Trigger Happy
is a thoughtful, stern consistency based on properties of physical substances: Link’s hookshot will bounce off stone, but if it hits wood it will sink in and let him swing up. And the player can be sure that a burning stick will always light a torch, wherever it may be encountered.
The third type of incoherence is that of spatial management. Tomb Raider III adds to its heroine’s series of possible moves—which already include implausibly high jumps and rolls—a crawl, so that the player can move around in low passageways. But at a certain stage in the game Lara finds herself at the end of a low tunnel, giving out onto a corridor. Try as the player might, it is impossible to get Lara out into that corridor, owing to the game’s basic construction around a series of uniformly sized blocks. If the tunnel entrance were a full block above the corridor floor, Lara could get out. But the getting-out-of-a-tunnel animation requires her to lower herself fully down the side of the block while hanging from her hands, and the tunnel exit does not achieve the required altitude. So the move becomes impossible. This sort of inconsistency also rears its gory head in Resident Evil, where the player is not allowed simply to drop unwanted objects on the floor, but must stow them
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