I Was Too Hard on Shadow of the Tomb Raider

PC screenshot taken by the author.

When Shadow of the Tomb Raider first launched back in 2018, I had a hard time mustering much interest in it.

It wasn’t developed by the series’ long time caretakers at Crystal Dynamics, instead handed off to the Deus Ex team at Eidos Montreal. It didn’t have a script written by Rhianna Pratchett, meaning that its story took a much different direction than the last chapter in the planned trilogy was supposed to take. And it had a whole different gameplay vibe, with more slow “immersive sim” style elements incorporated alongside the usual action and platforming mechanics.

I scoffed even more at it in 2019 when it was updated for the then-new Nvidia RTX cards, offering ray traced shadows. I was pretty skeptical of that whole first generation of RT stuff, and I didn’t see what the big deal was as I clutched desperately to my dear old GTX 1070.

Since then, ray tracing has become a standard feature, and I now have a GPU and a console that can do it. Tomb Raider changed hands and became a (shudder) Embracer Group property which they’ve rented to Amazon Games to do…something with. Eidos Montreal got their dream to work on another Deus Ex game, only to have that game recently cancelled. And the first three games were re-released in a totally okay remastered collection.