For characters introduced in Tomb Raider (2013), see here.
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Peru
Abby
Abby Ortiz
A local Peruvian mechanic who owns the inn Lara and Jonah stumble into after their escape from the Peruvian jungle. She ends up joining them in their quest to find the hidden city of Paititi and stop the Mayan Apocalypse. She also quickly takes a romantic interest in Jonah.
- Heroic Lineage: Downloadable Content reveals that she's the latest Guardian, a line of women who have taken care of the people of Kuwaq Yaku since Queen Abarrane founded the original settlement. Abigaile has no idea about any of this until a year after her grandmother, the previous Guardian, died.
- Jumped at the Call: It doesn't take much to convince Abby to join Lara's quest. She tells Lara what she knows about ruins behind the village and tags along from that point onwards.
- Love at First Sight: She takes an immediate interest in Jonah and strikes up a conversation with him and Lara, who quickly recognizes that Abby is attracted to him. So Lara excuses herself by exploring the village, though Jonah fails to take the hint.
- Nice Girl: A hidden document notes that Abby has many responsibilities around the village, which has earned their respect and at least one secret admirer.
- Tomboy: She looks the part, and at one point she mentions how she used to skip school to go joy-riding in her grandma's RV.
- Wrench Wench: One of the many positions she occupies in her village is the one of resident mechanic.
Paititi
Paititi in general
The legendary last Mayan city, hidden from the world for several hundred years since the fall of the Mayan civilization.
- Hidden Elf Village: Hidden high up in the Peruvian mountains, it's the last place where the Mayan civilization has remained untouched.
- Hub City: The largest hub in the trilogy, actually, which the advertising made sure to milk for all its worth.
- Mayincatec: While it's a Mayan city, its location high in the Andes meant that they borrowed a lot from the Inca who were more used to the area.
- Medieval Stasis: The Mayan people of Paititi don't seem to have advanced at all since taking refuge from the rest of the world several hundred years ago. Justified in that they're a single city high up in the mountains, and have neither the natural resources nor the need to significantly advance technologically.
Unuratu
Queen Unuratu
The deposed Queen of Paititi, who now leads a secret rebellion against Paititi's current ruler, Amaru ( a.k.a. Dr. Dominguez).- Action Girl: Even more so than Lara, at least when it comes to combat with a bow and knife. At one point when Lara gets attacked by a cultist she needs to shoot him three times in the chest to kill him, while Unuratu kills multiple cultists with one arrow each using precise shots to the throat.
- Badass in Distress: Gets captured and imprisoned halfway through the Paititi arc, prompting her allies to launch a daring rescue.
- Big Good: With Lara being a Destructive Savior and Walking Disaster Area at best, and a self-absorbed, mass-murdering sociopath at worst, it falls to Unuratu to hold the moral high ground in this game.
- Blue Is Heroic: She's the rightful ruler of Paititi, essentially the game's Big Good, and her dynasty's signature color just happens to be blue.
- The Chosen One: It seems Unuratu is actually the one who's destined to stop the Mayan Apocalypse. However Lara ends up having to do it instead after Unuratu gets killed by Trinity.
- Heroic BSoD: Suffers a major one after she learns that the Silver Box she put all her faith in is no longer in Paititi, having been stolen by a Christian missionary 400 years ago, its current location unknown. Fortunately, a bit of pep talk from Lara is sufficient to rekindle her hope.
- Ice Queen: She's a stern, assertive and authoritative woman wearing a perpetual frown on her face. In fact, you'll never see her crack even the smallest hint of a smile in the whole game, but considering the situation she's in, it's hard to blame her. Said situation only gets worse as the story progresses, so there's little to no defrosting to be witnessed, either.
- Ink-Suit Actor: Looks just like her voice actress, Patricia Velasquez
◊. - Mama Bear: Don't even think about touching her son Etzli if you value your life.
- Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: As much of a badass as she is, Unuratu has never encountered an opponent wielding modern weaponry, and Rourke easily kills her with one shot from an assault rifle at 20 yards.
- In the Back: How she dies, courtesy of Rourke gunning her down from behind.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: She's leading a rebellion against the Cult of Kukulkan ( which is actually a branch of Trinity), and also personally takes part in several missions against them with Lara.
Etzli
Etzli
Queen Unuratu's young son and the rightful heir to the throne of Paititi.- A Child Shall Lead Them: He ends up becoming the leader of the rebellion after his mother's death, and later becomes King of Paititi after the defeat of Amaru.
