Tomb Raider hasn't been out of the limelight for too long, but I’m happy to report that the game has resurfaced in a number of magazines with a flood of new details.
Gone is the perfect athlete with impossible anatomy. The rebooted Lara Croft is being designed as a person—one who bleeds and suffers from injuries like any normal person. She is being remade from the ground up, with a new main story, and a new character background—she's no longer a poor man's Posh Spice. And like a real person, she even has a personality this time around.
While the original Lara was a nice change of pace from the likes of Duke Nukem, the Doom Marine and a host of other male characters, the sensation of Lara Croft's "pretty girl with guns" wore off after the franchise abused the character in its countless iterations.
The story so far.
At the start of the game, Lara Croft survives a shipwreck. She is stranded on an island.
Fade to black.
Battered and bruised, Lara wakes up bound and hanging upside down in a dark cave with no recollection of how she even got there. She’s in a predicament—one she has to get out of. Swinging from side to side, Lara manages to set fire to the rope she’s tied to from a torch hanging from the wall, fraying her bonds but burning herself in the process. She falls to the ground and is impaled by a sharp bar on the ground.
It’s a nasty start for the tomb raider—she’s wounded, but she’s alive.
A quicktime event (QTE) takes place at this point, to get Lara back up on her feet. Aside from QTE indicators, Tomb Raider is said to feature a minimal user interface, so it won’t detract from the immersive quality of the game in general.
Puzzles will be making a big return to the game, as Lara must use various objects in the game environment to clear her path to the next area. Beyond simple interactions with the environment, players will be expected to think in terms of fire and water, gravity, and explosives.
Tomb Raider will break away from the fixed system of levels as found in the previous installments in favor of a new hub-based system, much like Arkham Asylum's. The island that Lara is on will be an open environment that limits Lara's freedom of movement to the abilities and equipment she has on her. Much like Batman—or if you prefer, any one of the newer Castlevania titles—Lara will learn new abilities as she progresses through the game, granting her access to more locations on the island.
Lara will also have access to an ability called "Survival Instinct", which functions much like Faith's "Runner Vision" in Mirror's Edge and Altair and Ezio's "Eagle Vision" in the Assassin's Creed series of games. This ability will allow her to paint various useful elements in the environment in yellow—for example, the footprints of wolves can be seen in yellow as the rest of the environment is grayed out to indicate a hidden cache of medicine.
As with the reboot of Lara Croft as a character, so too with her personality differ from that of the original Lara. She will apologize to the animals she kills, calling her actions a "matter of survival" rather than gleefully driving the island's population of wolves into extinction.
No longer an emotionless killing machine, the new Lara must learn to cope to her surroundings like a real person. She shows fear, doubt and even talks to herself to keep in control.
Like every step that Lara takes further into the mysterious island, the path that Crystal Dynamics is taking with the game is fraught with danger. It’s risky to reboot such a popular franchise, so we can only hope that the studio—like Lara—manages to find what they’re looking for.
Sources: Game Informer January 2011, Hobby Consolas May 2011.
