After years of corporate shuffling and various adaptations getting announced and coming out, everyone’s favorite Tomb Raider, Lara Croft, is finally returning to video games with two titles. At last week’s Game Awards, Crystal Dynamics revealed Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis and Tomb Raider: Catalyst. The former is a remake (or “reimagining”) of the original 1996 game that saw a young Lara look for the Scion of Atlantis. It’s been re-released many times over the decades, and this new version, co-developed with Polish studio Flying Wild Hog, features modernized gameplay and graphics, along with “new surprises.”
The day after the awards ceremony, Crystal studio head Scot Amos and game director Will Kerslake told press the chief aim with Legacy was to build it from the ground up and make the original game “feel like 1996, but play in 2026.” There was a lot of talk of “honoring” Lara’s debut, and not adding embellishments or divergences that fans would deem unnecessary. (Translation: it’s a single-player only game.)
“The things you expect in a Tomb Raider game, the characters and creatures you expect [from the original], are in the trailer and will be in Legacy,” said the developers when asked of the game’s locations being in this new version. Likewise, the original game’s puzzles and hard segments will make a return, but like the new controls, those will meet the current generation of players where they’re at.
Meanwhile, Catalyst puts Lara in Northern India after a cataclysm unearths ancient secrets, including one “that could reshape the future.” While investigating what caused the cataclysm and any other secrets in the region, she’ll team up with (and go against) other treasure hunters whose intentions aren’t as noble as hers. The most important thing to know about Catalyst right now is that it’s set after 2008’s Tomb Raider: Underworld, meaning Lara’s older and “at the top of her game,” according to Kerslake.
Speaking of Lara, she’s undergone another new look for Legacy of Atlantis, which was previously shown off in 2024, prior to the games’ reveal. Her last big artistic change came with the 2013 reboot and lasted through that trilogy. For this new redesign, Kerslake explained Crystal Dynamics has had the same art director and lead character artist for “many games now”, so they’ve kept core elements of Lara with each game while working within the boundaries of the engine used to make each individual game, and ensured her look fits “the right era for each version [of her].”
Similarly, Amos said the studio looks at evolving her through a lens of “the right character for the right period of how players experience games today,” focusing on “who Lara needs to be while retaining that core DNA that’s made her iconic.” No mention was made of her specific look for Catalyst, but the same logic applies there, with further insight presumably to come when that game is closer to release than the remake.
In both titles, Lara will be voiced by Alix Wilton Regan, best known for Cyberpunk 2077 and Dragon Age: Inquisition. The shared voice means players will see the character at two different points in her life, and combined with her redesigned look, it’s all part of an effort by the studio to unify her earlier exploits with the more recent Survivor era: Legacy of Atlantis is Lara when she’s “fresh-faced” (as in, not long after the reboot games and Netflix series), followed by the pre-reboot games, and Catalyst is set at the furthest point in her adventuring career.
That unification also extends to how the games were made. They were developed in parallel, with Flying Wild Hog tackling Legacy and Crystal Dynamics on Catalyst duty. Amos revealed the two studios have been sharing technology and resources, and are overseen by a leadership team that ensure “everything’s on track, within canon, and makes sense.” Of the partnership, he considered Flying Wild Hog, whose previous credits include Evil West and the Shadow Warrior games, “a dream to work with. Meeting them felt like a natural extension of [us], and there’s been so many similarities in how they’ve embraced this studio culture on their own that very much aligns with how [we] do things.”
Amos and Scot assured more information on the two titles would emerge when the time was right, and they were equally avoidant about touching on how the upcoming Prime Video show will factor into this new, unified timeline. But they were more forthcoming about their pride in these two reveals: Scot recalled being at the Game Awards with Regan, other Crystal devs, and Flying Wild Hog CEO Michal Szustak and absorbing the excitement from the crowd and online for the two trailers. It’s been a long road for Crystal Dynamics and Tomb Raider this decade, but the hope is that looking to the reimagined past and incoming future can reinvigorate the long-running series and put Lara Croft back on the map.
Look for Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis to arrive in 2026, followed by Tomb Raider: Catalyst in 2027, both launching on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
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