No matter how historically accurate the practice was, its deployment in this game (and across media depicting these particular peoples) becomes shorthand for showing how violent, uncivilized, and truly savage they are. I spent hours just wandering the city, amazed at something I never thought I'd see in a AAA game. There is corn- real corn-and brightly colored, Indigenous art and clothing. They speak, teach, conduct business, and even gossip in Yucatec and Quechua. In Paititi, I walked through market stalls and past villagers just living.
This is the first time I can recall this many brown folks in a video game speaking Spanish without being cartel members. As with Cozumel, and Kuwaq Yaku before it, I got goosebumps seeing a multitude of brown faces peering out from my television (even if incidental NPCs in this game have only one facial expression). It's clear that a great deal of time, effort, and yes, even research and consultation went into crafting it. Unuratu might be the queen of Paititi, but the city and its inhabitants are Lara’s-and yours, too.ĭon't get me wrong, Paititi (and the rest of Shadow’s South America) does look incredibly expensive. But Shadow is committed to aligning the locals to Lara’s perspective, and so, of course, Lara throws Abby’s ancestral knowledge back in her face, and convinces Unuratu with a brief dialog, winning over her, her young son, and their trusted military advisor. At first, Lara finds pushback from some of these people: Abby (Erika Soto), an Indigenous Peruana mechanic balks at Lara’s hunt for Maya ruins (since the Maya Empire never extended this far south) Unuratu (Patricia Velasquez), the deposed queen of Paititi, is skeptical of Lara’s presence in her territory. But Paititi is less a vivacious city showcasing the lives of uncontacted Indigenous peoples and more a digital Epcot Center attraction built especially for Lara to peruse at her leisure: You’ll overhear looping conversations, and watch as fishermen, children, and women pounding corn into flour cycle through their animations in this terraced city of thatched roof cottages and ancient, hidden temples.īut Lara loves collecting Indigenous people, too, adding supporting characters to her orbit the way European “explorers” brought brown folks into their own personal legends of conquest. It is indeed huge, and there are indeed many NPCs. Midway through the game, Lara and Jonah arrive at “the hidden city” of Paititi, which marketing materials remind us is the largest hub in any Tomb Raider game.
Regardless of what these opening moments suggest, and despite the story team’s interest in prodding at the colonialist underpinning of making a series called “Tomb Raider” in the first place, everything in this world is very much about Lara. It’s a line of dialogue that sets up one of the forced themes the narrative hopes to wrestle with. Not everything is about you.”Įxcept, Jonah’s wrong. An early voice for those questions is Lara’s Polynesian sidekick, Jonah Maiava (Earl Baylon), whose indigeneity is expressed the way “exotic” sidekicks were in mid-century adventure films: he’s big and strong and frequently “senses evil.” After one of Shadow’s many frenetic running-jumping catastrophe set-piece sequences, where Lara platforms her way to safety as the town she was staying in is literally wiped off the map, Jonah says to her, “You don’t know that you caused all this, Lara.