Like Batman before her, this year Lara Croft was reimagined in a dark and gritty origin-story franchise-reboot simply titled Tomb Raider. Unlike the new Batman, who believes that a hero must not take human life, Lara’s rebooted character goes from brilliant university student—isolated and weeping over the first deer she must kill so she doesn’t starve to death—to a soulless serial murderer in the space of about fifteen minutes. And somehow it makes the new Tomb Raider even more exploitative than this:

As any writer knows, a compelling story moves forward on the motivations of a compelling main character. And the new Lara Croft is compelling. Wonderfully modeled and animated, and superbly voiced by British actress Camilla Luddington, you can’t help but root for the latest Lara from the start. And root for her you must, because she goes through some serious shit.

The developers have said they approached the game and story with a single unwavering theme in mind: survival. Indeed, when you complete the game, a message fills the screen: “A SURVIVOR IS BORN.” In case you weren’t paying attention to the last 15 hours of gameplay and dialogue about survival. But, okay, I’m on board. The team had a vision, and by heaven they stuck to it.

Which is actually the story’s biggest problem, in my opinion. Tomb Raider is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom reimagined by the “minds” that came up with the Saw franchise. These guys—and I do mean guys; watch the credit crawl to see the percentage of women who worked on this game—wanted to make Lara Croft into a believable, empathetic survivor, but they also banked on their audience’s appetite for watching Lara, and by extension attractive young women, get hurt over and over. The Tomb Raider series has always been known for mildly horrific death animations when Lara topples over a cliff or gets eaten by a dinosaur or something, but the newest game positively gets off on watching Lara suffer. Certain levels are without a doubt designed so that you will fail them at least once, forcing you to watch, for example, Lara get impaled through the throat by airplane wreckage.

And never mind the death animations. Even if you somehow manage to play through the game without dying a single time, you will still have to watch Lara nearly drown in a sinking ship, fall onto a jutting piece of rebar and yank it out of her belly, get caught in a rock slide, watch companions get tortured and killed, nearly be starve and freeze to death, get tied up and slapped around, and fight off a rapist. And that’s in the first hour of the game. It gets to the point where the actress who plays Lara is gasping and grunting much more than she ever speaks. More than one reviewer mentioned that the early parts of the game sound like a particularly aggressive porno film. You can make other comparisons to pornography as well; I dare you to find a single game that penetrates a male lead character with as many phallic analogs as Tomb Raider does with Lara Croft.

But before we get too hung up on specific events of the story, let’s step back and look at the whole thing. Lara Croft is part of a university expedition funding itself through a contract to make a reality television show that chronicles their search. As most games are dominated by bald white male characters (I assume hair is difficult to render), I salute the developers for creating a multicultural cast of characters. Besides Lara, there’s a Scottish cook, an English mercenary, a Japanese-American producer, a Samoan cook, a black mechanic, and a white tech nerd who looks distractingly like Daniel Radcliffe. In practice they’re fine characters, but are still mere cardboard cutouts compared to the depth and complexity of Lara herself.

So Lara and her friends get shipwrecked on an uncharted island that—surprise!—happens to house the very ruins they were looking for. But it’s already inhabited by a human-sacrificial cult. These dudes are vile, vile people. As mentioned above, they do terrible, dehumanizing things to anyone who blunders onto their island, and for this reason we are meant to feel like Lara is still a good human being when she starts slaughtering them by the dozens.

It doesn’t help that messages like “Head Shot! 15XP” pop onto the screen every time you take down an enemy. Story-wise, Lara is supposed to be taking lives reluctantly, no matter how diabolical her enemies are. Getting rewarded with extra experience points for burying a climbing ax into an adversary’s brain just doesn’t gel with the story’s insistence that Lara is sickened by what she must do to survive.

And I think that separation is what breaks the game’s story. I won’t say it breaks the game itself, because regardless of its philosophical faults, Tomb Raider is a fantastically-made piece of media. Art and animation, control and level design, technical presentation—every aspect of this game is absolutely top tier.

It’s just a shame that the first Tomb Raider game that tries to move away from overtly sexualizing Lara herself chooses instead to sexualize violence.