Gamescom 2015: I Raided a Tomb in Rise of the Tomb Raider

I also got a spike shoved through my head. 

One of the few complaints people had with the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot is that it lacked its namesake. Lara spent a lot of time exploring the island of Yamatai and killing its residents, but not a lot of time raiding tombs. This fall’s sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, is about Lara becoming more than just a survivor and, yes, there is a greater emphasis on breaking into underground boneyards. I got to play through a tomb today at Gamescom and am happy to report it was a lot of fun.

We begin in Syria, where voice recordings left by Lara’s father guess a great treasure is waiting to be discovered. At E3 we got to see Lara fending off enemies in Syberia and now we’re in an arid desert land. It will be interesting to see how all this globetrotting affects the feel of Tomb Raider considering the entire first game took place on one island.
Obviously, the local driver we paid to take us to a secret location gave us up to the bad guys, and after a helicopter shoots up our truck (killing our betrayer) we conveniently crash just steps from the entrance of the tomb.
Once inside I didn’t encounter any combat — it was all exploration and puzzle solving. Oh, and trap avoidance. Those nasty kill screens from the first game are back. Here I accidentally stepped where I shouldn’t and fell into a spike pit, shoving a spear from underneath Lara’s jaw and out the top of her head.
In order to get inside the tomb I had to shimmy through a very narrow corridor that leads to a pretty good jump scare when Lara's glowstick goes out. There is also a sequence where the passage is crawling with scorpions that genuinely gave me the creeps.
This tomb in particular is kind of an underground city built into the side of a mountain. Areas are flooded, and the puzzles were mostly physics-based water challenges much like we saw in the 2013 game. I didn’t have time to reach the end, but it looks like the environment we saw in the E3 trailer that leads to a huge wave of water spilling over the city gates.
Lara can now learn foreign languages. There are Greek etchings on the walls of the tomb, and by examining murals and other ancient items strewn about you can increase her language proficiency and eventually be able to read the etchings and learn their secrets. They might point to buried treasure, optional tombs, or something even bigger.