--Lara Croft, Baba Yaga: The Temple of the Witch
The exhaustive DLC package for Rise of the Tomb Raider contains quite a diverse set of new content, ranging from horror-based alternative game modes to costumes to additional areas accessible in the main campaign. Some of the content is brief, some of it difficult, but most or all of it will likely be appreciated by those who loved the main game [1]. I particularly had fun with the horror elements and the thematic issues included in the Baba Yaga DLC.
Production Values
Almost everything I said about the general aesthetics and production value quality in my review of the non-DLC part of Rise of the Tomb Raider is also true of the season pass content. The audio and visuals are fantastic, especially in Lara's Nightmare mode and in parts of The Temple of the Witch DLC when the witch herself appears--the respective blue and red colors really accentuate the horror atmosphere of those modes!
Gameplay
The core gameplay is preserved well, but since there is such diversity of modes in the DLC I will address each new mode individually. The season pass also either immediately unlocks multiple new costumes or allows for new ones to be obtained through completion of the content (like the Wraithskin costume being unlocked upon completion of The Temple of the Witch).
--Baba Yaga: The Temple of the Witch
In this expansion for the story, Lara frees a woman named Nadia from Trinity, and Nadia says her grandpa fled to the Wicked Vale, an area where Soviet soldiers have been driven insane by a figure called the Baba Yaga, a legendary witch who allegedly has a house that walks on legs. The Baba Yaga is said to have killed her grandma and her grandpa wants vengeance.
(SPOILERS)
Lara enters the Vale, experiences the effects of a hallucinogenic pollen, and sees the house and the witch, fighting off demonic dogs. After making an antidote from the instructions left by a former Soviet Gulag prisoner, she returns to the Vale and confronts the witch. Nadia tells her via radio that the witch is her grandma Serafima. Ivan, her grandpa, is found alive, and Serafima is defeated in a non-lethal way, the two reunited at last, having previously both thought the other was dead for some time.
--Endurance
Endurance mode pits Lara against natural elements, animals, and hostile humans in an urgent survival mission. Players must scramble to obtain artifacts and signal a rescue, but until the rescue they must monitor Lara's need for food and warmth. Lara needs to eat and use campfires in order to stay alive, unlike in the main game. You can discover new skills and weapons as your progress by exploring caves and killing enemies, days and nights elapsing as you struggle to survive. One can continue onward for perhaps an infinite amount of time until either death or voluntary helicopter evacuation ends the play. There's also a co-op version of this, but I did not try it out.
--Cold Darkness Rising
In this mode, Lara infiltrates a Trinity experiment site, where past Soviet research is continued. The experiment involves chemical testing on subjects to make improved warriors, but the results leave the subjects in a zombie-like state--they are not reanimated corpses and thus not actual zombies, though. Nadia and Sophia (Jacob's daughter from the main story) fly above in a helicopter and warn Lara of incoming enemy groups and tell her about weapon locations. The reason for Lara entering the area is that the chemicals will soon be released into the valley where Sophia's people are unless the machines producing it are shut down.
Cold Darkness Rising is a self-contained but highly enjoyable mode where players must rely on extreme stealth if they wish to avoid large fights. You can find new weapons, as well as receive weapon upgrades from pry axe boxes and new skills from free prisoners. To deactivate the chemical machines, you have to carefully--and exactly--follow randomized instructions that involve searching for specific features of the building and then completing certain objectives based on the features you find. This provides a reason for caution, as enemies will be attracted to an alarm that sounds if you do not follow the instructions perfectly. Cold Darkness Rising is great for 45 to 90 minute sessions when you want to relive the joys of discovery and puzzle-solving without affecting the status of the primary campaign.
--Blood Ties
Here Lara explores Croft Manor in an effort to locate evidence that her father's estate will be legally passed on to her, with her uncle attempting to take control of the estate for himself. You get to walk around the mansion, hear Lara reminisce about her childhood, find objects and notes from her youth, and read of the relationship between her father and mother. This is definitely the least action-oriented new mode--there's no combat at all. It's a purely story and slow-paced exploration experience. Considering that it is so relatively uneventful, this is probably the content in the season pass that is easiest to overlook.
--Lara's Nightmare
Another mode in Croft Manor, in Lara's Nightmare Lara defends herself against zombie-like creatures with glowing blue eyes. She has a very limited number of bullets, and, though she can find other weapons around the house, the ammunition can run out quickly, and there are no pry axes to stave off enemies. It can be very easy to die--it's a very difficult mode! It can also be very addictively enjoyable, delivering a unique horror spin on Tomb Raider. To escape the nightmare Lara must kill three floating golden skulls before fighting a larger skull.
Intellectual Content
Once again, as much as I love her, the Lara of the reboot games flippantly makes false declarations about logic and possibility. Lara insists aloud in Lara's Nightmare mode that the experience can't be real, that it must be just a nightmare, but there is nothing impossible about such a scenario becoming reality. Only logical contradictions are impossible. And then there's the fact that dreams are real in the sense that they really are perceived by a conscious subject. Lara also claims in her Baba Yaga mission, when she has her first pollen encounter, that some of what she is seeing can't be real. First of all, this is untrue for the reasons stated above regarding Lara's Nightmare. Brief a priori reflection would reveal this. Second, it is ironic that even after her Yamatai experience in the first game Lara would be so unwilling to entertain the possibility of some events being supernatural.
The route the creators went with the witch, though, is clever and does show how even seemingly supernatural events can have a purely natural explanation. The Baba Yaga in Rise of the Tomb Raider is an actual woman, but she uses a hallucinogenic pollen to manipulate the perceptions of her victims into imagining things that do not correspond to the real external world. This is far from removing the supernatural from the universe of the rebooted Tomb Raider games, but it does emphasize how perception and folk stories can distort the truth. All myths do have some truth embedded within them. But they might mistake the natural for the supernatural.
Similar to the "magic" in Doctor Strange is not derived from a supernatural source at all (it is just manipulation of energy from areas in the multiverse), the "sorcery" in The Temple of the Witch is only a potent but manufactured illusion, a weaponization of resources from nature. Naturalism, which is in its strictest form the idea that only physical matter exists, is easily demonstrated false, as logic and consciousness are immaterial--but the immateriality of logic and consciousness in no way means that there is not a natural explanation for almost all other seemingly supernatural phenomena. In this case there is a scientific explanation for the Baba Yaga's powers--but even if there was no scientific explanation and the powers were derived from supernatural sources, there would still be a logical explanation and basis for them, since there is nothing alogical or logically impossible about the supernatural (the laws of logic govern all things by necessity).
Conclusion
I recommend the season pass content to anyone who enjoyed the main game of Rise of the Tomb Raider. Horror fans will likely derive particular enjoyment out of Cold Darkness Awakened, Lara's Nightmare, and The Temple of the Witch as I did. At 30 dollars, it is far cheaper to purchase the entirety of the content through the season pass than to buy each mode or costume individually. Due to the brevity of many modes in themselves, though, I would not be willing to pay the 10 dollars per mode to purchase each one by one. For some players, the uniqueness of some of the new offerings might be sufficient grounds for a buying the season pass.
Content:
1. Violence: Everything I said about the main game holds here. Blood appears when enemies are shot, though the game is not particularly graphic.
2. Profanity: Likewise, what I said in my review of the main game is true here also. Lara uses profanity at times.
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/04/game-review-rise-of-tomb-raider-xbox-one_6.html
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