Rise of the Tomb Raider's first DLC adds a welcome spookiness to Lara's adventuring.
Rise of the Tomb Raider’s first piece of story-driven DLC Baba Yaga: The Temple of the Witch is an enjoyable, if brief, adventure that adds a welcome supernatural element to familiar puzzle-solving and adventuring. Although a fetch quest in well-trodden territory is a low point, The Temple of the Witch stands out from the main campaign by virtue of this unexpected psychedelia.
Lara’s hunt for a witch who’d allegedly terrorized locals for years is a welcome change from Rise of the Tomb Raider’s more grounded threats. In one sequence, Lara must follow her father through a haunted forest, pursued by demonic dogs and leery skeletons. While genuinely spooky, it also serves to illustrate Lara’s complex relationship with her dad, one of the most interesting themes in Rise of the Tomb Raider’s main campaign.
This sense of escalating insanity culminates in a great boss battle that takes place entirely on this otherworldly plane. Multi-tiered and increasingly frantic, this battle is a fitting end to The Temple of the Witch, and offers a satisfying resolution to its mysteries.
Outside of its dark wrapper, though, it’s business as usual here. Lara solves puzzles, fetches things, and shoots bad guys. Overall, this isn’t a bad thing - in fact, one of its puzzles is the most enjoyably tricky I’ve yet encountered in this resurrected series - but all that time spent gathering resources in Rise of the Tomb Raider’s overly familiar Soviet Installation felt like a wasted opportunity. After all, The Temple of the Witch's Wicked Vale is an entirely new region, so it’s difficult to comprehend the justification behind returning to such well-worn territory when I could’ve been there instead.
Once your main mission is over – which took me around 2 hours – there are a handful of distractions in The Temple of the Witch to make your return to Rise of the Tomb Raider more worthwhile. A new ‘Dreamstinger’ bow enables you to equip poison arrows that cause hallucinations, and document and survival cache challenges are there for completionists. I was left yearning, however, for new challenge tombs - the absence of one made the post-boss-battle Wicked Vale feel curiously empty.
The Verdict
Baba Yaga: The Temple of the Witch is a brief, but mostly entertaining chapter in Rise of the Tomb Raider’s lore. While I would have happily swapped the return to the Soviet Installation for a new challenge tomb, its supernatural elements added a noticeably different feel and a welcome sense of tension to Lara’s new adventure.
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