Key Highlights:
- Tomb Raider reimagines Lara Croft as a younger and less experienced adventurer fighting to survive her first major expedition.
- The opening sequence introduces environmental puzzles, fire, climbing and Survival Instinct while Lara escapes from a collapsing cave.
- Crystal Dynamics rebuilt the series around a more vulnerable Lara while retaining exploration, traversal, combat and puzzle-solving.
The 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider introduces Lara Croft as a vulnerable young explorer rather than the experienced adventurer established in earlier games, with the opening sequence immediately placing survival at the centre of the experience.
Pre-release footage showed Lara waking while suspended upside down inside a cave after the expedition aboard the Endurance ends in disaster. She frees herself using a nearby flame, but the escape ends painfully when she falls and is impaled by a piece of metal.
The sequence establishes the physical vulnerability Crystal Dynamics wanted for its new version of Lara. Injuries affect the way she moves and reacts, while the environment itself becomes part of the challenge rather than simply acting as scenery.
Fire plays an important role throughout the opening tutorial. Lara carries a torch through the cave, relights it when water extinguishes the flame and eventually uses burning objects to clear a blocked route.
The cave also introduces Survival Instinct, a visual aid that highlights useful environmental objects and possible routes. It forms part of the reboot’s broader shift towards interconnected exploration and progression, with equipment and new abilities eventually opening paths that Lara cannot initially access.
Environmental physics are demonstrated through an early puzzle involving fire, suspended objects and the flow of water. The mechanics are introduced simply during the tutorial, but they establish several of the systems Crystal Dynamics would use throughout the game.
The sequence ends with Lara climbing towards daylight as the cave collapses around her. Emerging outside reveals the scale of the island for the first time, including the wreckage of ships scattered around its coastline.
Crystal Dynamics built Tomb Raider around Lara’s transformation from an inexperienced survivor into the adventurer players already knew, while retaining the franchise’s core mixture of traversal, exploration, combat and environmental puzzles.
Tomb Raider launched for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 5 March 2013. The reboot quickly found a substantial audience, with more than one million players recorded within its first 48 hours on sale.
