Headscratchers / Tomb Raider (2013)

WARNING: There may be unmarked spoilers below, so read at your own risk.

Lara's injuries during prologue

• How was she able to keep moving around like she did after falling a couple stories and getting impaled (without treatment soon after at that)? Also, that beartrap that snapped on her leg clearly showed blood, yet she does not really limp around or bandage it afterwards?
  • It's all for dramatic effect, as well as for those who are disturbingly into seeing masochism, intentional or not. Normally yes, she would not have survived past the prologue of the game (it's BS enough that she can climb such a slippery slope out of that cave during a collapse, especially at that speed). Put simply, she's a superhero in this iteration of Tomb Raider. One can argue that she was more ridiculous in past games, so at least she reacts and grows more naturally to her struggles in the 2013 game. However, "GCN" does a good job of showing the flaws of the game already.

Alex alone

• Why the hell did Reyes let Alex go off alone? He's a Non-Action Guy. He has a pistol. The group knows that the island is crawling with Solarii, and that chances are the ship is going to be, too. No one should be going anywhere alone if they can help it. And yet when Lara essentially points this out, Reyes brushes it off by saying that Alex can take care of himself, leaving Lara to run after him. This is made even worse by the fact that if Lara hadn't gone to find him, the tools wouldn't have been retrieved and they would never have been able to fix the boat. Reyes allowed a Non-Action Guy, alone, armed with a single pistol, to go retrieve what could possibly be their only hope at getting off of the island. WHY?
  • Made even more frustrating when Reyes passive-aggressively blames Lara for Alex's death.
  • Reyes is not in good shape at that point. Roth's death hits her harder than she lets on, because Roth is the father of her child and they clearly still have feelings for one another; one of the camera flashbacks shows her and Roth talking intimately in the hallways of the Endurance. Even better, the crashed helicopter represents the failure of escape attempt #2, and she's nearly died several times that day. Sam's coping by putting all her faith in Lara; Jonah's coping by eating and being productive; and Reyes... isn't coping.
  • All of the survivors aside from Lara and Sam seems to have a clinical case of Too Dumb to Live. If they're not making pointless Heroic Sacrifices that could have easily been avoided, they're sitting around complaining and brushing off everything Lara has to say despite the fact she's the only one who seems to be able to take care of herself.
  • To be fair, it's shown during the escape-from-the-palace scene, as Lara is getting into the helicopter, that the rest of the crew are on the ground fighting it out. Alex specifically can be seen with a shotgun, implying he at least does know how to use a gun. Add in the fact that the group on the beach by this point number only three (and they had no idea when Lara would show up) it's not like they really had much choice.
  • But Jonah would have been the far better choice. Both in-story and from a meta perspective, it made no sense for Alex to go beyond the last-second revelation that he was crushing on Lara, which is a pretty damn flimsy excuse to begin with. Jonah, in the prequel comic — which Pratchett also wrote — is shown being able to physically beat up thugs without apparently suffering any damage himself, using a gun while saving Whitman from the mafia, being fully willing to kill people with said gun without flinching, not even hesitating to act while being shot at, and brushing off a bullet graze like it's no big deal while saying that he's had worse. He is obviously pretty used to dangerous and life-threatening situations.
    Even if Reyes didn't know about any of that — which I find unlikely, but even so — Jonah is obviously a large, physically capable guy who knows how to use his strength. Meanwhile, Alex is someone who, by his own admission, is the least badass person in the group besides, you know, Samantha. And whether Alex knows how to use a gun or not (and knowing how to shoot a gun doesn't necessary mean you can shoot it well), exactly how many combat situations has he been in before landing on Yamatai? It's probably safe to assume that the number of those would be a grand total of zero. What was he supposed to do when his tiny pistol ran out of bullets? Jonah, at least, would have had a chance at physically subduing his enemies if he managed to sneak up on them. Alex would have been screwed. Which he was. To be honest, I can see Reyes being like "Yeah, sure, whatever, knock yourself out," when Alex volunteered to get the tools, but that isn't just grossly irresponsible and stupid. It's cold. I'd like to think she felt some guilt about that afterward, because she basically sent Alex to his death. And, bottom line, it still makes no sense from a story perspective besides killing Alex off as a Deus Angst Machina. Yes, yes, I know. That's how it all played out, end of story. But the fact that it did play out that way in the first place still confuses the hell out of me.
  • As pointed out in other places, Reyes just doesn't care anymore. It's irresponsible and stupid, but so was later letting Whitman stay with them despite accusations of treachery. Reyes is fully capable of being cold. "Thanks for saving us Lara." "No problem, you would have done the same for me right?" "Uh, sure."

