Tomb of Tihocen

Thanks to the kind linkage by Stella and Matt, it seems my blog finally has some readers. This rocks, and I thank you all for the kind comments you’ve made. As a special treat, I’ve decided to break my usual habit of updating twice and then abandoning the blog for several months to bring you my third post of September 2011: Tomb of Tihocen.


The beginning of the level finds Lara floating in a small pond. It must be refreshing not to be in a corridor for once.


I was pretty sure Lara would be beheaded the minute I picked up these shotgun shells, but then I reasoned that such an animation would probably be beyond the grasp of the fifteen-year-old game engine.


Pierre makes an another unwelcome appearance, which mostly consists him banging into walls and taking the occasional pot-shot at Lara before evaporating.


Not only do gorillas delight in making creepy noises and jumping out at you, but when they die they spend their last moments fixing you with the cold, accusing stare of someone who’s planning to come back to haunt you.


Oh, look, some boulders. Haven’t seen some of those in a while. I love how, when Lara is flatten by them, the noise she makes is closer to “slight annoyance” rather than “extremely painful death”.


Some people would keep door keys and medical supplies in a cupboard or something, but not those Grecian-Romans, oh no. That would be far too convenient. If you ain’t willing to get a limb ripped off in order to get some paracetamol then, honey, you ain’t sick.


Is it just me or does that stone face thing look about ten years more sophisticated that the rest of the surroundings? I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw that thing in Anniversary.


The entrance of Tihocen’s tomb, guarded by two centaur statue. Of course, in the world of Tomb Raider, anything shaped like an animal has a 50-50 chance of coming alive and trying to kill you.


Sure enough, an Atlantean bursts out of one of the statues in what is, I might add, the campest manner he could have possibly chosen. He may as well have been jumping out of a cake.


Instead of stripping, however, Centaur decides to shoot fireballs at Lara, not even bothering to stop when she finally succumbs to death, and grinning like a Shinigami as he does so.


Inside Tihocen’s tomb, Pierre finally succumbs to death after helpfully running into a close door for several seconds so Lara can shoot him without getting hurt. He takes one last leering look at one of her thighs before he goes down, after which Lara prizes the second piece of the Scion from his cold, dead fingers. Well, actually, he just drops it on the floor and she picks it up, but that doesn’t make for a very artistic description.


Time for this post’s pretty picture, which is a view of the Scion pedestal from a balcony above it. The whole place reminds me of Tomb Raider II’s Temple of Xian.


Lara takes a moment out of Tomb Raiding to entertain us with her impression of a stereotypical gay man mincing around the room.


Tomb of Tihocen is a fairly short level, I was quite surprised when it abruptly finished. Her work in Greece/Rome done, Lara is now heading off to the unambiguous country of Egypt to continue her quest. We won’t be seeing Rome again until Tomb Raider Chronicles, and I’m pretty sure Greece won’t pop up until Anniversary. Let’s hope they’ve sorted out their identity issues by then.