• 29 June 2026

Shadow of the Tomb Raider doesn't want me to 100% it and I have to learn to live with this

I picked up Shadow of the Tomb Raider in a recent Steam sale for a few bucks. I played the first game in the reboot trilogy^[1] in 2014 when I first got my PS4. In 2023, I played Rise of the Tomb Raider for my (dead) podcast. I loved them both, and, finding myself bored with Horizon Forbidden West, I thought Shadow of the Tomb Raider would be a great game to plop my pregnant ass down and binge for the summer.

Thus far, Shadow is more of the same: fun puzzles (even if Lara talks too much), rampant and increasingly brutal mass-homicide enacted by Lara in the name of “archaeology,” generally batshit storytelling, outfits of questionable taste and style, and, most poignantly for me, collect-a-thon bullshit. For reference, I picked up every collectible in the first game and came pretty damn close in Rise — if I didn’t have to meet a podcast recording deadline and rush to the end of the story, I’d probably have done the same there, too.

To be clear, there is nothing particularly innovative or exciting about the collectibles in these games. The tombs and crypts are fun and highlights of the experience, but the other items instill the same thrill as checking items off a list. Fortunately I am a sicko and checking shit off lists is exactly my brand of bullshit. I love running around in circles, activating Lara’s Batman vision every half-second, and watching the percent completion for each area slowly tick upward. I simply love to pick shit up off the ground.

I’m maybe a third of the way into Shadow^[2] and have been living the high life: I’m picking up every collectible I can and only reluctantly advancing the story when collectibles are blocked by the various Metroidvania-esque obstacles that necessitate actual progress through the game. Where I am in the game, Lara finds herself in the Hidden City of Paititi — it’s the third major map in the game. There, the player can encounter Takiy, a young boy who claims that a person named Pisco the Dead stole his dice; he asks Lara to get them back for him, and Lara, skeptical, agrees. After picking up the quest, the player can listen to ambient dialogue in which Takiy argues with others that Pisco the Dead is, indeed, real and that Takiy can see him. Lara finds Pisco who tells her his story and promises to return the dice if Lara speaks to five outcasts in the village. A fairly standard quest then ensues.

Here’s the rub: this questline contains a bug in which Pisco may not spawn in but the button prompt still appears for the player to interact with him. The cutscene plays out with Lara talking to thin air, and the quest is initiated: Lara traverses Paiti and learns about the outcasts. When the player returns to Pisco to finish out the quest, however, Pisco again doesn’t spawn in and cannot be interacted with, therefore preventing the quest from ever being completed.

From my searches, it’s unclear what, specifically, triggers the bug. It could simply be a load-in error, which is certainly not unheard of in Tomb Raider or video games writ large. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, after all, I encountered a bug where key mechanics of a puzzle did not load in and, after running around confused for a good hour, had to exit the game then load back in to finish the tomb. It’s also possibly a sequence-breaking issue; the player can (and I did) trigger the conversation with Pisco before meeting or speaking to Takiy. Presumably, Pisco is not meant to appear or be spoken to until after meeting Takiy. Some error in the game’s code successfully hides Pisco’s model but not the button prompt to speak to him.

I also read some suggestion that the bug might be related to the outfit system of all things. See, the Hidden City is, well, hidden, and there are baddies out to kill Lara within in. The queen of Paititi gifts Lara a special dress to wear while within the city to help her blend in; it’s a nice dress, but it has no XP or item bonuses like many of the other outfits in the game. Happily, there are other outfits available — I believe through DLCs, which I have — which both allow Lara to blend in and confer some nice bonuses. If the player reaches a bonfire prior to encountering the Pisco questline, they will presumably change into one of these outfits for said bonuses, but unfortunately, changing out of the basic outfit might have something to do with triggering the bug.^[3] I am, of course, a glutton for XP rewards and did just that before speaking to Pisco.

Of course I understand that game development is really fucking complicated. Bugs happen. I have never made a typo before in my life but I can imagine how these things happen to other people. Square-Enix also sold off their western properties (which includes Tomb Raider) not terribly long after Shadow’s release, which perhaps affected long-term support for the game — though the last DLC for Shadow was released in April of 2019 and the sale of Eidos was a full three years later in 2022.^[4] But this bug feels particularly egregious for a few reasons.

