Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation

One of the key features of any Tomb Raider game is not being dead. From the original PS1 game, to its most recent incarnation, the primary goal—like in so many games—is to keep Lara Croft alive. Which makes the ending of the fourth mainline title, The Last Revelation, something of an oddity. When playing, you spend many hours watching Lara die a thousand deaths, from spikes, pits, pits with spikes, drowning, falling, falling and drowning, falling into a pit of spikes, and getting shot at by teams of men somehow already far ahead of her in tombs she’s had to solve intricate puzzles to be able to enter. Each time this happens, you’ve failed, so you reload. But come the end of the game, after a dramatic series of attacks, jumps, and chases, the game switches to a cutscene during which Lara is hanging from a ledge and…a pyramid falls on top of her.

So reload! Whenever she dies, I can reload! Except, no, not this time. In the most peculiarly ill-judged decision, developers Core decided to create this almost literal cliffhanger ending, failing to understand that they simply added a thousand-and-first death to the game and ultimately no satisfaction at all for the player.

Kudos to them for the fifth game beginning with Croft’s funeral, and the game itself a series of vignettes based on stories told at her wake. That’s commitment to the bit. As it happens, even the ending of Chronicles doesn’t resolve the situation, her continued existence only confirmed four years later in the execrable Angel of Darkness, which no one in their right mind would ever want to play. So to me, Lara’s still dead, underneath the Pyramid of Giza. RIP. — John Walker