Tomb Raider is one of those series that can achieve anything from comedic dry wit to thrilling adventure. However, one of these things the series regularly delves into is the dark and scary nature of tomb raiding. From horrifying monsters to dark and gritty tombs, Tomb Raider can also be seen as a pseudo-horror series with some genuinely terrifying adventures that haunt some game's levels, events and characters.
Despite all this, the titular heroine Lara Croft continues to face danger with ease. However, the same can't be said for the ordinary player who isn't an experienced explorer and has to come face to face with jump scares, genetic experiments and other tragic circumstances that show that the life of an adventurer isn't all it's cracked up to be. From the very first game with its haunting atmosphere to the later entries where Lara has to find out the truth about her parents, face unspeakable horrors and deal with trauma, here are some of the scariest moments in the Tomb Raider series.
6 Lara Croft And The Atlantean Experiment
In both Tomb Raider and its remake Tomb Raider Anniversary, Lara comes face to face with Natla — a businesswoman and Atlantean queen who sought artefacts in order to power her genetic experiments that were the new Atlanteans who would take over the world. After a heated confrontation, which sees Lara almost die and Natla fall into a pit of lava, Lara climbs the edge of a life to come face to face with one of these experiments.
Though it is still just as horrifying to face in the remake, the original Tomb Raider creates an air of suspense with a chill female voice counting down and the intense music ramping up, displaying nothing more than the orb the experiment is contained in. After the cutscene is over, Lara faces the monstrosity, and though it's scary in both games, it is a horrifying encounter in the original. Surrounded by shadows due to low render distance, Lara faces off against this huge Atlanean beast all on her own, with limited space and a lot of bullets to take it down.
5 The Transformation Of Boaz
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness is certainly one of the darkest games in the series just by tone alone. Instead of Lara going on a grand adventure in some faraway tomb, she is in Paris where she is being framed for the murder of her mentor, Werner Von Croy, who died at the hands of a serial killer still skulking around the streets of the city. In time, Lara comes face to face with the true force behind the murders — Eckhardt, an alchemist who plans to use artefacts to revive an extinct race known as the Nephilim.
Eckhardt works with a few others to achieve his plans. However, during a confrontation with one of his subordinates, Boaz, he decides to kill her by throwing her into the jaws of an experiment in the lab known as the Pod. As if this wasn't horrifying enough, she later returns as a mutated form, part human, part insect, part Nephilim and was another scary boss battle out of the few already in the series.
4 Amelia Croft's Fate
During her adventures in Tomb Raider: Legend, Lara embarks on a quest to find out what happened to her mother Amelia Croft. Though Lara's parentage and backstory changes between the different iterations, when it came to this trilogy, Lara and her mother were the sole survivors of a plane crash in the Himalayan mountains. As they sought shelter from the elements, they came across a strange artifact that seemed to activate a portal where voices spoke to her.
Shortly after pulling out a sword from this device, Lara's mother disappears. We then find out her fate in Tomb Raider: Underworld, where she had been teleported to the mythical realm of Helheim and turned into an undead thrall, still even wearing the same clothes she had on when she disappeared from Lara many years ago. It's a dark moment, and even darker when Lara has to put down her own undead mother.
3 A Haunted Labyrinth
Though it's one of the lesser-known games, Tomb Raider: Chronicles is one of the few Tomb Raider entries that showcases a young teenage Lara Croft and shows that her resilience was something she clearly must have learned in her early life, or she would've never made it through one of the scariest levels of the entire series.
From a hooded skeleton skulking around to just a downright shadowy atmosphere, the level is also eerily quiet with nothing more than just ambiance and Lara's footsteps making most of the noise. Despite not being a horror game, this level is a good reminder that some Tomb Raider games get scarily close to the genre at times.
2 Origins Of The Cult
The reboot trilogy of Tomb Raider saw Lara go from an inexperienced adventurer to the legendary tomb raider we all know and love. However, this doesn't mean that her path was ever easy. During her first real adventure on the island of Yamatai in the 2013 entry, Lara discovers the grisly origins of the cult of islanders she's been facing. As part of an initiation ritual, any survivors who wash up on the island are thrown into geothermal caves where they are left to starve and fend for themselves.
This results in turning many of the survivors into depraved cannibals who devour new survivors and attempt to kill Lara herself. It's a dark twist on an already cruel fate of being shipwrecked on a cursed island, and shows the depravity of the people Lara is facing.
1 The Original (Almost All Of It)
Though the classical games all have a similar theme, the original Tomb Raider is almost certainly a horror game in its entirety. The low draw distance creates shadows in the near distance, causing tombs to feel more isolating and darker than they actually are, making enemies springing out from the shadows suddenly a jump scare. As well as this, the soundtrack is one of the most intense in games and, when there isn't a soundtrack, there's nothing more than Lara's grunts of effort and her footfalls in between the churning of the tombs she's in.
From an icy cave to a volcanic island, each environment is so different from the last and yet retains one thing — tension — as Lara solves puzzles, kills animals and monsters, all while trying to avoid deadly traps. It can be creepy, adrenaline rushing and downright terrifying all with its atmosphere alone, and that's why the original Tomb Raider will always be one of, if not the most, scariest of the series.