First, the only way to rectify the bug is for the player to reload their save upon finding that Pisco did not properly spawn. But the modern Tomb Raider games have incredibly generous auto-save systems — they have to because there are a lot of traps in the game and the player regularly dies just walking around. I very rarely hard save in these games^[5] and certainly not when doing minor fetch quests. I’m also pretty sure that the game only has three save slots and that it auto-saves when you make any kind of progress (like, say, picking up a side quest). The likelihood that the player has a save immediately before interacting with Pisco is unlikely, at least not without losing some progress. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, the argument that bugs like this can be easily avoided by taking such precautions feels like blaming the victim to me. Of course we need to be cautious and take safeguards in our lives against mistakes (or other people do — again, I am exempt from this), but there’s a basic level of practicality where we must draw lines. Driving a car is dangerous so I wear my seatbelt, but I don’t also wear knee pads and a helmet lest I find myself in a 2 Fast 2 Furious ejecto-seato-style scenario, because that would be ridiculous and unwarranted when driving a car rigorously tested by a major company. There are only so many reasonable measures we can take before we cross the border into neurosis. Saving after every little conversation seems like overly paranoid behavior that simply should not be necessary in a game published by a company with vast resources like Square-Enix.

Second, the last outcast Lara speaks to in the questline is also a merchant from which the player can purchase the rope ascender and the lockpick. These are key items that open up new areas and treasures — ones that have been tantalizingly dangled in front of the player already. Naturally, someone with completionist tendencies would find this a good opportunity to do some backtracking, perhaps before returning to Pisco and attempting to turn in the quest (and therefore realizing that there is a bug afoot). After all, is this not the intention in a Metroidvania game? Would the developers have spent the time to create these barriers and hide collectibles behind them if they did not want players to go find them?

Lastly, the initial cutscene where Lara speaks to thin air is, yes, an obvious bug. However, it is one that seems harmless — one can follow the gist of the conversation with just Lara’s responses and thus not necessarily feel compelled to reload from wherever their last save was, especially because all the outcasts do spawn in properly and the player can seemingly continue through the questline without issue (lulling them into a false sense of security). But the bugged conversation with also presents an interesting in-universe question: just who is Pisco the Dead and who can (and can’t) see him? Recall that the build-up to the quest has Takiy insisting that Pisco is real, which implies that other inhabitants of Paititi can’t see him^[6] (after all, his name is Pisco the fucking Dead). What if the conversation between Lara and the wall was a storytelling choice to have Lara able to see and interact with Pisco but not the player? The Tomb Raider series certainly does not shy away from the supernatural, and the games are no strangers to misleading the player: in levels of the original trilogy, there are invisible platforms that the player must use to access secrets. Pisco’s apparent invisibility therefore may be a play on diegetic and non-diegetic storytelling, blurring the veil between reality and presentation by building on our prior experiences within the universe of the series. To what extent are the player and Lara one and the same? Can mechanics intentionally “break” to prompt the player to question Lara’s choices and perceptions? Shadow wants to ask questions about if and when Lara’s pursuit of myth goes too far — are we as the player beginning to see cracks within her sanity by watching her converse with ghosts? There are mummified corpses within Pisco’s hut that would support this thesis, and it would, frankly, be a pretty fucking cool and daring narrative choice. Perhaps I overestimated the chops of the Tomb Raider writing team.

This bug is apparently notorious online; I found heaps of people with the same problem as me, but I generally try not to read much about a game before I play it. And if the bug is so notorious, it probably should have been patched! I found reddit threads about the bug where the users contacted Square and were told to kick rocks — and these threads dated back at least to 2019, when Square was still actively selling and releasing DLCs for the game. But they already have my money — I played the game for a good ten hours before triggering the questline, then another five hours before I tried to turn it in — and hotfixes don’t make money for the corporate machine.^[7]

The long and short of it is that I will never get to 100% completion of the game and I simply have to live with that. Perhaps this will quell my obsessive collection tendencies and let me just enjoy the game for its story (imagine that!). Perhaps knowing that it’s impossible to reach my coveted 100% will release me from the obligation of seeking every pithy survival cache. It’s a bummer, but I guess I did insist that I was going to go back and 100% Rise and never did so. Maybe it won’t matter. Maybe it’s for the best that I’m humbled by seven year old bugs in eight year old video games. Lara constantly encounters folks who caution her to know when it’s time to stop, and perhaps I can spin some ludonarrative yarn that insists that the developers are teaching me the same lesson by forcing me to leave some stones unturned. But regardless of how I feel about the rest of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, this minor questline will always be an asterisk (a shadow, if you will) over any of its merits.