Lara Croft in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
Lara Croft in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The next title is coming from Amazon Games and Crystal Dynamics.
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Shadow of the Tomb Raider interview — how developers view Lara Croft’s evolution

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 14 min

Shadow of the Tomb Raider debuted on Friday as the third and final part of Lara Croft’s coming-of-age trilogy as an adventurer. Square Enix’s reboot of Lara began with Tomb Raider in 2013 and continued with the coming of age tale in Rise of the Tomb Raider in 2015.

And with this latest installment, critics are arguing about whether she’s a neocolonialist and whether she’s become too mean or the developers are too mean to her — or if she’s really Lara Croft at all.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.