In the new Tomb Raider, Lara Croft’s journey from survivor to action star to heroine (or antiheroine, but we’ll get to that) takes her through horrors visceral and terrestrial, mundane and extraordinary. But her grim and grueling adventure isn’t quite or only survival horror. At the end of her ordeal—the end of her transformation—she is a survivor, yes, and she is more than that. But what? A badass? An icon? A hero?

Tomb Raider is about fear and bravery, growth and change, in its gameplay, its story, its characters. The game’s marketing campaign (and, indeed, the game itself) tells us “a survivor is born,” but is that true? What does it mean?

That theme of survival is woven into virtually every aspect of Tomb Raider’s narrative, from its abrupt beginning to its stirring end. Every character is a riff on the theme. The whole experience is a dramatization of the challenges and costs of survival. It’s bloody wonderful.

Massive spoilers from here on out.

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In a post sketching out an Indiana Jones game I’d like to play, I mentioned that I’d like to see it incorporate “conversations that count.” This isn’t an innovative idea, I know, except maybe for the implication that it fits into the kind of game we’d want from Indiana Jones or Lara Croft or Nathan Drake. To me, conversations with meaningful — even if modest — ramifications in gameplay go a long way to adding contextual nuance and player ownership over the game’s narrative.

Some games call for rich conversation webs with major, persistent ramifications. The Mass Effects and Walking Deads of the world seem to make great use of dialogue choices and effects. I don’t think what I’m seeking in my action/adventure games is revolutionary but its underutilized so let’s talk about it some more.

Weirdly, to my mind, conversations are considered the stuff of RPGs. If Mass Effect 3 didn’t have robust dialogue, it’d be a shooter with character-customization mechanics. When you add NPC interaction and consequences to dialogue choices, that’s often considered an inherited feature from, or defining feature of, RPGs.

Why aren’t inter-character interactions a feature of more narrative games? Why aren’t they just a feature of play?

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Indy and the Idol from Raiders of the Lost Ark

I’ve enjoyed a slew of Indiana Jones video games, like The Fate of Atlantis and The Emperor’s Tomb, but I haven’t played the Indiana Jones video game I really want right now. It doesn’t exist. Yet with Uncharted and Tomb Raider paying homage in some ways and setting precedents in others, I think the time is right for a new Indiana Jones video-game adventure.

Here’s what I want an Indiana Jones game to be: an adventure game played in the third-person style of Lara Croft and Nathan Drake with rich exploration of engrossing environments, puzzle-based combat, dialogue scenes that count, and rollicking set pieces. The idea is not to recreate the forward momentum of an Indiana Jones movie, because the movies do that already, but to create a uniquely interactive experience that draws on cinematic techniques and ludic mechanisms in equal measure.

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More than anything, the new Tomb Raider game makes me enthusiastic for another game in the series that takes the best from this new vision and jettisons the game’s meanest elements. The result might be a step back toward the franchise’s earlier swagger combined with the scale, detail, and humanity of this year’s installment. Call it gritty without being gruesome.

I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers for the 2013 Tomb Raider here, but be aware that I’ll be making some direct references to that game as I proceed.

Here, then, is what would go into my Tomb Raider sequel.

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If you’d asked me before, I would’ve been skeptical. Another gritty reboot, this time of Lara Croft, a character whose confidence and poise under pressure was part of the hook? I know people who hated the twists on Bond in Skyfall.

It’s not that I would’ve doubted whether there’s a great idea for a character-driven, narrative-driven adventure game in there, it’s that I’d doubt whether the realities of modern big-budget video-game production would be able to pull it off in the face of demographic data and audience testing and brand protection.

(I’m not just talking about the much-publicized controversial and problematic elements of the game’s promotion and production. In fact, I’m not talking about those elements in this review at all — I’m reviewing the game as it was during actual play for me, for whatever that’s worth.)

Making this game required facing some tough hurdles, like making a bad-ass character into a human character without undermining the badassery, if you will. The cunning within the new game’s approach, in my opinion, was that it didn’t really try to leap the more general hurdles. It focuses the game on a specific story, following a popular character through a particular arc, and pays attention to the needs of that story. I can’t say that this Tomb Raider damned every torpedo but I feel like it aimed to stay true to the story it wanted to tell. It’s a shame that story is so grueling and cruel.

Tomb Raider humanizes Lara Croft in a way that could be seen to undermine her bad-ass nature if you think of bad-asses as being necessarily or completely superhuman. So, it seems to me, the developers at Crystal Dynamics didn’t quite aim to clear those hurdles. Instead, they pursued a different path and aimed for a different game with a different voice and style. They bet that an audience exists for this game, this story, this experience.

I hope that bet pays off and I hope Crystal Dynamics learns the right lesson if it does. Here’s why…

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