- Badass in Distress: Lara first meets him while he's caught in a snare trap set by the Kukulkan cultists. As far as his badassery is concerned, he might not be a lethal warrior (yet), but when he is forced into the role of leader of his people, he barely flinches and takes to it immediately.
- Wise Beyond Their Years: He's way more mature and grown up than he looks, and the more you see and hear of him after he ascends the throne, the clearer it becomes that Paititi is in good hands.
The Yaaxil
The Yaaxil in general
A group of animalistic parahumans who dwell in the dark depths of Paititi and who seem to protect the city from interlopers; they appear similar to the Stormguard and Deathless of the earlier games.
- Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence: Their final fate in the Playable Epilogue, a reward by their creator goddess for millennia of protecting the Silver Box on Earth.
- Body Horror: They look really messed up, with emaciated bodies treated to heavy ritual scarification. Some of their decorative accessories seem fused or nailed directly to their flesh, like the one on their upper back that looks like parts of a human spine, with some ribs still attached.
- Facial Horror: Their lips seem to have been ritualistically removed, leaving them with open teeth-baring mouths.
- Foil: To the Stormguards and Deathless from previous games. Brutal, terrifying, almost animalistic parahumans that mainly serve as a supernatural force and attack Lara's human enemies as well as Lara herself. However, Lara eventually finds out that the Yaaxil are not evil and can be reasoned with, and forms an alliance with their leader to stop Trinity.
- They also reflect Lara herself in their mobility, scrambling across walls and cliffs like it was nothing, except that unlike her they don't need special equipment. This is especially obvious in the finale, when they use the same platforming sections that she does to traverse the battlefield.
- Hell Is That Noise: For a long time, the Yaaxil's creepy screeches and howls are the only thing that tells both Lara and the player that they're in the area. Lara grows increasingly jumpy the longer this goes on. Later, when she knows the noises' meaning and hears them upon entering a cave system, she utters a thoroughly uncomfortable "sounds like trouble" and breaks out her concealed guns.
- It Can Think: The Yaaxil are not mindless monsters like the Stormguard or Deathless, and in fact Lara considers them the rightful guardians of the dagger of Chak Chel and box of Ix Chel.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's not entirely clear whether the Yaaxil are genuine parahumans like the Stormguard or Deathless, or whether they're simply a very aggressive tribe who practice extremely freaky body modification and extensive physical training, and use an animalistic persona to intimidate their enemies. Notably their seemingly superhuman physical abilities like wall-crawling and parkour jumping are all things Lara herself can replicate, albeit with some aid from modern climbing equipment.
- Downloadable Content gives a partial answer: the Yaaxil were created by a Mayan goddess to protect the Silver Box on Earth. With their task fulfilled after Dominguez and Trinity are wiped out, they return to their creator's side, leaving nothing but their spiky armor and a final farewell to Lara behind.
- Nothing Is Scarier: It takes quite some time before the Yaaxil are actually seen and fought in the flesh, but they make numerous appearances as fleeting shadows and disembodied voices along the way that will make you wish they'd finally show themselves.
- Spikes of Villainy: What little clothing they wear incorporates lots of spiky bits, most of them made from (human) bones.
- Zerg Rush: At the end of the game the Yaaxil manage to completely wipe out the all-powerful Trinity using these tactics.
The Crimson Fire
The Crimson Fire/Chak Chel
The leader of the Yaaxil, who has seemingly modeled herself on the Mayan goddess Chak Chel.- Creepy Good: Unlike the Stormguard or the Deathless, the Yaaxil aren't actually evil, and their queen plays a crucial role in preventing The End of the World as We Know It following the death of the sun. "Creepy" is still one hell of an Understatement when it comes to her looks and mannerism.
- Facial Horror: Like the other Yaaxil, her lips have been removed and she has a rather nasty looking Glasgow Grin.
- Fan Disservice: She's practically naked but for a few strips of cloth, but her extreme facial disfiguration, her creepy stare and her inhuman voice make sure there's pretty much nothing titillating about her even so.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: During the final fight she leads the Yaaxil in attacking Trinity's Last Stand.
- Side Boob: One effect of her (lack of) clothing, although it's hard to spot most of the time.
Trinity
Trinity in general
- Elite Mooks: Like in Rise of the Tomb Raider, Trinity is comprised of a small core of heavily trained and well-equipped initiates (called Deacons) backed up by a small army of paid mercenaries who aren't even fully aware of who they're working for.
