Lara Croft Go
Playing it a little straighter than Hitman, Lara is presented not as a figurine but as a wonderfully polygonal avatar, exploring gorgeous natural environments that belie the same rigid level designs as before. The game turns back the clock by skewing the balance of gameplay away from combat (as it should be), and toward environmental puzzle-solving. Exploring spacious caverns, hearing the drips and the echoes off cave walls, you can’t help but be transported back to 1996.
The gameplay strikes a chord that hasn’t resonated in a very long time. Pulling levers, pushing blocks, collecting keys, studying the environment for secrets, flipping up over ledges with a handstand all while the airy soundtrack screams memory and prestige, it’s pure Lara Croft. Once upon a time, it was pure Tomb Raider, too. It’s telling that the reboot series takes the iconic franchise name, while the spinoff series takes the name of its heroine.
Go gracefully solves one of gaming’s big problems: Lara Croft’s perpetual identity crisis. It does this just as she might actually do by athletically side-stepping it. The trouble with the reboot is that whilst they are excellent games in their own right, they can’t escape the wide reaching shadow of Nathan Drake. While Drake has the cheery tone of the Uncharted series to lessen the impact of his mass-murdering, Tomb Raider 2013 took on a decidedly darker feel. As such, Lara goes from vulnerable young thing to orchestrating an island massacre rather quickly and without much narrative backing.
Lara Croft Go does what the older Tomb Raider games did: it doesn’t shoehorn grittiness into a character (and a game) that doesn’t really hold it up. Lara here is signaled by her iconic blue tank top and twin pistols. She acts as she used to do, less as a real, vulnerable human being, and more as physical avatar embodying our wish to soar through stunning environments, flipping and swan-diving with style. Pure Tomb Raider.