Roth's Tactics

• Why didn't Roth just drop himself and Lara to the ground when he saw Mathias throwing the axe? He was barely holding them both up, it's not like it would have taken much effort to just fall down, and he still could have fired his pistol from there. And probably a lot more accurately, too, seeing as how he wouldn't have had an axe embedded in his spine. Yes, yes, Rule of Drama, but still.
  • Dropping to the ground would have, almost without question, gotten them both killed. Sure, he could have tried shooting from the ground, but he certainly wouldn't be able to kill all three pursuers after falling, and it would have made both him and Lara an easier target.
  • The fact it was preceded with an atrocious example of Clean Pretty Reliable doesn't help matters. First he does the mouth breathing thing, which is a horrible health hazard considering they're both filthy, he doesn't lay her completely flat on her back instead letting her sprawl out to the side from the hips down, and he barely pushes on her chest at all during the compressions, does maybe three or four compressions before attempting the mouth breathing thing again, and goes for the cliche gold medal with the How Dare You Die on Me! screams. Roth is supposed to be a survival expert who trained Lara himself, and yet he not only fails to recognize CPR wasn't called for in that situation, but goes about it in the most overwrought Hollywood Medicine style possible. All that had happened was she blacked out from the helicopter crash, one could even assume that Lara woke up on her own, and his attempts were completely needless, she would have spluttered awake just fine without the CPR. The whole scene was really badly handled, combined with the Heroic Sacrifice that followed being pointless white knighting and easily avoidable. The weight of what happened would have been a lot more effective if they simply cut the entire scene out and went directly to the other survivors finding Lara and Roth dead without explanation, perhaps with a close up of Lara clutching his tech pistols, and we're left to wonder what exactly happened.
  • The CPR is nothing more than Critical Research Failure. The rest is Rule of Drama, dialed up to eleven. Which ends up as Narm.

Reyes' Tools

• The whole retrieving Reyes' tools from the Endurance to fix the boat is ridiculously stupid because the supposed "tools" are just generic screwdriver and wrenches. If Lara manages to MacGyver her way into having a silenced assault rifle with frag grenade launcher and bunch of other perks, for sure they could find something useful around Shantytown or the beach.
  • Lara was able to MacGyver her equipment together. Alex went off to Endurance before Lara arrived on the beach, and at this point of the game Reyes made it clear she had no faith in Lara's abilities, besides being shaken by Roth's death and holding Lara responsible, so it's not like she was going to wait around for her to show up when she believed their lives depended on getting off the island as soon as possible (remember that Reyes wasn't going to wait for Lara to return if they got the boat working before she got back from the General's tomb). There's also a question of how much Lara's equipment updates should be considered Gameplay and Story Segregation. Especially when you consider that it would mean Lara was somehow able to convert a Japanese Type-100 submachine gun into a frelling AK-47 with nothing but a bunch of spare parts (seriously, look at the "Assault Rifle" base model. It's an AK-47).
  • Nah, the whole weapon upgrade thing is easy to justify - the small upgrades (silencer, extra rounds) from spare parts are classic MacGyvering; however in big upgrades (wooden bow to composite to carbon fiber bow) Lara simply found a new weapon and replaced her old one - this is even shown in the cutscenes - the Maori big guy handed Lara a modern bow just before heading to the Endurance. Back to my complaint, I think your argument still doesn't defeat the fact that the supposed "tools" Alex went off to find are just generic wrenches and screwdrivers. It's been pointed out numerous times that the crew outside of Lara are completely Too Dumb to Live but this one takes the cake. Alex is supposed to be the smart nerdy archetype character, but really you're gonna go to a partly sinking ship like 3 miles away alone in an island full of cultist mercenaries for generic set of wrenches and screwdriver?? If he just turned his head around the Shipwreck beach is full of machines (lifts, cages, towers, etc) - obviously there will be something that can be used as a wrench.
  • The only three weapon upgrades Lara gets where we're explicitly shown her being given a new item to replace the existing one is the Compound Bow from Jonah, the climbing axe from Roth, and Lara claims one of Roth's pistols after his death to replace the Model 1911 she picked up as her first gun. The Recurve Bow, Competition Bow, Magnum Pistol, and all shotgun and rifle upgrades are done completely via the Bow, Pistol, Shotgun and Rifle parts you collect throughout the game. Now maybe you can handwave this by saying Lara is actually replacing her other equipment in the same way as the ones she gets via cutscene, but that still doesn't explain some of the very complex modifications she makes. Suppressors ("silencer" is really a dirty word) are quite complicated pieces of equipment, not to mention the drum magazine she cobbles together for the shotgun and other modifications that would require complex mill work. I'm not saying all of her mods are out of the realm of possibility, but there's more than a few that go above and beyond MacGyvering.
  • "Salvage" doesn't mean she's always picking up animal bones and unforged metal, then shaking them in a bag to produce a functioning assault weapon. There are enough people using ramshackle semi-automatics and hunting bows on Yamatai that Lara could readily be finding machined parts and broken rifles, then repurposing those into upgrades or brand new weapons. The "salvage" mechanic simply prevents the Rage problem where you're always carrying around a full backpack of sixteen assorted Bear Asses without the one thing you need to do something useful with them. Granted, this also implies that Lara has picked up some serious gunsmith chops on 'her time on the Endurance, but that's not impossible.
  • By design it is actually possible to build all the weapon upgrades in the game nearly exclusively out of bits of dead wildlife. It is in fact possible for Lara to build an ACOG scope out of enough deer spleens.
  • To go back to the original point, it's possible that the tools were more complex than that, but for the sake of simplicity, they were rendered as a couple of simple tools. While her Hammerspace of weaponry is an Acceptable Break From Reality for gameplay purposes, in a cutscene it's hard to justify Lara managing to stash a heavy toolbox on her person and then fleeing at such a speed.
  • And still there are numerous other wrecks and other sites closer and safer where some toolbox could be found or assembled from single tools. No-one even bothered to check the PT boat, which should carry tools - if it still carry functional MGs, then it means no-one before was trying to salvage the boat or it's equipment. One could wonder how actually Alex was able to get to the Endurance in the first place, if it took Lara half a day with lots of Le Parkour. And WW2-era boat engines can be easily fixed with hammer, spanner and screwdriver - the exact tools (minus hammer) Lara got from Alex.
  • Excellent points. And yeah, I really can't figure out how Alex managed to get over there, either.
  • The only possible way Alex could have gotten there was to swim - IIRC there's an overheard dialogue where the Solarii fished him out of the water before he managed to escape into the Endurance. Or maybe he found some kind of debris that allowed him to make a simple one-man raft and paddle it over, given that the currents will smash Lara against the rocks if she tries to swim past a certain point.
  • If you notice, the parts you get to make the AK-47 do say rifle parts, as opposed to sub-machinegun parts. Given the number of Russians on the island, it sounds like she just put together an AK-47 from parts that weren't broken.

