There are letters and relics to find, and secret tombs to plunder for bonus skill points. Your options for traversal have been expanded by the acquisition of rope arrows that allow you to pull down certain doors and affix zip-lines to particular posts. Then, after another calamitous mountainside descent, Lara emerges out onto a familiar landscape - a hub area - from a new vantage point. Adventure game sleight-of-hand, as taught at Uncharted's School of Seven Bells - what is being pickpocketed, in this case, is your right as a player to have your agency reflected in the events taking place on-screen. Let go and Lara will keep climbing without you. There's a point where the game slips into a cutscene but pretends that it hasn't: nothing changes, with the exception that it's no longer accepting your input. There's no way to fail, though a few pre-canned moments will have a rusty rung give way and leave her hanging. Press forward and Lara climbs: press anything else and Lara stops. Once you're on that bottom rung, the game will only accept one input: forwards. Shortly afterwards, Lara hops onto the bottom rung of a ladder leading up a rickety radar tower whose topmost transmitter is her crew's best hope for rescue. It's certainly what they've been talking about until now. Give it a few months and I suspect these opening hours will be what people will be talking about when they talk about Crystal Dynamics' reboot. Her first human kill leaves her blood-soaked and distraught. Her elbows shake believably when she mantles up onto a ledge. Hunger necessitates finding a bow and hunting deer. Lara sobs and trembles, and evident effort has been made to slow down and focus on the details of her experience.

This early cruelty is the game's most strikingly idiosyncratic feature. Fail any of these and you'll also watch her be crushed, impaled, strangled, mauled and so on. In the opening hours of Tomb Raider she is stabbed, burned, drenched, assaulted and almost freezes to death: that's if you're doing well, meeting the demands of every linear climbing section, gunfight, finickety stealth sequence and quick-time event that presents itself. Stranded on the mythical island of Yamatai following a freak storm, 21-year-old Lara Croft's career as a videogame protagonist begins with suffering.

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