Shadow of the Tomb Raider

• 1. Introduction

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  Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the 2018 adventure game from Eidos-Montréal, begins with its hero doing something she was clearly told not to do. On the island of Cozumel in Mexico, Lara Croft finds a temple whose painted walls warn of a Mayan apocalypse called the Cleansing. She reads the warnings, then lifts the Dagger of Chak Chel anyway, hoping only to keep it from the paramilitary group Trinity. Moments later, Trinity's leader, Pedro Dominguez, tells her what she has done. A tsunami is already on its way to flatten the island.

  That opening turns a familiar formula upside down. Tomb raiding has always meant taking treasure and walking away. Here, taking the treasure is the catastrophe. Why would a studio build a blockbuster around a hero who causes the disaster? How do you make a jungle feel alive, and a city of ordinary people feel real? And why did a game that cost so much to make start so slowly in the shops?

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• 2. Four Cataclysms

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  A violent storm brings down the plane carrying Lara and her friend Jonah Maiava over the Peruvian jungle. It is the second of four disasters the Cleansing will send, and it drops them near Paititi, the hidden city from the murals. A boy named Etzli, whom Lara rescues, leads them to his mother, Unuratu, the city's queen. Local tombs teach Lara the stakes. Piercing the Silver Box with the Dagger releases the power of the god Kukulkan, and that power is meant to stop the apocalypse.

  The villain is not who Lara first assumed. The man she knew as Dominguez turns out to be Amaru, Unuratu's brother-in-law, taken by Trinity as a child and now the head of a cult devoted to Kukulkan. The Box itself was carried off centuries ago by Andres Lopez, a missionary sent by Trinity during the Spanish conquest. Lara also meets the Yaaxil, strange humanoid guardians of the Box, led by one called Crimson Fire.

  Unuratu dies after being shot by Commander Rourke, Amaru's second in command, and with her last breath she urges Lara to finish the ritual. She also warns Lara not to let the Box change her. Beneath Lopez's mission, Amaru takes the Box and confesses that he ordered the death of Lara's father. An earthquake and landslide follow, and then a volcanic eruption.

  At the temple summit, Lara defeats Amaru, who passes Kukulkan's power to her as he dies. She is tempted to use it to bring back her parents. Instead she asks Crimson Fire to stab her symbolically, giving up the god's spirit to end the Cleansing. Jonah goes on vacation, and Lara stays behind to help the newly crowned Etzli.

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• 3. A Hero Who Causes Harm

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  Director Daniel Chayer-Bisson, who had co-led the 2013 reboot, described his Lara as "overconfident," and the writers built the story around the mistakes that flaw produces. The Mexico sequence was called a "benchmark scene" by Eidos because it showed that her recklessness had a body count. Earlier games threw Lara into trouble. This one makes her answer for it, and the team treated that as a deliberate reversal of what players expect from the series.

  Jonah carries the moral weight. He appears more than in earlier games, and he plays Lara's conscience, questioning her revenge and reminding her what it costs other people. Lead writer Jill Murray pointed to the "desperation," "panic" and "anger" behind some of Lara's choices. Over the story, Lara moves from selfish motives toward something more generous, and she has to forgive herself along the way. Camilla Luddington and Earl Baylon again supplied voice and motion capture for Lara and Jonah.

  Bisson also called Lara "awkward" around other people. Paititi, a large hub city, was designed as a "celebration of life" where she could practice trust, make contact and take on side quests that help its residents. Narrative director Jason Dozois said these quieter scenes helped "create more of a person rather than just a super athlete who was always getting in and out of horrible situations."

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• 4. Building Paititi

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  The original design pitch asked for something earlier technology had never allowed: a genuine lost tomb with a living population inside it. The team weighed legendary places and settled on Paititi, because it has a basis in history, unlike purely fictional locations such as El Dorado. Mayan, Aztec and Incan mythology fed the setting and the plot, and the story imagines how these cultures might have mixed.

  To get the details right, the developers worked with cultural consultation groups and historians from Yale University. They also took field trips to Machu Picchu and the Yucatán to study ancient architecture in person. A study of archeoastronomy, the way ancient peoples read the sky, became the narrative thread linking Cozumel to Paititi. The stated goal was "responsible archaeology," an approach that values a culture's customs, people and language.

  That last word shaped a feature in the game itself. Lara's language skills grow as she finds collectibles, which lets her read the text on monuments. An Immersion mode lets players hear locals speaking their native languages in the background. Switch it off, and those conversations play in the voice-over language the player picked.

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• 5. Fear and Camouflage

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  Fear was a core theme, and the team wanted two kinds of it to meet. Players should feel dread moving through dangerous tombs, while Lara's enemies feel dread when she hunts them. An early idea was a "fear meter" that filled as she terrified foes, but it was scrapped as too intangible. Looking to Predator and Alien for inspiration, the developers made the enemies' panic visible on screen instead.

  Players received a lot of control over each fight. They can slip back into stealth, climb into the canopy for extra vertical advantage, or fire hallucinogenic arrows that make enemies attack one another. The team replaced stationary mud pits with a camouflage system usable at any time, because older games in the series encouraged constant movement. Dozois called Lara an "apex predator" who strikes and then blends back into the environment.