Buildings

• Ok, so the storms that wreck ships or aircraft that approach the island are the result of Himiko's rage at being trapped in her rotting corpse for nearly two-thousand years. The implication is that any ships and aircraft that stray too near are sunk or brought down, and no one gets off the island again. However among the wreckage from previous inhabitants is a large and heavily fortified shore battery dating to World War II ( the installation you enter en route to the wreck of Endurance) with its guns still in place. This isn't a temporary sandbag structure, but a fixed-position concrete bunker designed to withstand heavy naval bombardment, high up on the cliffs with a wide field of fire out to sea. Furthermore, those are some pretty big guns. Even if you assume most of the structure relies on natural rock, there's still a lot of excavation needed that would require fairly heavy-duty equipment, and it's clear much of the finished structure is indeed made from concrete, not the local rock. Not to mention getting guns that large into position is a pretty tall order before the advent of large utility helicopters. There's other fairly heavy wartime construction (the radio tower and its command bunker I believe is implied to have dated from the same period, probably a part of the same defense system as the gun emplacement we explore during the game) on the island as well. So clearly, there had to have been a fairly reliable flow of heavy equipment and construction personnel arriving at the island to build finished structures of this sort. Additionally, if the Japanese thought this island was important enough to fortify it so heavily, its location must have been known well enough to be viewed as strategically vital. Meanwhile, the United States had to consider its capture strategically important to have actually landed Marines ( based on the Semper Fi artifact collection) on it, (the Island Hopping strategy dictated bypassing strong points such as Rabaul altogether and just pounding them into rubble from the air and sea. Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Saipan and Okinawa were targeted for capture because they were viewed as vital for advancing towards the Japanese Home Islands) which means they also must have known about it. And of course, Trinity knew enough about the island and what could be found there that it sent an agent to investigate. For such a lost and mysterious island, there's certainly a lot of activity in its fairly recent history that would practically require people freely coming and going from the place.
  • One possibility is that Himiko goes through periods where she's largely dormant, which allowed time for the Japanese military to construct its base, and the German scientists to set up shop, and American reconnaissance flights to target the island for capture. Or perhaps she deliberately allowed the troops to operate in hopes of luring others, but still, it doesn't seem to mesh with the rest of the history of the island.
  • There's a reasonably strong implication from some of the WWII-era documents that Himeko's rage didn't really kick in full-bore until the Axis research teams showed up and deliberately started messing around with her. The Japanese and German soldiers both note in their dossiers that the process of setting things up on the island went off reasonably well, but then they were suddenly hip-deep in angry Stormguards and they were killed off almost to a man. It's entirely possible that before that, Himeko's anger caused the anomalous weather that drew the Axis's attention in the first place, but once they woke up the Stormguard, that's when things really started to go to hell on Yamatai.
  • So does that mean Himiko's been throwing a seventy-year tantrum since the Axis woke her up? Sure, seventy years isn't much time for an immortal spirit, but you'd think that if she's been raging full-force since the Axis intruded on her territory, that someone—and by "someone," I mean major government-funded organizations—would have started poking around as well, especially since we know from flashbacks set aboard Endurance that Himiko's storms show up on global weather-tracking satellites. But the weight of the evidence is that it's only been the unlucky merchant or fishing vessel (or rescue craft) that's foundered in those waters since the end of the war. It would have worked quite well for Indiana Jones or any other pulp adventure set in the pre-war period, but it opens up a bit of a plothole for a modern setting.