- Frontline General: Trinity's leadership show up in person at the end of the game to take part in their Last Stand alongside the rest of their Elite Mooks.
- Dirty Coward: That said, they hide in a heavily armored APC the whole time that's impervious to anything the Yaaxil can field. The only reason they die anyway is because Rourke was manning the tank's pintle-mounted machine gun and thus had to open the top hatch.
- Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Even for videogame bad guys, their accuracy so poor that at one point an armored vehicle, a gunship and several soldiers firing at once still fail to land a single hit on Lara. Most of their ground forces vacillate wildly between emptying their entire clip into the scenery around Lara, or pouring the entire clip into Lara regardless of distance. There's nothing in between.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After Rourke and the High Council are killed, a soldier orders a retreat for all remaining units, and responds to concerns about abandoning their orders with a panicked Precision F-Strike.
- Took a Level in Badass: Their Elite Mooks are better equipped than ever, especially once they break out the infrared night-vision googles that can spot Lara through any vegetation she might be hiding in. Might actually be a subversion instead because even with all that fancy gear they seem to die even faster than the ones in Rise.
- Vestigial Empire: Ever since Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara has spent the past several months systematically hunting down and destroying them. They're still a force to be reckoned with, however by the end of the game, all that's apparently left of them is a few squads of Elite Mooks, a couple attack helicopters, and an APC. All that quickly gets wiped out by the Yaaxil.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Often hire local workers to help out there excavations of ruins in their search for artifacts, only to then murder them once they find what they were looking for.
Dominguez
Dr. Pedro Dominguez
- Alas, Poor Villain: Lara seems genuinely sad after mortally wounding Dominguez, despite him being the man who killed her father. Dominguez, for his part, accepts his fate and willingly transfers Kukulkan's power to Lara, urging her to use it to save Paititi.
- Anti-Villain: Dominguez is a Well-Intentioned Extremist Villain with Good Publicity who avoids pointless cruelty and is unfailingly polite to his enemies. However, he's still the ruthless leader of a megalomaniacal religious order that wants to reshape the world in their image.
- Authority Equals Asskicking: He seems to manage to beat Jonah in a fistfight off-screen at one pointnote . When confronted during the final battle, he's also the first and only opponent this version of Lara ever faces who possesses genuine supernatural abilities.
- Beard of Evil: A short graying one. It stands out because he's the only Paititian who has one.
- Big Bad: Of Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Greater-Scope Villain: As the supreme leader of Trinity, he's this for the entire prequel trilogy. Especially given the fact he's the man responsible for the death of Lara's father.
- Big Bad Friend: Was apparently this for Richard Croft, Lara's father.
- Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: He differs from past male antagonists in that, rather than have a woman be behind his actions, he himself is the leader Trinity, making him responsible for everything the organization has done. Also while Mathias was too selfish to care that him releasing Himiko could endanger the world and Konstantin was too delusional to realize that his sister was using him for her own ends, Dominguez was aware of Ana's treachery having Rourke go to Siberia to kill her and his reasons for endangering the world are to protect Paititi instead of self-preservation.
- Cynicism Catalyst: The death of his beloved brother in the great famine during his youth apparently forms a major part of his motivation to gain Kukulkan's power and immanentize the eschaton, as revealed in The Price of Survival DLC.
- Evil Uncle: He's one to Etzli.
- Final Boss: Of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and the reboot trilogy as a whole.
- Flunky Boss: Powerful Kukulkan warriors join the fight the longer the battle against Amaru drags on, to the point that his mooks pose a much greater threat than the guy himself.
- A God Am I: As the ruler of Paititi he's acknowledged as the earthly embodiment of the Mayan god Kukulkan, but this is basically a ceremonial title and he doesn't actually believe he's actually Kukulkan. After using the key of Chak Chel and the box of Ix Chel to obtain the power of Kukulkan, however, he starts to see himself as a god for real. Given the power he displays, he may have a point there.
- Ink-Suit Actor: Bears a striking resemblance to his voice actor, Carlos Leal◊.
- Lightning Bruiser: Unsurprisingly for someone who might've become an actual Physical God, Amaru as the Final Boss is wicked fast (even without resorting to his Teleport Spam) and deals incredible damage at any range. Fortunately, his ranged attacks are easy to dodge as long as you keep moving, and a decent shotgun barrage will slaughter him whenever he tries to charge into melee.
