This scene is very deliberately paced like a horror game: You enter the den, explore the den, find the radio, and then you get attacked by a wolf on the way out. The most effective of these is when Lara is tasked with retrieving a radio from a wolf’s den. Most of the horror imagery in Tomb Raider is meant to alter our view of the antagonists, it builds them up while breaking Lara down, but the island itself gets its fair share of horror scenes as well. It’s just the beginning of an even bigger struggle. The prologue is Lara’s own mini horror movie, and her intense escape doesn’t represent any sort of end. Putting this image at the start of the game emphasizes that illusion, that false ending. This hopeful image of a desperate escape is undercut by the horrible reality of her situation. It seems like a dramatic escape, but in reality, it’s just a dream (there’s another version of the ending in which she escapes, drives away, then sees the “ghost” of her friend in the passenger seat, implying at the very least that she can’t escape the memories of what she has experienced).
This scene comes at the very end of the movie the heroine climbs up a mountain of bones until she finally bursts through the surface, out of the caves. What’s impressive about this homage is that Tomb Raider doesn’t just steal this imagery because it looks cool, the context of that scene in the movie mirrors its context in the game. Her final escape from this prologue has her crawling up a hill towards a thin ray of light, leading her out of the cave a scene reminiscent of the end of the horror movie The Descent. This enemy isn’t designed to be deadly, he’s designed to be scary the others are good action enemies, but this first guy is a good horror enemy. He’s also unarmed, so instead of attacking her with a deadly weapon, he just gropes at her, trying to bring her closer. This dweller is far more wild and animalistic, jumping down from the ceiling as Lara passes beneath him, like he’s been hanging in wait for her since the beginning. The Solarii are typically a tactical enemy some shoot from afar while others come running to flush you out of cover.
When we do encounter the dweller, he’s unlike any of the other enemies in the game. Lara escapes by setting her bindings on fire, severely injuring herself in the process, putting her at even more of a disadvantage. Such methods of storage and the nearby ritualistic alters tell us that this cave has been occupied for so long that the grotesqueness of the setting has become monotonous for its inhabitant. Lara is knocked out on a beach, then awakens tied up, hanging upside down like a sack of meat, surrounded by other hanging bodies.
The game opens with a prologue straight out of a hillbilly cannibal horror flick. Admittedly, it’s a narrative shortcut, using the visual cues of another genre to establish the character’s place in the world rather than bothering with the heavy narrative legwork and slow gameplay pacing that would have more naturally established Lara as an inexperienced and frightened explorer, but it’s also an effective shortcut, used throughout the game at just the right moments to punctuate her character arc.
Most of the time, when the game cribs from horror movies it does so in order to emphasize Lara’s vulnerability. It’s smart about how and when it uses these visual cues, and it’s clear that the developers understand how this kind of imagery affects us as gamers and people and even what such imagery represents within the greater context of the horror genre.
Tomb Raider is ostensibly an action game, but it’s filled with an unusual amount of very specific horror imagery for an action game.