  • Nobody said she was whipping up hurricanes for seventy years; what's said is that the weather in that area doesn't make sense given the local climate patterns. In the game, Yamatai is located in the Devil's Sea, a.k.a. the Dragon's Triangle, which has a big danger sign on it courtesy of the Japanese government. A little strange weather in the area isn't enough reason to risk losing another boatload of researchers to it, and anyone who disregarded that and went anyway would fall victim to Mathias and the Solari cult and would never be heard from again. End result: generations of climatologists who just don't go there and have a well-advised lack of curiosity about it. In addition, the weather on the island is so frequently stormy, even during the game, that satellite photography would be nearly useless most of the time even if you knew there was something there to photograph.
  • The best way for a prepared organization to get people and things to and from the island would be by submarine, nothing we've seen Himiko do would bother a sub too much. As for how they got all the concrete and equipment there, well, it's easy to get ships TO the island if you don't mind wrecking them in the process, it's leaving that's the problem.
  • As far as how anyone knew the island was there to fortify it, Occam's Razor: The location of the island was well-charted and never lost. What was lost was its identity, which faded into obscurity after the collapse of its influence. It's the same reason why Atlantis was "lost" right under everyone's noses for millennia, until new research strongly connected it to Santorini and the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Thera. Everyone knew right where Santorini was, they just didn't realize it was also what was left of Atlantis.

Lara and tombs

• Lara hates tombs. She actually states this when tombs haven't represented any threat to her so far in her adventure, and while taking cover in one as safe haven from the attacks of the natives. It's also implicitly part of her backstory that she's been in tombs since she was an infant, and even happily explored them and found her necklace within one when she was very young. The story and gameplay don't really lend to a scenario that justifies Lara making this statement, and it seems as if it was included mostly to provide trailer fuel.
  • Well, I hate going to work, but it doesn't mean that I won't go there anyway. Hating something doesn't mean that you're going to avoid it. It just means that you really don't like it.
  • However, Lara gets positively giddy when discovering and exploring the various tombs, speculating on their original purposes before the Solarii took them over and IIRC, expresses outright disgust at what they have done with them in the meantime. In fact, the artifacts and tombs are the only part of her experience on the island Lara shows enjoyment in. This doesn't sound like someone who hates tombs. I'd almost consider it a Big-Lipped Alligator Line. It makes no sense in context of the character, and comes completely out of nowhere.
  • She hates tombs but loves the artifacts inside them - she goes giddy over stuff she finds outside of them as well.
  • ...but Lara is only saying this after having already explored at least 2-3 of the game's optional tombs, neither of which she commented about hating. It's a line of dialog that just doesn't fit the context of either the character or the game itself. At best it's a bit of Gameplay and Story Segregation, at worse it's a one-off joke thrown in about the character that falls flat because it doesn't make any sense.
  • No, it makes sense. It comes after her experience with the tombs on the island, giving her reason to hate them - again, the tombs and not what's inside of them.
  • ...but what experience? What happens inside the tombs prior to that point to explain her reaction later in the game? Aside from the General's tomb none of them have enemies present, (and only one— Shantytown, with the snare trap—has enemies guarding its entrance) none of them have death traps, the player would have to be Too Dumb to Live to even take a fatal fall in one, and while they show signs of Solarii presence there's none of the other horrors that Lara sees everywhere else on the island. The tombs are frankly among the safest places on the island.
  • The experience of being in an unknown, dark area on an island that's proven itself to be inhospitable. Once again, she hates tombs because they're disgusting but loves finding artifacts inside them.
  • A Tomb is a place where a dead body is buried. The remark of hating them comes as she is right next to, or in the process of opening, a big stone sarcophagus. She hates mucking around with decomposed corpses in their Tombs. She puts up with it to discover the various fripperies one can find in ancient tombs of people important enough to have them.