  Stealth still had to carry risk. The designers felt that players would not feel fear if the game were too easy, so danger stayed real. Enemies who lose sight of Lara search from the last place they saw her. Critics later noticed how well this worked, and one wrote that the stealth sections treat open-world combat "almost like a deadly puzzle."

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• 6. Tombs and Jungle

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  Eidos-Montréal had supported earlier games in the rebooted series, helping with level design and multiplayer in 2013 and building challenge tombs and about a quarter of the main campaign for Rise of the Tomb Raider. Playtesters rated its levels very highly, and that gave Crystal Dynamics the confidence to hand the franchise over. The studio's earlier work on Deus Ex and Thief shaped its approach. Both teams saw traversal, combat and puzzles as the three pillars of the series, and Shadow split attention evenly among them.

  Tombs and puzzles were the most common player requests, so there are more of them, placed along the main path and in side objectives. Bisson wanted them to feel "dark," "brutal" and "scary," with most puzzles hiding a twist. Traps can kill Lara instantly. Challenge tombs reward her with a unique skill, while smaller crypts give outfit blueprints.

  The jungle was chosen for its visual contrast with earlier games and for its reputation as one of the "deadliest environments" on Earth. It began as a dark, bleak design before the team made it more colorful. The developers treated the world as a character, and Bisson noted it grows less hostile as players master it. Underwater sections, meant to echo classic Tomb Raider, were built to feel "claustrophobic" like Mexican cenotes, with scuba-diving videos from National Geographic as reference.

  Brian D'Oliveira composed the score, chosen for his skill with South American instruments, and he recorded with native musicians in his Montreal studios. Sound designer Martin Stig Andersen focused on how audio shifts underwater. The percussion piece called "The Instrument," created by Matt McConnell for the 2013 soundtrack, returned to evoke Lara's primal side.

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• 7. Release and Aftermath

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  The game's existence first leaked in October 2016, when a Reddit user photographed a passenger on a Montreal train who was working on its marketing materials. Square Enix confirmed a Rise of the Tomb Raider sequel in December 2017 and revealed the title in March 2018, billing it as the "climatic finale of Lara's origin story." Marketing and promotion cost $35 million. At San Diego Comic-Con 2018, visitors could play a demo and meet animals including anacondas, scorpions, silkworms and water beetles.

  Development, which began in 2015, wrapped on the 24th of July 2018, when Eidos-Montréal declared the game gold. Its own estimate put development costs between $75 and $100 million, the studio's largest project at that point. Wider estimates of the total budget reach US$110-135 million. The game reached PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One on the 14th of September 2018, with Nixxes Software handling the Windows version.

  A launch-day patch fixed a strange mistake. The game had shipped with an unused ending that tied more closely to the 1996 original. A Square Enix representative said it was one of several post-credit scenes the team created, and "one of the directions that was considered, but not chosen, was mistakenly included in the game."

  Players could buy a Croft Steelbook Edition, or an Ultimate Edition that added a statue of Lara, a flashlight and a bottle opener. A free trial of the first level arrived in December 2018. A season pass offered seven DLC packs with new missions, tombs, weapons, outfits and skills, but none added story, since the narrative was already complete. Cooperative play let two people tackle challenge tombs together. Feral Interactive ported a Definitive Edition to Linux and macOS on the 5th of November 2019, and Stadia received it on the 19th of November. In July 2021, an update brought 4K at 60 frames per second to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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• 8. Reception and Sales

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  Aggregator Metacritic rated the game "generally favorable," though it fell short of the acclaim earlier entries in the trilogy had won. PC Gamer's Andy Kelly praised the tombs for conveying "a sense of place and scale." Sam Byford of The Verge called the pacing "excellent," noting fewer forced gun battles than ever. Several critics said the puzzles were the most sophisticated the series had offered. IGN's Lucy O'Brien called Paititi a "real, lived-in city" and the set pieces "wonderfully orchestrated roller-coaster rides."

  The complaints were just as pointed. GameSpot's Edmond Tran found the combat clumsy and the platforming imprecise, and found the collectibles exhausting. Polygon's Ben Kuchera said the game over-explained its systems. The Daily Telegraph's Olivia White felt crafting and upgrades fit poorly in a linear design. The Guardian's Keza MacDonald called the story an "incoherent mess." Eurogamer's Aoife Wilson dismissed a "contrived revenge story that no one asked for," and White described Lara as a "whiny, bratty child." Some reviewers also read Lara's actions as neocolonialist.

  Sales started slowly. Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda blamed a lack of originality next to rival releases. In the United Kingdom it ranked second for its week behind Marvel's Spider-Man, and in the United States it was fifth for September 2018. First-week sales beat Rise of the Tomb Raider by 25% but trailed the 2013 reboot by 70%. By the end of December 2018, 4.12 million units had shipped, and Eidos-Montréal, satisfied, went ahead with the DLC. By December 2021, the total reached 8.9 million.

  The series moved on without Square Enix. Embracer Group bought the franchise rights in May 2022, and Amazon Games is set to publish Tomb Raider Catalyst in 2027. Netflix's anime-style Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft premiered on the 10th of October 2024. It is set after Shadow's events and bridges the reboot trilogy and the original games.

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