At the outset of 2013's Tomb Raider, a fresh-faced Lara Croft muses on the ܫjourney players are about to take.
“I’d finally set out to make my maꦫrk, to find adventure,” she reminisces. “But instead, adventure found me.”
This opening epitaphꦯ not only serves to set the tone for the game, but immediately differentiates Lara from the confident protagonist fans came to know and love over the years. Her playful thirst for danger and extraordinary wealth are all but gone in 2013’s Lara. In their place is a twenty-one-year-old woman who has rejected any pretense of luxury, who’s curious but not reckless, strong-willed but scared of practically everything. She barely makes ends meet working late hours, and is on an expedition in a ragged vessel in hopes of selling a reality TV show to recoup the cost of the trip.
Immediately, players are given the impression that Lara is clever but inexperienced – a history nerd with no real-world experience. Her ship is torn asunder by a storm, and not one second later, she washed up on the beach, screaming for help, and conked on the back of the head and dragged into a cave. Then trussed up from a ceiling. Then taking a twenty-foot tumble and getting impaled in the ribcage. Then chased by a disheveled maniac, only to be saved by a falling boulder that crushes her assailant’s skull. It takes around five to ten minutes for 2013’s Tomb Raider to establish 💎that Lara is scared, inexperienced, and ওprone to gruesome injury.
Contrast that with the opening of 1996’s Tomb Raider and its brilliant 2007 remake, Tomb Raider Anniversary. Lara has trekked to the top of a remote snowcapped mountain in Peru, with the help of a gui🧸de. In front of them stand two stone doors, and as Lara climbs above in an attempt to get inside, the doors slowly creak open. A pack of wolves come out and immediately devour the guide. In an instant, Lara cuts her climbing rope and falls a good fifteen to twenty feet, beginning to lay waste to the wolves with dual pistols. She lands on her feet, then finishes off the rest of the pack, before checking on the guide’s pulse and shaking her head at the loss. Then, she ventures into the doors, only for them to slam shut behind her. Eyes steeled directly ahead of her, she cocks a single finely shapen brow – as if this is just another mild and curious inconvenience.
Yes, these are supposed to be the same character.
Yet there are glimpses of that original Lara in Pratchett’s initial incarnation. She’s passionate about history, curious about ancient artifacts, and intrigued by puzzles. It’s obvious that she values human life, and clear that she’s able to think her way out of a scrap – even if said scraps injure her significantly more in this game than previous ones. That empathetic, curious survivor who does whatever it takes to survive and to unravel ancient mysteries is still here. To say that Pratchett’s Lara is a totally different character is🗹 a bit disingenuous when there are still so many traces of Gard’s work buried underneath all the blood, tears, and mud.
But the similarities fall apart there. The core narrative of Tomb Raider is concerned with a crazed cult of marooned travelers that worship the ancient sun goddess, Himiko. The🐈y believe that by sacrificing a woman to Himiko, they’ll be able to overcome the violent storms that keep them trapped on the island and finally be able to escape. In order to do this, they kidnap Sam Nishimura – a camerawoman on board the same ship as Lara.
Oh, she's also Lara's best friend.
This friendship is the root of some of Pratchett’s biggest mistakes with the character. While, on paper, there’s nothing wrong with Lara having a🌸 close friendship with another woman around her age, the way this friendship is mined for cheap narrative stakes is a pretty major assassination of character. I recognize that’s a bit harsh, and I’m more than willing to admit that my own personal investment in the character makes me more critical than I should be.
However, I do genuinely believe that throwing Lara into a damsel-in-distress yarn is a complete smack in the face to wha🧸t Toby Gard was originally trying to do. As a creator, This character wouldn’t be guided by love for a man or a woman, but rather by a love for her line of work. The narrative stakes would be her life or a potential failure to nab an important artifact. Even in the 2006-2009 trilogy, Lara’s connection to her childhood friend wasn’t a quest to save her from a scary bad man, but a struggle to save her from herself. It was complicated. It gave two powerful women a chance to be good and evil on their own term. That was significant.
Contrast that to Lara and🐼 Sam. Lara wants to save Sam because they’re besties, and Sam… kind of just sits there. We barely understand w💃hy they’re friends and what they mean to each other. We’re just told that Sam is a woman in danger, and Lara must save her, because Sam is important to Lara. Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t deproblematize the “damsel in distress” narrative. Replacing a man with a woman doesn’t make it progressive – it’s still lazy storytelling, and it still comes at the expense of a character’s personality. In this case, it not only stunts Sam’s potential growth, but it completely sacrifices years and years of Lara’s development.
I also take issue with just how much Lar꧟a is defined by Conrad Roth – a grizzled Englishman who wields two pistols and takes on the role of📖 a surrogate father figure. Every action she takes, every decision she makes, every moral quandary she faces, Lara winds up coming back to Roth for most of the game.
Even well after Roth has sacrificed himself to save L𝓰ara’s life, as he gets stabbed while holding Lara in his arms, Lara continues to dwell on him. She lives for his approval, even in his absence. Very rarely does it feel like the decisions she makes are her own. Instead, she feels guided by either her mentor or by her dead father. Either way, an older male figure looms large over her life. Not even her signature dual pistols are allowed to be her own. A symbol of strength, that iconic part of her classic design, are now wrested from her hands by writers preoccupied with father-daughter narratives and given to a grizzled middle-aged man who refers to Lara as “girl” for most of the game.
Those weaknesses aside, however, I can't fully say that I dislike the 2013 Lara. She's a far cry from the heroine I grew up with, for sure, and I think an unarguably weaker one. Yet her vulnerability makes her feel more human than the iconic character ever did, and I think that does wonders for making her a more sympathetic protagonist. In the past, she was an invincible superwoman, but now she's som♔ebody who we can relate to. She's not really a goal anymore - she's just like us.
Wh𓆉ether or not that makes her a "better" character really depends on who you ask. Personally, I prefer Lara as a comic book hero - there's value in having an Indiana Jones-esque figure for young girls to look up to. That being said, those sorts of games weren't selling as well in 2013. The market demanded grittier and more vulඣnerable heroes, and this was a smart way to reimagine one of gaming's most important leading ladies for a younger audience. It's not so much a question of it being better or worse, really, as it is one of the market demanding something and Crystal Dynamics offering it up in kind.
But the ending of this game promises a return to the Lara we knew and loved. She sails away from the island﷽ on a cargo ship, and somebody asks if she's ready to be home again.
Quietly, to herself, she replies, "I'mꦑꦐ not going home."
In 2016, we'd see just where she wound up.