Minutes into 2013's Tomb Raider reboot, Lara Croft says "This is gonna hurt!" before being gruesomely impaled on a rusty spike. It's a moment that perfectly illustrates the relentless, grim, and downright sadistic tone of the Survivor Trilogy, which charts Lara's gruelling journey from fresh-faced rookie to seasoned adventurer. Across Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara is constantly drenched in blood, yelping in pain, and being brutalised by wild animals, traps, collapsing scenery, and mercenaries. It's entertaining, in a sick sort of way, but it's not what I want from a Tomb Raider game.
Developer Crystal Dynamics wanted to make Lara feel less like Indiana Jones, able to survive any hardship with only a few scuffs to show for it, instead making her more of a fragile human being, moulded by harrowing experiences, before emerging as a stronger person. There's nothing wrong with the concept, but the sheer amount of violence and torture porn in these games often feels gratuitous. It's also tonally inconsistent. Early in the first game she's traumatised by having to kill a single wild deer for food; a few hours later she's casually mowing down hundreds of pirates with an assault rifle, suddenly transformed into a hardened killer.
In cutscenes she's quiet, thoughtful, and kind—in the game she's a blood-splattered butcher with a body count to rival John Rambo. Plenty of games suffer from this kind of dissonance, Uncharted being a prime example. But it feels more incongruous in a game where the writers are also trying to make this character feel like a real, nuanced person. That's my biggest issue with the Survivor Trilogy: having to reckon with Lara the survivor on a journey of growth and discovery, and Lara the deadly predator who sneaks around in the shadows snapping necks. Honestly, I prefer the old Lara, who spent more time actually raiding tombs.
There are tombs in the Survivor Trilogy, and some of them are excellent. Shadow of the Tomb Raider in particular features a number of quality, satisfying room-sized puzzles set in a variety of atmospheric crypts, caverns, and temples. But the trilogy as a whole is skewed heavily towards combat—especially the first one, which is almost entirely a game about shooting people in the head with arrows. This drift away from the core appeal of the series, pun intended, began with the failed PS2 experiment The Angel of Darkness, which was more concerned with Lara the character than her much more interesting ar🍸chaeolo💟gical adventuring.
The early Tomb Raiders give you that thrilling feeling of delving into somewhere dangerous, forbidden, and ancient—and of being the first person to set foot there in centuries. There's still action, of course. I mean, Lara encounters a dinosaur in the first one. But the games are ultimately defined more by the slow, th✱oughtful navigation of these vast, intricate spatial puzzles. Uncovering the secrets of crumbling, forgotten tombs and temples, trying not to trigger traps, swimming through submerged tunnels to find shiny artifacts, is a l🦩ot more interesting to me than running around in the mud and rain breaking necks and shooting people.
I enjoyed the Survivor Trilogy, but my heart still belongs to the early Tomb Raiders. Not just because of the nostalgia and the focus on tomb raiding, but because they have a much more pleasant vibe. The reboots are loud, intense, and overwhelmingly bleak, while the old games have a strangely peaceful quality to them—which is heightened by composer Nathan McCree's haunting music. The levels may be literal death traps filled with killer animals, but I've always found the PlayStation-era Tomb Raider games to be extremely chill. I don't know what Square Enix has planned for Lara next, but I hope it's a return to the series' roots.