As hinted at in Rise of the Tomb Raider's initial reveal video, in which Lara attended a therapy session, the protagonist is still recovering from the events of Yamatai Island in the first game.
Seeking out the answers to how Queen Himiko could seemingly be immortal, Lara sets off to discover the mythical city of Kitezhm in Siberia.
"People think she's crazier than she is," franchise creative director Noah Hughes told Game Informer. "If you came back [from Yamatai] and started talking about an immortal being and a secret sun-worshipping cult, that's a tough pill to swallow. So Lara feels like an outsider in the real world. Her next expedition is a way of dealing with the trauma she's been through, but it's also a way of finding peace by chasing any shred of evidence that what she saw was real."
The game features a day-night cycle which will effect Lara's ability to craft items and survival gear. For example one upgrade requires the hide of an alpha wolf, but wolves only appear at certain times of the day.
Tomb Raider featured a serious tone and could be quite brutal, and that trend will return for Rise, testing Lara's psychology in a very pronounced way.
"Lara's learned a lot from the last game, but she doesn't have unflinching confidence. She can't face unlimited opponents unscathed. She's in a life-and-death situation, so we want to capture a certain amount of humanity by showing that Lara is continually challenged as a character. It's important for us to capture those moments where she is uncertain about her identity, her direction, or her ability to come out alive," Hughes commented.
One of the criticisms of Tomb Raider was the lack of tombs and how quick they could be solved, but Crystal Dynamics seems to have listened to that feedback and has taken it into account when making Rise, "I think the most important thing to us is really to live up to that promise of tomb-raiding, and make sure that–as much as this is a game about traversal, exploration and combat–it's also very much about tombs and puzzle solving."
It has been confirmed that Crystal Dynamics is only developing the Xbox One version of Rise of the Tomb Raider, with Nixxes Software tackling the Xbox 360 edition.
