SHADOW OF THE TOMB RAIDER
A stroll through the valley of the shadow of death
Our demo begins with Lara moseying through Paititi, an isolated Mayan-inspired city that serves as one of the larger hub areas for the events of the game. Hunted by the Cult Of Kublai Khan and Trinity, Lara has hooked up with the city’s resistance to go incognito as she tries to stay one step ahead of her pursuers.
As usual, Crofty’s going to find herself thrown into the midst of bizarre events tied into the mysteries of ancient civilisations. Beginning the game in Mexico, she quite quickly picks up a trail that leads her to Peru, and the legendary city of Paititi. As far-flung as it sounds, the team has put serious work into making sure Lara’s adventure feels real, and her consequences even more so.
“They have their own customs that have developed in isolation over time. It’s really an amalgam of mostly Incan and Mayan cultures, some Aztec elements in there too,” Jason Dozois, the game’s narrative director, says of the bustling city. It’s full of life on a scale that this rebooted trilogy hasn’t touched on before. This is just after he’s finished telling us about the corn they’re growing in the village, and how, along with beans and squash, it’s very important to the agriculture. Veggies in games aren’t something we usually get told about outside of the Farming Simulator crowd.
SWEETIE PAITITI
“It’s fiction, but we wanted it to be fact-based fiction,” says Dozois. “We wanted it to feel as realistic and grounded as possible. That’s why we picked Paititi, which is a place that a lot of people went looking for – they never found it, but they went looking for it.” But not being found in real life doesn’t mean it can’t feel like Lara has actually found it. “We spoke with historians about the plausibility of Aztec and/or Mayan people coming all the way down from Mexico to Peru. […] If that happened, how would they lay out a city, what would all the districts be? We had a lot of input on the creation of the city from those historians.”
As Lara walks the streets, and interacts with the locals, it does feel believable. An Immersion mode you can toggle on and off even has everyone else speak in their own languages as opposed to English. It’s no magical El Dorado, but a slice of actual culture hidden from the world. And with the way the city gives way to jungle, where crypts and challenge tombs lie, it feels more interconnected and streamlined than ever.
KILLER QUEEN
As Lara explores she jokes around with a child about a side-quest. “We wanted to show a lighter tone,” explains Dozois of that moment. “We have some dark moments in this game […] but a lot of light moments too. I think this is the most contrast of any Tomb Raider game.”
While that may be the case in those small interactions, it certainly doesn’t extend out to the grim character arc that’s followed Lara in most of what we’ve seen, or the brutal guerrilla warfare she engages with in the encounters we’ve played. Combat is brutal and fast, building heavily on some of the stealth mechanics seen in its predecessors and adding more tools that play into that element, such as fear arrows that cause enemies to go berserk and slaughter their comrades, and mud you smear on yourself to blend into the shadows. After we clamber over an exploding compound, narrowly avoiding being hideously impaled on pipes, Lara has a brief moment, submerged underwater, where she contemplates death and the journey that led her there. She rises from the depths, framed by flames, and silently stabs a soldier to death as he cowers. This Shadow looks like being a dark one.