Though Lara Croft's last outing in the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot was a quality title, it came up short in one particularly crucial area, given its name: it didn’t really have all that many tombs. The few challenge tombs sprinkled throughout the game were nicely designed, but petite, bearing little resemblance to Ms. Croft’s former adventures. Fans thought that was a bit of a letdown, and the team at Crystal Dynamics agreed, so the tombs of Rise of the Tomb Raider
have gotten a beefy upgrade.
"One of the most important things this time around was to really deliver on that nostalgic sense of tomb raiding, delivered from a more modern lens," said Creative Director Noah Hughes in a recent demo of Rise, and that sentiment comes through in much of the game's construction. The story in particular is built in a way that highlights the tombs in addition to Lara's survival instinct: while her goal in the last game was just to make it out of Yamatai alive, this time she's out looking for trouble hidden in ancient locales. Now raiding is built right into the narrative, and though there will also be optional challenge tombs (which will, as one might guess, build on the difficulty of the mandatory ones) even players who don't want to break from the story will still get their share of tomb-time.
The tombs are also an immediate focus, appearing in the game even before Lara reaches the blizzardy Siberian locale seen in almost every trailer. The demo, for instance, showed Lara making her way into a crypt in the mountains of Syria, which Hughes describes as one of the "breadcrumbs" that points her northward in search of an immortal prophet.
And it's one hefty breadcrumb. After Lara clears an atrium roughly the size and difficulty of one of previous game's tombs - water was raised, and a pallet was dropped for her to float on - she walked out into the real tomb, an underground tower that doesn't even brush the top of its vast chasm, with hints at the beginning of puzzles scattered around it. According to Hughes, Lara's goal is the top of the tower, but getting there will require a lot more than than solving a simple brain teaser.
"When you get to the larger center rooms of tombs, you'll often put multiple puzzles together, we call it nested puzzles," says Hughes. "You'll have that giant door you're trying to get through, you'll have to do all kinds of things there to ultimately achieve that goal." That sounds like tricky business, but after seeing what Lara's adventure are like without tombs, something a little more challenging feels like a welcome relief.
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