The Time 'Tomb Raider's Lara Croft Died (And Came Back To Life) With Zero Explanation

At the end of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, players expected Lara Croft to yet again daringly escape a crumbling pyramid, but the devs decided to subvert expectations by having her just die instead. The following game, Tomb Raider: Chronicles, just has players grimly reliving some of Lara's past adventures that her friends reminisce about at her wake. The entire thing is so messed up that at the end of the game, players are teased with the possibility of Lara actually being alive ... but the only thing you see is someone recovering is her backpack. The next game, the unanimously hated Tomb Raider The Angel Of Darkness, shows Lara is fully alive, no questions asked, and no answers given.

Soooo, what the hell just happened there? Did we all just miss out on an entire game in the series? The reason Lara goes from corpse to perfectly apt to murder innocent guards at the Louvre is that she was meant to get resurrected. Still, the devs either deemed the scene itself so stupid or were so ashamed for having killed off the golden goose that they just thought players would rather just put all that crap behind. Lara was originally resurrected by Putai, a nowhere-to-be-seen-in-the-game shaman from North Africa who presumably thought the world couldn't stand to lose any more artifact thieves from Britain.

While I won't hold it against the devs for removing the mystical gobbledygook, it would have brought much-needed answers not just to the game's plot but to its awful mechanics as well. One of the most deservingly maligned elements in that game is how they tried to forcefully introduce dumb RPG elements, like Lara needing to do mundane actions in order to become strong enough to perform more demanding acrobatics. 

On top of that simply not being as fun as just getting to do everything from the get-go, it also leads players to believe that the devs forgot that Lara's a master athlete who would never need that crap. However, the cut content provides a surprisingly decent explanation for Lara's newfound ineptitude. Lara's need for training didn't stem from her need to get more athletic than she'd ever been; it was just the physiotherapy one would naturally need to recover from some rigor mortis-level stiffness and maggot-induced tissue damage

Top Image: Square Enix