Bear Trap

• There are no bears on the island. So why/how did Lara end up finding a bear trap?
  • That kind of trap can be used to catch most any animal. It was probably left by some of the Solarii as a means of snagging some dinner.
• More importantly, how did Reyes open it by shooting it? You open a trap like that by pushing down on the leaf springs that hold the jaws shut.
  • She DIDN'T open it. She either broke it so that once it was fully opened, it wouldn't close again, which technically isn't opening it. Or just as plausible, her shooting it didn't do anything. We have to remember that Jonah was the one who actually pried the jaws apart with his bare hands, a guy like that could probably do it without pushing the springs down.

Regiment vs Stormguard

• So, if An ENTIRE REGIMENT of the Imperial Japanese Army and a unit of US Marines was unable to take on a bunch of undead samurai, why is some twentysomething year old girl able to kill them by the hundreds without breaking a sweat? No offense, but I'd think that the friggin Army would be loads more competent in combat than any adventurer, no matter how skilled they are.
  • It's heavily implied if not outright stated that the Stormguard were ambushing the Japanese and the American armies, paring down their numbers and terrorizing them before actually attacking. The journal of one Japanese soldier states that men kept vanishing without a trace save for a helmet or other small item left behind. Obviously such an approach won't work on Lara, who is travelling alone. She also knows what she's up against, whereas the armies did not — the truth of the Stormguard is terrifying, yes, but not so terrifying as a seemingly-impossible enemy about whom you know nothing and cannot appear to defeat. The real headscratcher is how Lara is able to harm the Stormguard at all when it seems that others cannot, as the soldiers made note of how the Stormguard just wouldn't fall no matter how many bullets they used. Unless, of course, that was just hyperbole.
  • Lara doesn't get into a direct confrontation with the Stormguard until she has no other choice, and when she does, she's better-equipped than a World War II infantry brigade would've been. Between the grenade launcher, the assault rifle, and the shotgun, she's simply got superior tools for the job. She's also not frightened of them at that point, or if she is, her fear of death is trumped by her concern for Sam.
  • Between early 1943 and mid 1944 a US Marine Corps Battalion had a strength of approximately 1000 men. A more specific breakdown can be seen here, but in 1944 you have one Weapons Company (one mortar platoon and three machine gun platoons, with bazookas held by HQ) and three Rifle Companies (each with their own mortar and machine gun sections, and three platoons of three rifle squads). The machine guns would be Browning M1917 or M1919 light machine guns (with the occasional Browning M2 heavy machine gun, generally attached to battalion HQ). Each rifle squad would have at least two BARs, with the rest of the riflemen armed with M1 Garand rifles. You'd also have the occasional Thompson M1928 submachine gun or Winchester M97 (later the M12) trenchgun. A number of members of each rifle squad would also carry rifle grenades. By 1945 the separate weapons company was eliminated and its machine guns and mortars were attached directly to the rifle companies. Oh, and flamethrowers were added to the battalion's arsenal as well. The amount of automatic firepower a Marine battalion could bring to bear in the latter stages of WWII was phenomenal. So no. When it comes to equipment Lara couldn't even match the firepower of a single rifle squad, much less an entire Marine battalion. If the Stormguard were as vulnerable to the weapons of the Marines as they are to Lara's, any assault against even an only marginally-prepared defensive position would have been a massacre (this is precisely why the Japanese abandoned the Banzai Charge in the later stages of the war: Sending a massed body of men into a direct assault against that much firepower was like throwing meat into a grinder).
  • You could make the same complain about a LOT of action movies and videogames where a lone character overcomes challenges that proved impossible to larger, better trained and armed forces. Supesion of disbelief, my friend. Plus, it could be handwaved that the Japanese and American forces took a toll on each other before the Stormguard finished them off.
  • Really, it might not even be *that* complicated. The average Western Allied unit- like the USMC- was an absolute beast in terms of equipment and training, but was it ever divulged how large the USMC forces were? For all we know, the units of them that the Stormguard destroyed weren't that much larger than a rifle squad or two; certainly highly formidable and containingly well equipped, trained, and experienced soldiers, but in a deeply strange environment and facing an enemy like nothing they had experienced before in numbers far in excess of themselves. Lara's greatest advantage and what eventually leads to defeat her enemies is unparalleled adaptivity and the ability to survive long enough against the enemy to learn their weaknesses; she's not *really* dependent on anybody else to survive from hour to hour, and her combat power isn't massively diminished by going it alone (one of the justifiable reasons where a single person can fare better than an entire unit). In contrast, the USMC would have been cutting their teeth against the Japanese and- maybe- the Germans (conventional forces with a very distinctive way of operating) and operating in disciplined units that possessed massive firepower but also depended on proper coordination to use as effectively as possible. The new threat would have caught them offguard, and the strategies they employed would have cut them into small units of disoriented men who had probably been forced to ditch most of their heavy equipment and who were operating separately from anyone not in their immediate viewing range; once they're like that they could be overwhelmed with brute force. In contrast, the Japanese land forces were effectively in a Medieval Stasis that lasted from 1904 to the end of the Empire, and on the whole were miserably equipped, poorly trained (again, a common nickname for soldiers was "Bullets" or "Senrin" (a unit of money that is to the Yen what a penny is to a Dollar, and the average price of a conscription notice), thoroughly malnourished on an institutional level, and wedded to strategies that were costly and risky in 1904. On top of this, they lacked the advanced small unit training the USMC received, were stuck in an unfamiliar territory, and were stuck in an insanely hierarchical system where they looked to their officers for almost everything. I find it all too plausible that the Stormguard could have destroyed them in a straight up battle if they had to, especially after whittling away at their strength (like we see in one of the letters) beforehand.
  • Even simpler explanation: One of the logs, I think by the Japanese soldier, said they were attacked by hundreds of Stormguard. Lara fights maybe a few dozen. So maybe there were a lot more Stormguard before they fought the Japanese, Germans, and Americans. Maybe fighting off three modern armies, plus constant skirmishes with the Solarii, thinned their numbers to the point where Lara could finish them off.
  • Really it should be obvious..unlike the American, Nazi and Japanese, Lara knows that Himoko's tomb is the source of the Storm and the Zombie Samurai Stormguards, so she did a Dungeon Bypass and just go directly to the tomb and killed her, as oppose to the rest of Americans, Japanese, and Nazi's who made the mistake of trying to attack a supernatural army head-on.

