14 - Illogical.

Sometimes video games frustrate me. At the moment the one causing me the most frustration is Rise of the Tomb Raider.

I'm not far in to the game, but am already getting frustrated. There's a bit where you have to either sneak past seven or eight gun toting soldiers. Or you can use your bow and arrow to shoot them in the head, one by one, hoping that the others won't see you.

Now, when you kill these soldiers you can loot their dead corpses. And you basically pick up tat from them. That's it. They're carrying machine guns, so you think you might get a Bruce Willis in Die Hard “Now I have a machine gun, ho-ho-ho” moment... but no. The game just won't let you pick up a single one of these machine guns.

This makes no sense. This is not an old, simple, ZX Spectrum game; it's a PS4 game where you can interact in many ways with the environment and objects within it. But you can't pick up your enemy's gun...

But this is nothing compared to the ludicrous leap of illogicality that comes just after this.

You see, there's a cave. And in this cave is a bear. And behind this bear in the cave is a wall. And this wall has loose bricks, and you have to hit it with your pickaxe a few times to get a hole big enough for you to get through, but small enough that the bear cannot.

At this point you start to think that if you'd been able to get machine guns, and ammo, from these soldiers that you could just spray the bear with bullets. But I've talked about this already.

You have to stun the bear with poison arrows. The game suggests drawing the bear out of the cave to stun it, as it gives you more room to manoeuvre. So, you draw the bear out of the cave, stun it, go back in to the cave, and hit the wall with your pickaxe. But before there's time to hit it again, the bear is back behind you, so you have to draw it out. And then stun, and then hit the wall, and then... you get the picture.

And it's a pain.

You basically have time to hit the wall once before the bear is behind you again. So, I thought I'd try something a bit different.

I lured the bear out of the cave, stunned it, and ran back in to the cave. Rather than immediately hit the wall, I turned to see the bear enter the cave and immediately stunned it. I figured that might give me enough time to get a couple of hits, then I'd turn around, stun again, and repeat...

Great idea, I thought...

But, no... I stunned the bear, turned around, and the game would not let me hit the wall. It put up the little icon it always does if you try to do something impossible. But it wasn't something impossible. I was hitting the wall in the same way as I'd always done.

The only difference was that this time, the bear was in the cave.

A bit of experimentation and it became clear that the mere presence of the bear in the cave meant that the game just wouldn't let you hit the wall. The bear's outside the cave, and all is fine. Bear in the cave, and suddenly the wall is impervious to all attack. It becomes the Captain Scarlet and Captain Jack of all walls rolled in to one.

This makes even less sense... a wall whose physical properties change according to the presence, or otherwise, of a bear.

I'm at something like 10% in to the game. I wonder what other stupidity awaits me...