Nevertheless - and as fans will surely have predicted - it's when the game simply remembers to be Tomb Raider that it's at its best. In nine optional Challenge Tombs and at a couple of junctures in the story, Lara finds herself gingerly exploring lonely ruins, gorgeous in their centuries-old decay. Here she solves cleverly assembled, if relatively simple, physics puzzles to gain access to a treasure trove. (In this game, the treasures are new skills - the designers clearly knew what they were getting right.) Quiet descends, all the firefights and resource nodes and progress tickers recede, and the game drinks from a well too few contemporaries bother to seek out. Just a woman and her wit, unlocking the secrets of the distant past.
It's not the lip-service the 2012 game paid to the tomb-raiding concept, but it's still barely more than a sideline for nouveau Tomb Raider. Given the tombs' strong flavour and Crystal Dynamics' comfortable command of the form, why couldn't there have been more of them, with harder puzzles, and why couldn't they have occupied some of the space filled with empty battles and vacant scrambles in the storyline? Was it a lack of corporate confidence or a surfeit of bitter experience that led to tomb raiding taking a back seat? I'm not sure I want to know the answer.