Legacy of Atlantis Features Food Only a Brit Could Eat

You could argue that it’s all supposed to feel timeless and perpetual, like The Simpsons, but you can’t tell me that pointy PS1 Lara Croft looks like she knows what an iPhone is. There’s also an element of parody to the previous eras, as plenty of Indiana Jones and sixties spy tropes were playfully redeployed as foils for 90s Girl Power, and then again as welcome ballast to the prevailing dourness of post-9/11 Bond movies. A playfulness that the Survivor Trilogy dropped entirely, focusing sharply on the 2010s appropriate misery of being a teenager who unwittingly spends her gap year having to murder dozens of Russian mercenaries while worrying about whether her tetanus shots are up to date.

The point is, all of these flavours of Tomb Raider are distinctly of their time, which is absolutely fine. Smooshing them together into a paste is a weird decision and one that seems to be inspiring some questionable choices, like the inclusion of survival mechanics like crafting and skill trees in this redux of Lara’s original adventure, things that seem to be there just because the last game had them or, worse, because that’s what games are like now. Things that don’t make thematic sense: if this is 2013 Lara finally reaching her prime, her zenith, her most capable self – as the survivor trilogy always promised to be leading to – then why are we still spending the game unlocking her skills?

Why are we “surviving” at all, eating foraged meals cooked in the field, when this isn’t a survival scenario? Lara hasn’t been stranded here, she came to these ruins of her own accord, presumably in a rented jeep. It’s only Greece, you can go on Ryanair for twenty quid. This is a capable explorer who would have a meticulous itinerary and a bag full of protein bars and jerky, she wouldn’t be winging it on the basis of eating boiled moss.

Nor would this classically educated aristocrat seem to need a detective mode scanner thing that gives her puzzle hints and provides handy historical commentary. In fairness, its usage is entirely optional, and seems to be there to address a common criticism of the more recent Tomb Raiders, namely that Lara seems to spend a lot of time chatting to herself.

None of these things are dealbreakers, they’re just prominently questionable choices in a game full of them. As is the decision to employ, then defend, the studio’s use of generative AI in development. Granted, feelings in the community are mixed on this – some care, some don’t, most are probably blissfully unaware of the controversy – but it tends to go down like a shotgunned leopard with enthusiasts, and so using it at all feels like unnecessarily tainting your project before it’s even out.

Because they’ve admitted to using it, it’s hard not to look for evidence of it. I’ll be blunt, the food crafting menus are looking very suspicious. Video game depictions of food are an art form in and of themselves, and often, they are notable for looking absolutely delicious. Who can forget the sweetrolls of Skyrim or the lavish gourmet meals conjured up by Ignis in Final Fantasy 15? In Legacy of Atlantis, though, the food looks kinda disgusting. Despite what the accompanying description says, Lara’s lunches all look rather aptly like slop. Mushy stews of unrecognisable plant matter and meat you’d hesitate to put in a dog.

To be clear, this is all circumstantial – we don’t know for sure if these elements are derived from AI, and the studio for their part has insisted that everything in the final game will be human made or human “refined” – but it demonstrates how damning even a faint association with generative AI can be. Especially if the results are this unappetising.

The game is still many months away from release, and what we’ve seen of it so far is by no means final. There’s time to iron out the kinks and excise the final traces of generative AI that may or may not be plaguing the current build (not that you can un-use genAI any more than a bat can un-shit a temple floor).

As the second remake of a ground-breaking game, Legacy of Atlantis has a lot to live up to. It certainly justifies itself by playing differently from the existing versions: there’s never been a Tomb Raider game quite like this, for better or worse. And though the challenge element has been dramatically reduced in the Damocles Room (and therefore, one presumes, the rest of the adventure), incorporating the giant swords into a traversal puzzle is inspired, and the way it plays out in the demo hints at something fresh: a puzzle with a fixed solution, but multiple routes to reach it.

And it really can’t be stressed enough how beautiful it all is. On a technical level the fidelity in every image is positively retina-searing, but it’s all sumptuously lit and pocked with a gnarly decay that makes the ancient world sing with a sense of history. Lara herself has never looked better, a depiction that successfully blends the slightly cartoony Lara of the Legend trilogy with her naturalistic, mud-caked, cortisol-saturated counterpart of Tomb Raider 2013. New Lara spent her youth avoiding certain death in some of the most deadly corners of the earth, from Syria to Siberia, yet moves with all the balletic flourishes that the Survivor Trilogy sidelined in favour of Uncharted-style handhold grappling. Every jump, flip, and bullet-time whip exudes joy: this is a Lara who revels in being Lara. She even does that handstand backflip thing when hoisting herself onto a platform (in the build we saw, a little too often, but I heavily suspect it was dialled up for this demo).

There’s a lot to love here. A celebration of all Tomb Raiders past and present, one that treats all of the previous eras as equally important to the series’ legacy, is refreshingly inclusive. In these sorts of franchise overhauls, someone’s favourite usually gets overlooked in pursuit of whatever is deemed to be the most iconic or fundamental. To have a project here that treats the whole thing as gospel is admirable, if dauntingly hard to chew.

As someone who grew up with Lara and has enjoyed every iteration of Tomb Raider, I desperately want to be on board for this new, unified journey. But a mixture of dubious choices, mechanical and ethical, are making it a tough sell at the moment. I very much doubt Lara would choose to consume suspicious looking slop if any alternatives were available, and neither should anyone else.

Jim Trinca is a Video Producer at IGN, and when he isn’t fawning over Assassin’s Creed, he can be found watching Star Trek and eating stuff. Follow him on @jimtrinca.bsky.social, and check out The Trinca Perspective playlist over on IGN’s YouTube channel!