In the new Tomb Raider, Lara Croft’s journey from survivor to action star to heroine (or antiheroine, but we’ll get to that) takes her through horrors visceral and terrestrial, mundane and extraordinary. But her grim and grueling adventure isn’t quite or only survival horror. At the end of her ordeal—the end of her transformation—she is a survivor, yes, and she is more than that. But what? A badass? An icon? A hero?

Tomb Raider is about fear and bravery, growth and change, in its gameplay, its story, its characters. The game’s marketing campaign (and, indeed, the game itself) tells us “a survivor is born,” but is that true? What does it mean?

That theme of survival is woven into virtually every aspect of Tomb Raider’s narrative, from its abrupt beginning to its stirring end. Every character is a riff on the theme. The whole experience is a dramatization of the challenges and costs of survival. It’s bloody wonderful.

Massive spoilers from here on out.

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If you’d asked me before, I would’ve been skeptical. Another gritty reboot, this time of Lara Croft, a character whose confidence and poise under pressure was part of the hook? I know people who hated the twists on Bond in Skyfall.

It’s not that I would’ve doubted whether there’s a great idea for a character-driven, narrative-driven adventure game in there, it’s that I’d doubt whether the realities of modern big-budget video-game production would be able to pull it off in the face of demographic data and audience testing and brand protection.

(I’m not just talking about the much-publicized controversial and problematic elements of the game’s promotion and production. In fact, I’m not talking about those elements in this review at all — I’m reviewing the game as it was during actual play for me, for whatever that’s worth.)

Making this game required facing some tough hurdles, like making a bad-ass character into a human character without undermining the badassery, if you will. The cunning within the new game’s approach, in my opinion, was that it didn’t really try to leap the more general hurdles. It focuses the game on a specific story, following a popular character through a particular arc, and pays attention to the needs of that story. I can’t say that this Tomb Raider damned every torpedo but I feel like it aimed to stay true to the story it wanted to tell. It’s a shame that story is so grueling and cruel.

Tomb Raider humanizes Lara Croft in a way that could be seen to undermine her bad-ass nature if you think of bad-asses as being necessarily or completely superhuman. So, it seems to me, the developers at Crystal Dynamics didn’t quite aim to clear those hurdles. Instead, they pursued a different path and aimed for a different game with a different voice and style. They bet that an audience exists for this game, this story, this experience.

I hope that bet pays off and I hope Crystal Dynamics learns the right lesson if it does. Here’s why…

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PAX East obliterated Jared Sorensen’s voice but he still had an event left to run. Players were counting on him. The convention schedule had the game session locked in. Sorensen, his voice already spent on conversations and events in the noisy convention venues, seemed fucked. But Jared Sorensen didn’t quit.

Sorensen was on the hook to run one of his new Parsely games on Sunday afternoon. Parsely games, if you don’t know, evoke classic text adventures through live, face-to-face play. One or more players (sometimes many more than one) issue commands to a person who parses (get it?) the players’ instructions in the fashion of an old text adventure, thereby navigating intriguing, frightening, exciting adventure environments like in days of yore. The players take on the role of explorers and collectors and the parser takes on the role of computer emulator, taking in the player inputs and doling out brief descriptions of the environment and the action.

“You’re in a dank cellar. The water here is ankle-deep. You smell gasoline,” the parser might say, then: “Exits are North, East, West.”

“Go East,” says a player on her turn.

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Cover by John Harper

Zombies control the city. Humanity holds on within a towering enclave. Precious supplies remain out in the abandoned city, waiting to be reclaimed. To get these supplies, you must go roof-to-roof, dodging zombies and staying clear of the lethal mist that clings to the streets. In other words, the situation is this: Parkour or die.

From Daniel Solis (Happy Birthday, Robot) and John Harper (Lady Blackbird), comes this clever hack of Apocalypse World about inventory management (using stacks of coins), rooftop acrobatics, and menacing zombies, called Dead Weight. You now know almost everything I know about it, but if you want to you can see John Harper work on this thing, practically in real time, by following along on this thread at Story Games. It includes links to a live Google Doc containing the nascent designs behind this free game. Have a look.

I’m happy to announce that Gameplaywright Press is sponsoring what looks to be a terrific new Halloween story-game: Cthalloween! (@cthalloween) This is the new Twitter-based storytelling experience from Jay Bushman, in the vein of last year’s Halloween story-game, “War of the Worlds 2,” (@wotw2) and such Twitter-theater affairs as the Death Star battle reenactment, “A New Group of Signals.” (I played Red 10. You choked up when I died.)

Check out more of Jay’s inventive next-gen narratives via his Loose-Fish Project website.

Positioned halfway between neo-fiction and Twitter game, Cthalloween is a massively multiplayer online storytelling event (MMOSE?). To participants — like you, maybe — it’s collaborative semi-improvisational storytelling. To readers not in the know, it’s like a massive, mysterious play breaking out on Twitter. Either way, it’s a fun way to scratch your narrative itch on this eldritch holiday. Inside your Twitter account, elder gods are on the rise, bringing with them a new season of insanity and gruesome death. It’s what Halloween afternoon is for.

Want to play along? Just check out the Cthalloween wiki, devise a character for yourself, and get your Twitter account ready by Halloween day. Jeff and I may play along on our own Twitter accounts, or on the heretofore untapped Gameplaywright account (@Gameplaywright).

Need a quick primer on all this Cthulhu business? I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend Kenneth Hite’s wise and hilarious Cthulhu 101.

Many thanks to John Kovalic (@muskrat_john) for the Cthalloween “Twitterthulhu” logo!