle with the enemy. Games like Final Fantasy or Hitman Go rely on enemies to be the only struggle, which only detaches players from everything around them. For Hitman Go, that’s the point. You have your target and the enemies, but it deprives the player of needing environment awareness. If everything takes place in a single house, sure, that makes sense. What made the Hitman series captivating, though, was its “hide in plain sight” mentality. Everything winds up feeling organic, and that is why Lara Croft Go feels satisfying after every level.
Even the spider, which follows the same set path over and over, can be manipulated by environment changes. That demands an overwhelming reliance on environmental awareness – something that’s been key to the character of Lara Croft throughout her games. What makes Lara Croft Go work better than most of them is that everything feels like it belongs. The world never revolts against the enemies that Lara faces, because they were there first. What the world is constantly fighting against is the threat that Lara poses to it.
Lara Croft Go is superbly designed because it recognizes that the player is the destructive force. The odds are stacked against the player because they are not meant to function within the foreign environment, which makes defeating a level carry significant weight to it. Failing feels natural and even expected. Whereas solving environmental puzzles is satisfying, it’s mastering the ecosystem of a level that gives you that fist-pumping feeling of achievement.