Climbing down the mountain

• If getting up the mountain to the ziggurat is hard enough, with plenty of Le Parkour and wall climbing with the axe, how does Lara even manage to climb back down with Sam in her arms, (assuming Sam was too injured to even walk)?
  • She jumped. A lot.
  • Or more likely Lara used the same way out the Solarii used to get in. Her entrance was more of a side/back door.
  • The same thing happens earlier on, with radio tower. It's falling apart as you climb up and final ladder literally breaks down when Lara was already jumping between lacking rungs. At this point she's not even carrying any rope to help herself. So how did she get down after the transmission? Sure, she didn't have to go to the bottom of the tower, but that still doesn't explain how she was able to get down even by that smaller bit.
  • Um, doesn't she use a zipline to get down from that tower?
  • No, she doesn't. Not immediately, anyway; she just "appears" down a level on the tower after the cutscene, even though she pretty much effectively destroyed her way down while climbing up in the first place.
  • The spike on top of the radio tower isn't that wide, she could have wrapped her legs and arms around it and shimmied her way past the broken section. Certainly not easy, but it is possible.
  • She was in a hurry to get to the top of the ziggurat area, so she didn't have time to look for a safe and easy path. After she'd rescued Sam, she might have wanted to get down relatively quickly but wasn't under as much immediate pressure, so she was able to take her time a bit more and find an easier/safer way down.

Scavenger's Cavern guy

• How did the guy in the Scavenger's Cavern catch up so quickly with Lara so fast? More importantly, why would he want her in the first place?
  • You never find out, but its clear from his victims that he kills women. If you fail the QTE, he appears slightly consoling as Lara dies, suggesting that possibly he was trying to save her from the worse fate (burning or being the queen's vessel).

Helicopter

• So how did the helicopter get in, in the first place? The plane gets shot down almost immediately but the helicopter apparently flies in, lands to pick up Roth and the hovers around looking for Lara. Only after picking her up does the storm really have any affect and it seems clear that he could have landed for a second time if he had only heeded Lara's warnings.
  • The storms were erratic, not constant. The helicopter pilot was lucky enough to have a moment where things weren't as chaotic as usual.
  • Lara just detonated a huge reservoir of natural gas and leveled a section of the island: Himiko was distracted.
  • Japanese-flagged helo, American pilot...wearing a Commonwealth Air Force's (RAF, RCAF, RAAF, etc.) flightsuit. Anyone else catch that?

