Nice kitty …
With devastating natural disasters, deadly jungle cats, treacherous tombs and human sacrifice, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of the most brutal and frightening Tomb Raider outings to date.
- The tsunami that destroys Cozumel. After taking the dagger she finds in the ruins, part of the nearby mural showing a series of disasters collapses near her. Namely the part showing a tsunami. Lara immediately realizes she might have made a serious mistake and warns Jonah to get to higher ground. When she makes it back outside, it's begun raining, and after she kills several mooks, she's ambushed and comes face to face with Dominguez, who tells her that by taking the dagger, she's set The End of the World as We Know It in motion. Then the ground starts rumbling, people are screaming, and sirens are going off. As Dominguez departs in a helicopter with the dagger, Lara turns around... And sees a Giant Wall of Watery Doom heading right for her. Within seconds, she's swept along helplessly by the currents, soon getting sucked underwater by collapsing rubble. She then has to swim through a flooded store, filled with the drowned corpses of people who couldn't get to safety in time and almost drowns herself while trying to bust open a trucks's window getting back to the surface. Then when she's trying to get to higher ground, she sees a boy dangling from a window, crying out for his mother… And no matter how fast you are, you can't save him. The sequence is capped off by Lara just falling to her knees and watching the disaster she unleashed consume the town, because no matter what Jonah says, this is her fault and she knows it.
- Crawling through the corpses of freshly dismembered sacrifices in Amaru's temple, with audible squishing sounds. The entire temple and the human sacrifices contained within are either nausea-inducing, terrifying, or both.
- When Lara first crash-lands in the Amazon after a violent rainstorm knocks down her plane. She is immediately separated from her party with no weapons to use to fend herself from dangerous animals, and is forced to wander around terrified as she desperately calls out their names. While she does get a flare from the pilot once she reaches some higher grounds, it ends up being too late, and he is reduced to Ludicrous Gibs by a jaguar. Fortunately, Jonah is okay (albeit with a worm in his arm) and they do find a town shortly afterward.
- When Lara dives underwater to snap off a piece of plane propeller that she can use as a machete, a moray eel swims out of nowhere, coils around her, and starts biting her wrist. Luckily, she's able to kill it and escape, but it won't be the last time Lara is attacked by morays.
- The flashback to Lara's childhood achieves this through Primal Fear: young Lara blithely climbs across the manor's rooftops with no supervision or safety equipment, and suffers a close call when part of the guttering collapses. It's terrifying because it's such a plausible scenario. If she were to fall, it's likely no one would come to help anytime soon since the only other person on the premises is her father, who think she's in her room (even assuming he wasn't about to be assassinated. However, there is Nightmare Retardant on this scene since it's a flashback, and so logically Lara must survive.
- The jaguars in the beginning of the game, with their unnaturally bright eyes, excellent stealth, and tendency to show up right out of nowhere to maul Lara.
- Of course, it isn’t a Tomb Raider game without the claustrophobic areas, and this game doesn’t hold back, with Lara having to maneuver through a lot of tight, underwater caves, some even containing piranhas.
- In the Porvenir Oil Field, Lara's look of unbridled rage as she rises out of the water and begins to lay holy hell to Trinity, believing they killed Jonah.
- The mudslide avalanche in San Juan, it's a reprise of the Tsunami, only this time it's on a place that's already been severely damaged by an earthquake.
- One of the crypts has a long hallway where one wall is lined with stone statues staring at the other wall. Considering the rest of the crypt is an unadorned cave, it's so unexpected and out-of-place that it becomes downright eerie, especially since it doesn't actually mean anything.
- One of the early game challenge tombs is this. You are making your way through it, finding bodies strewn with arrows, and for some reason as you are passing though, a nightmarish not-quite-human scream tears through the air. You keep expecting something to come at you, but apart from a few crumbling traps falling at you (although Lara's dialogue indicates there is possibly someone doing this on purpose, the game never tells you) nothing actually happens. A good example of tension combined with Nothing Is Scarier.
- Some of the game’s ambience can be this. The Mountain Temple has unintelligible shouting in the background, while one of the early jungle areas has some sort of guttural…noises (eventually revealed to have been the Yaaxil, who are already nightmare fuel on their own). And when you revisit these areas after beating them, the noises will still remain along with the suspenseful music despite the absence of enemies, leaving a Nothing Is Scarier vibe.
- The Yaaxil themselves, with their horrific appearances and tendency to attack you out of nowhere. They’re hard to kill, being very fast and able to take a few rounds before falling dead. They growl like Predators when they hide, and they also screech and snarl when they attack. Likewise, they even appear in some challenge tombs, which is likely to startle unsuspecting players.
- Some of Lara’s methods of disposing Trinity soldiers, which include pulling them into water and drowning them, or firing an arrow attached to a rope from a tree and hanging them.
- The Fear Arrows, while still an incredibly awesome and useful endgame weapon, is still nightmare fuel if you put yourself in Trinity’s shoes. Imagine seeing one of your teammates suddenly freak out and turn on you, shooting you and others dead. One must also wonder what kind of hallucinations are making the soldiers so terrified.
