Ava is a fan of all things relating to The Sims and Dead by Daylight, to immersive RPGs, MMOs, and cozy games
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“To the heirs of my blood, you will inherit these stone walls and titles, but you will also inherit a burden.” Those are the words of Lara Croft’s ancestor, T.E. Croft, which were shared in a recent community post for the upcoming Tomb Raider game. After seeing this, a familiar feeling arose: Each time a new teaser, developer interview, or trailer drops for Legacy of Atlantis, I can’t help but feel like there’s a giant, Croft Manor-shaped hole.
This Croftian chasm only widened further after watching the latest mini-doc episode for the action-adventure on Monday, July 20. Slight tangent here, but stay with me: Hearing that Crystal Dynamics and Flying Wild Hog are so focused on delivering an authentically ‘Lara’ experience in her movement leaves me with such high hopes for the reappearance of the series. Notably, Lead Gameplay Designer Bartek Schweiger assures that the team is aware it’s important to look back into the past, stating, “you need to look at how those games were functioning. What was the essence of those to extract it and put it into the future.”
While that certainly applies to swan dives, cartwheels, and Lara’s suite of flashy, action-hero power moves, I think it also relates (or should relate) to Croft Manor, which as of yet, remains firmly in the past. Despite the estate appearing in the Survivor series in both Rise and Shadow of the Tomb Raider – the latter as a segment where you explore the home as Lara in her childhood – to me, neither come close to the pull of loading up those sandboxy, dedicated levels in Anniversary, Legend, and Tomb Raider 2.
While both segments in the Survivor games did bring back the stately home as narrative experiences, the real magic in Croft Manor is having it accessible at any point in the story, serving as an escape from the action when you want to polish up on your traversal, acrobatics, or swimming. As a kid, I can wholeheartedly say that TR2’s Croft Manor and its obstacle course, the legendary Venice Violins musical piece, and the iconic challenge of trapping the butler in the fridge (he was my first real experience with true, unbridled terror in a video game) had me spending more time in its liminal-feeling rooms than the actual game itself. As a teen, this trend continued. While I absolutely devoured the main story of both Legend and Anniversary, my favorite thing to do was still to run around Croft Manor with my well-earned unlocked skin of the villainous Amanda Evert, completing puzzles and awing at the marvel of its reimagined halls. The nature of these prior renditions is what Rise and Shadow so missed.
Legacy of Atlantis serves as a way to continue the heroine’s planned ‘unified’ timeline (the intention of which was first revealed in a video way back in 2021), while also marking a good entry point for newcomers. Crystal Dynamics and Flying Wild Hog have a real chance here to bring the manor into the hearts and minds of gamers new and old alike. And in the latest mini-doc episode, one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part has me hoping they will: Charlie the fish.
This iconic little fish last made its appearance way back in TR Anniversary. In the mini-doc clip, Art Director Arek Tomaszewski says: “We brought back Charlie,” when discussing how the art direction includes subtle signals to “subconsciously guide players” around the environment. Mikał Kuk, Creative Director, adds, “it’s the legend that there’s a fish that guides [the] player. The fish [tries] to swim towards the places that you’re supposed to go.” Clearly, this shows that the dev team intrinsically know the legacy of the material that they’re working with – which means that they should also understand how well-loved Croft Manor is. Even more so because Game Director Raul Siqueira touches on Lara’s acrobatic nature and her cartwheeling maneuvers from the original and how that’s “unique to who she is as a person, that says a lot about her story, that says a lot about who she is.”
Acrobatics was a mainstay of Croft Manor, serving as something like a tutorial to understanding how Lara moves. So that last statement, alongside the letter published note from T.E. Croft, and what seems to be a fundamental understanding of respecting the Tomb Raider series as a whole, gives me high hopes that we haven’t seen the last of those hallowed halls just yet.