Worst Aid

• In the Scavenger's Den, Lara yanks out a stick thing that goes through her body, and doesn't appear to treat it until reaching the helicopter in the Shanty Town. How come she didn't bleed out at any point between then, considering all the extra-strenuous activity she does afterwards? Also, isn't it considered Worst Aid to yank a foreign object out of a wound if it's impaling you?
  • For your first question, she probably should have bled out, but it's a video game. For your second, yes it's generally bad to pull something out that's impaling you, but you're also not supposed to move either. If she was running around with that piece of rebar or whatever sticking out of her side, it would have been reaming out the wound the whole time. If it had caught on something and ripped out her side, it would have been much, much worse.
  • She was incredibly lucky and nothing vital was hit or torn when she pulled it out. However, it still takes its toll. She eventually aggravates it too much to function after one too many hijinks and needs to treat it with a heated arrow. And even after this, you can notice in cut scenes where she lands from height that her hands immediately go to her wound.
• There's also the part of the game where Lara gets an open wound from crashing into a tree while parachuting. She locates an abandoned helicopter and thinks that there may be medical supplies on board, so she heads towards it, visibly in pain. At one point during this sequence, she jumps into a river of sordid water. I guess that stupidity really is the only option at times in a video game.
  • She'd been almost fully immersed in fetid water with the massive puncture wound in her side a couple times by that point, so she was already at high risk of going septic anyway. Like pulling out the rebar in the earlier scene, though, in theory it's a necessary risk. Terrible infections are a tomorrow problem while being able to avoid being shot is a right now problem.

Frequency of Shipwrecks

• How often do ships get wrecked in the Devil's Triangle? Matthias has several hundred mooks on the island, and many more died without joining the Solarii. Gathering that many people takes time. Especially since since the fact that the Devil's Triangle is a known navigational hazard means that people will have long since charted flight paths and shipping lanes that go around it.
  • Mathias has been on Yamatai since 1985, according to one of several journal entries scattered across the island. When the game came out in 2013, the math adds up: that's over thirty years he's been trapped on Yamatai. He's had time to observe things. And it's not as though the Dragon's Triangle is policed constantly or has signs posted at its borders warning people away. Not everyone who owns a boat is instantly a seasoned mariner to know what areas to avoid and how to read the weather correctly. Granted, there were probably plenty of experienced sailors—and pilots, given the state of how many planes have crash-landed as well on Yamatai—who ended up on the island, too. Couple all that with Himiko being the biggest influence in creating the erratic storms that plague that particular system, and it's quite possible to see how frighteningly easy it is for Mathias to gather that many men in thirty years.

Interrupted Ritual

• So Queen Himiko bodysurfs between her priestesses, so that she can live forever. Hoshi puts a stop to that by killing herself. How come the people in charge of Yamatai didn't try to find another girl to replace her?
  • Hoshi killed herself in such a way that the ritual was unable to continue or be done again (it's mentioned in a letter that this is why she killed herself during the ceremony) to spare others of her fate.
  • Wait if she did it in away that it couldn't be done how come Mathias is able to do it with Sam? It looked like if Lara hadn't stopped the body transfer by destroying Himiko's body it would probably have been successful. Did I miss something?
  • It's implied that Himiko was giving Mathias instructions in his dreams. It's possible that somewhere in the past thousand years or whatever she sorted out what went wrong and devised a new ritual that would work. Or he was just crazy, and if allowed to complete his ritual it would have just killed Sam and pissed off Himiko even more.
  • It may be that Himiko had originally been able to body-hop to pretty much anyone, but after Hoshi broke the cycle Himiko could only possess a descendant. After hundreds of years of bodysurfing there were no descendants left on the island and none could be brought there now because of the storms. So Himiko had to wait for a descendant to arrive on the island by chance. Enter Sam...
  • My thoughts: Hoshi stabbed herself as Himiko entered her, and died moments after the ritual was complete and it was too late. Himiko's soul is trapped in Hoshi's dead body.

Rescue Plane landing

• Why was the rescue plane trying to land to pick up the Endurance's crew? A casual look at Yamatai Island would show any experienced pilot that there is no place on it flat enough, long enough, and sufficiently free of obstructions in which to land a four-engine aircraft, much less have it take off again. The most the pilot should have been able to do was get the GPS coordinates for the island to a boat, seaplane or helicopter, because any attempt to land to pick up survivors himself would have wrecked the plane even if Himiko had been asleep.
  • Knowing US Coast Guard doctrine, the C-130 pilot was probably trying to get a better picture of the area for follow-on rescuers and drop rescue supplies. US Air Force/Air National Guard squadrons would go further by dropping pararescue jumpers (parachuting mountain climbing scuba diving paramedics) along with the supplies, in order to treat the wounded. What really bugs me more is the Japanese Coast Guard helo, which is being flown by an American pilot.

