10 dumbest moments in the Tomb Raider series

Lara Croft is one of the most recognizable fictional characters in the world, and she has totally earned it. Still, her games have put her in a myriad of absolutely ridiculous situations that would easily derail 🌸the 🅰career of any other popular gaming hero.

Let’s look at the dumbest moments in the Tomb Raider series, shall we?

Lara Croft kills the same guy in two different games (Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider Chronicles)

In Tomb Raider Chronicles, Lara intentionally causes the unarmed henchman Pierre to plunge to his death. That’s bad already because killing defenseless comic relief goons is bad, but the main problem here is how it breaks the Tomb Raider timeline.

Why? Because Lara also kills Pierre in the original Tomb Raider — as she should, because he’s shooting at her in that game. So, when you begin playing Chronicles, you assume it takes place before the original game because Lara is up against henchmen who don’t survive the events of the game. Fans asked the devs what the hell had happened and got the most hilarious response imaginable.

One of the devs explained that Pierre’s segment on Chronicles wasn’t a prequel and was actually supposed to take place after the original. The funniest part of it all, however, is that neither option would ever make sense because people tend to only ever die once. So, why did this happen? Well, the developers explained that

The devs destroyed Lara’s origin and made it weird (Tomb Raider The Last Revelation)

For the first three games in the series, Lara’s background and reason for becoming a survivalist was a plane crash that killed both of her parents and forced her to fend for herself.

Then came The Last Revelation, which features a tutorial segment in Cambodia where Lara is learning her survivalist ropes from an old mentor even before the crash and death of her parents. This not only sh*ts on the cool pre-established origin story but al🦩so makes it weird because what ki♌nd of still-living parents would let their teenage daughter fly to a dangerous and remote location with a creepy old dude?

Lara has a license to kill until she doesn’t (The entire series)

Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness begins with Lara running from the cops for a murder she didn’t commit. This murder takes place inside a Parisian apartment without any witnesses present. Still, Lara has to spend a large part of the game running away from the police. That’s a very strange state of affairs, given how the previous games in the series had seen Lara, a popular figure in that world, going on killing sprees in densely-populated cities such as Rome, Venice, Cairo, and London without facing any sort of repercussion.

Lara kills to prove her innocence (The Angel Of Darkness)

While on the run from the cops, Lara goes to steal an artifact from the Louvre. I think that’s the opposite of what an archeologist is supposed to do, but this time, she’s trying to prove her innocence, so I’ll give her that.

Too bad she then kills the poor innocent guards working at the Louvre, which, again, I think is the opposite of what a person who’s been framed for murder should be doing.

I guess she was originally meant to use a non-lethal option, but the game’s messed-up development didn’t give the devs enough time for such mechanics.

Lara kills a bunch of innocent people in pretty nasty ways (The entire series)

Most of her killings are understandable — in video game logic, at least — as it’s either their deaths or Lara’s. What’s weird is how so many of these games feature cutscenes where Lara just murders some possibly defenseless people, which the game plays as a pretty cool thing, actually. What the hell is up with that?

One of Lara’s big claims to fame was the murder of bigfoot (Tomb Raider)

Do the people who came up with the concept for Lara Croft and Tomb Raider even have the faintest idea of what an archaeologist is supposed to do? I’m no expert, but I’m certain they aren’t out there hunting cryptids. That’s not the notion you get from the original Tomb Raider. It’s a blink-and-you ‘ll-miss-it moment, but the scene where Lara is introduced to villain Natla shows a magazine cover where Lara is stepping on Bigfoot’s corpse.

So yeah, remember that whenever you’re playing Tomb Raider, you’re entering a world in which Bigfoot isn’t real but only because world-famous preservationist Lara Croft has already made him go extinct.

Lara Croft doesn’t know how to use an elevator (Tomb Raider)

Please watch the cutscene above and tell me if you’ve ever seen anyone use an elevator by cutting the cable, grabbing it, and hoping it would take them to the top without getting crushed against the ceiling? You could say that she’s doing that to infiltrate the villain’s lair, but then why not just do it in a sneaky and not extremely dangerous way?

Also, wh𝔍at kind of elevator do you enter from the outside of the building?

Lara Croft drowns… skeletons (Tomb Raider The Last Revelation)

I bet you thought I was going to mention Lara murdering another innocent in another extremely vile way, but no. This time, she’s only murdering what should already be dead — albeit in an extremely dumb way.

I don’t care that skeletons shouldn’t be able to move — I’m completely ok with the idea of them being controlled by otherworldly entities — hell, isn’t that the case with Lara herself? Still, I draw the line at skeletons that die because they cannot breathe with the lungs they don’t have. And you know what makes this even sillier? The fact that the series would spiritually double-down on this for its next entry:

Killing cyborg with gas (Tomb Raider Chronicles)

If modern times have taught us anything, it’s that we should probably curb our enthusiasm regarding all things automated. Tomb Raider Chronicles, however, came out in the earliest of the early 2000s, a time when we could still have fairly hopeful dreams about robots and AI without sounding utterly delusional. Weird, because that’s the game where Lara somehow fills a room with noxious gas to kill a robotic bodyguard, and it totally works.

I don’t doubt for a second that any of the so-called visionaries of the 2020s would think a robot who needs to breathe — and that can die from inhaling anything other than oxygen is a great idea, but it just doesn’t make sense in that game. Still, big props to the developers of the remaster, who award you with the “Gassassin” achievement for this.

Lara died so that the developers could live (Tomb Raider The Last Revelation)

Spoiler warning: Lara Croft dies at the end of Tomb Raider 4.

Sure, we don’t see her death, but the developers will have no problem clarifying that they really intended for They did so because the incredibly demanding development of these games was destroying their lives, and they probably thought this would put an end to their torment. It didn’t. They had to come up with another game the following year, just like they had to in the previous three years of the series.

Even worse, the developꩲers also had to come up with a half-assed reason for how Lara came back to life, then scrapped the cutscene showing her resurrection, which left players with no real explanation as to what the hell had happened there.

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