In case you missed it – as part of my oh-so-insightful and not at all chaotic liveblog of the heavily staged, saccharine pantomime that was yesterday’s Microsoft pre-E3 conference – here’s a fair-sized chunk of proper in-game footage of the latest Tomb Raider reboot. We’ve only seen screenshots and pre-rendered stuff so far, right? Well, here’s how nu-Lara plays.

Warning: shirt.





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Visually amazing (and often palpably gruesome and claustrophobic), though it’s not always entirely clear just what the player needs to do. Or rather, it’s entirely clear, thanks to regular on-screen prompts you apparently need to follow to the letter. The question is how much time you spend actually controlling her, and how much time you spend simply doing what you’re told. It’s very hard to not compare it to the Uncharted series of interactive movies on PlayStation 3 – akin to a Dragon’s Lair for a more modern and less cruel age – being as it is so heavy on quicktimery, and heavily scripted but impressive animation.

However, noisy little Lara also seems to have some sort of psychic power they’re calling ‘survival instinct’, plus there’s a throughline of using fire for puzzle-solving. I’m sure they’re simply showing off the most dramatic stuff at this stage – and dramatic it definitely is – given the video culminates with a mention of “open environments.” Free-roaming tomb raiding would be a wonderful thing for sure.

Autumn next year for this one, so there must be great huge gobbets of stuff they’re keeping from us. They’d better show more soon, or I’m bound to do something big. Like write a grumpy tweet or something.