- Playing with Fire: Once he becomes the embodiment of Kukulkan by combining the dagger and the silver box, he starts slinging devastating fire magic during his subsequent Boss Battle.
- Teleport Spam: One of his abilities during his Boss Battle.
- Villain with Good Publicity: He's spent a fortune on charity for the community of Cozumel, making him beloved by the townspeople there. He's also quite popular as the ruler of Paititi, and even La Résistance generally feel that the real problem is the Cult of Kukulkan and not Amaru himself.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Everything he does is motivated by protecting the hidden city of Paititi from the outside world.
- What the Hell, Hero?: He berates Lara for removing the dagger without also having the box, as this triggers the Mayan Apocalypse and if both artifacts aren't brought together the world will be destroyed.
- You Killed My Father: He's revealed to be the one who ordered Richard Croft's assassination; his true motive wasn't because of Croft's refusal to join Trinity, but rather to prevent him from revealing the existence of Paititi to the world.
Rourke
Commander Rourke
- Always Introduces Themselves: Rourke regularly issues orders to his field team via com-link, which always begins with: "This is Commander Rourke..."
- Badass in a Nice Suit: When first encountered in Brazil, Rourke's seen in a very sharp all-black business suit. It's possibly a Shout-Out to the Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider film, where the Big Bad wears an identical suit and had a similar role. He switches to military combat gear later on in Peru.
- Dirty Coward: He's never seen partaking in any battle where the odds don't overwhelmingly favor him, although since he's a soldier and not a warrior he might simply be being pragmatic. He uses an assault rifle to gun down Queen Unuratu while she's distracted fighting Cult warriors, hides in his APC for the entirety of the Final Battle, and never engages Lara in one-on-one combat at all.
- The Dragon: Is this to Dr. Dominguez.
- Evil Gloating: He loves doing this. The most notable is when he pretends he killed Jonah just to get a rise out of Lara. Then when he hears her calmly threaten to hunt him down before wandering into camp and slaughtering waves of his men with a machine gun, he hands command over to his second and runs, then resumes gloating oncehe's sure he's safe.
- Faux Affably Evil: Though often he doesn't even try to hide it.
- Flunky Boss: When confronted at the end of the game just before the Final Boss fight with Amaru, Rourke is behind the armored turret of an APC and is completely shielded from attack. The fight consists of Lara gunning waves of his Elite Mooks, after which Rourke himself runs out of ammo and gets killed by the Yaaxil in a cutscene.
- From Camouflage to Criminal: He's a former US Special Forces soldier recruited to lead the armed forces of a violent and very criminal paramilitary sect.
- Hate Sink: While his boss, Dr. Dominguez, is presented as a tragic villain with sympathetic motivations, Rourke never displays any redeeming features, uses cowardly and ruthless tactics, taunts Lara in an attempt to compromise her emotions, and generally acts in a despicable manner.
- The Heavy: While he might be Dominguez subordinate, the latter mostly confides in Paititi, leaving Rourke to do carry out Trinity's action outside of Paititi and is more active in antagonizing Lara.
- Knight Templar: Although not as overt as Konstantin, Rourke seems to be a true believer in Trinity's religiously motivated goal to immanentize the eschaton, based on his speech during the final battle. Not that it makes him any less evil, though.
- Insistent Terminology: Lara simply calls him Rourke, which gets her the sneering response of "Commander Rourke".
- The Starscream: While Rourke never acts openly against Dominguez or even backtalks him to his face, during his Villainous Breakdown at the end Rourke expresses his distain for Dominguez's sentimentality and allegiance to Paititi.
- Trash Talk/Troll: After Lara and Jonah get ambushed by a Trinity attack helicopter, Rourke calls her up on the radio to taunt her, having deduced from her actions that she must be listening in on Trinity's secure radio frequency. He even goes so far as to falsely claim that he's killed Jonah, just to mess with Lara.
- The Unfought: Combined with Cutscene Boss. The one time he actively engages Lara in combat, he does so from behind the trigger of a tank-mounted heavy machine gun that's more an environmental hazard than an enemy you can fight. Instead you gun down a few waves of his goons until he runs out of ammo and gets eviscerated by the Yaaxil. Lara herself never lands a single hit on him.
- Villainous Breakdown: Rourke has an epic one during Trinity's Last Stand as the organization's entire leadership and remaining soldiers get wiped out by the Yaaxil.
