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The first house I ever owned was vast and elegant, a comfortable arrangement of grand halls and wide staircases with a treasure room glinting madly from the basement and a butler I enjoyed locking in the fridge. I would go back to that house to take a break from globe-trotting and jumping about in jungles - although, when I got there, jumping about was still pretty much all I did anyway. What a place: I loved it. You never forget your first home, and so I never forgot Croft Manor.The manor's always been a core part of Tomb Raider's appeal, if you ask me, although I'm still only starting to understand why that is - particularly in the light of Rise of the Tomb Raider's delightfully odd DLC Blood Ties (included in the new PS4 edition of the game), which puts the old house firmly back at the center of things. To approach it in a different way, maybe the appeal of the manor has changed as the games have changed: as Lara Croft has evolved and been rebooted, and as the series has changed hands and different teams have tried to work out how to make Tomb Raider in a new image.
What I initially loved about the early Croft Manor was that its inclusion suggested that Lara Croft was bigger than the game she existed within. Away from the action, here was her home - introduced as a tutorial, sure, but quickly finding a purpose beyond that. Lara goes on adventures, right, but she also has an amazing house, much like Batman does, and why wouldn't you want to see that? And if you did see that, why not make it into a puzzle - albeit a very gentle kind - with secrets that you could uncover and nooks and crannies to explore? Why not make into a place that is suggestive of puzzles, so you never stop sounding it out?
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