New Shirt

• A minor thing, but when Laura finally gets back to her cabin, why doesn't she grab a new shirt? Sure, she was a little pressed for time looking for Alex, but still...
  • That's pretty much it. The ship was flooded too, so nothing really was salvageable. Also, I doubt they were able to keep ahold of ALL their gear since the crash inland, including extra clothes.

Stormguard and potential vessels

• Okay, late in the game, Mathias sends Dr. Whitman to let the Oni/Stormguard know that they have a suitable host for Himiko. It seems that the Oni don't understand what Whitman is saying, but apparently they're willing to hear him out for a minute or two before killing him. After speaking to them in English the whole time, Dr. Whitman tries saying the Japanese word for "Queen". How do the Stormguard respond to this most joyous of news? They get angry and immediately kill Dr. Whitman right there on the spot. Am I missing something here?
  • His mangled speech and weird behaviour makes them think his use of the word "Queen" is threatening her.
  • Furthermore, it's the Solarii who are trying to find a new host for Himiko, not the Stormguard, explaining why they are massacring the cultists and not helping them. It's mentioned that the Stormguard only take women to replenish their numbers and other than that, their sole focus is on protecting Himiko. Whitman saying "Queen" so close to her sanctum made them realise that he knew where she was, making him a threat.
  • There may be another reason, remember the Stormguard are not just a zombie army, they seem to be some form of revenant, as they are clearly sentient, maybe they hate their existence and instead of what looks like them protecting Himiko's corpse they are actively preventing anyone bringing her a new vessel not much justification but outside of Himikos' legend we know not much about the stormguard themselves, remember Mathias had to sneak himself and Sam in, despite the fact that he would probably know exactly what to say to them.

Weapon Parts

• Why are there parts for a Desert Eagle hidden away in ancient tombs?
  • Perhaps those parts were left there by the Solarii, who have discovered quite a few tombs that Lara visits. If they already believed in Himiko's myth at that point, it is possible that instead of robbing the tombs blind, they added something valuable of themselves to the treasure chest as a gift/offer for the Sun Queen. On an island such as Yamatai, where the strongest rule, guns and other weaponry were probably considered one of the most valuable things one could possess and thus made for a suitable offer.
  • Lara's using wood and animal pelts to add alternate burst modes, silencers and larger clips. Using a Ruby to magically turn a Type 100 into an AK-47 is child's play.

Functioning WWII Shotgun

• Pump action shotguns are simple weapons, but could such a weapon and its ammunition (this was before plastic shotgun shells were invented and paper was used instead) still be functional after 68 years in an open cave exposed to wind, dust, and rain with no maintenance?
  • Marines ran into problems with the paper shells when they went to the Pacific theater, so they switched over to brass shells. There were still bits that could be damaged from getting too wet, but whatever was loaded in the shotgun was given a bit of extra protection from the elements by the gun itself, so most of the rain may have never reached the actual shells. Corrosion could still be an issue from the humidity, though.

Merciful Stormguard

• Why did the Stormguard kill all the Solarii in the monastery but not kill Lara?
  • No one said they were SMART. They pretty much have one purpose: Protect Himiko. They probably thought Lara was already dead.

Functional Radio Tower

• How did the radio tower still have power? The Solarii in the bunker mention fuel for the generators powering it, but Lara went through the generator room, and she blew that room up. After that, all the generators in the room were smoking, sparking, and silent, so I'm pretty sure they weren't working.
  • Lara remarks in-game about how any of the structures seem to have power. There's a remote chance that the Solarii, in all their years of fiddling around in every nook and cranny of the island, have somehow managed to cobble together generators to pump life into the place. Even in-game, as Lara makes her way to the Endurance to find Alex, the Solarii are scavenging generators. Several of the Solarii even remark, when not engaged in combat, about how they've already salvaged quite a few generators from other parts of the island and wonder aloud what exactly they're being used to power up. It's also possible that the radio tower is being run on a different power grid than the one she blew up on her way there.

Gathering ammo

• When scavenging enemy corpses for ammunition, the game seems to act mostly realistic, in that bow-wielding enemies mostly have arrows on them, while gunmen have pistol or rifle ammo. Then you get to the Stormguard, and they, despite using medieval weapons and absolutely no firearms, somehow have ammo (by the dozens) to take! Design-wise it's a Gameplay and Story Segregation to alleviate frustration, but it's still jarring.
  • Trophies from the various people who DO have firearms that they've killed.