A decent way to add some depth to Lara's character.

The mansion looks great and I had fun exploring, but some puzzles are straight up annoying and just difficult to figure out.

It's a mediocre DLC but way too short, not sure if I recommend it.

Final Rating: "Average" ~ 5/10.

They really looked at their action-adventure video game and said "Okay but what if it was Gone Home?" and I love that so much. I'm not a Tomb Raider lorehead but this was still fun to run through. I think the writing itself is not 100% there but it's still a well-paced lil story about the Croft family.

It's.. interesting that this seems like a move to try and separate Lara Croft from her family's wealth and history... but also not too much. It really reminds me of of the 2018 Tomb Raider movie where Lara starts off trying to distance herself from her wealthy, privileged life (which I think is cool and they should've committed to) but then at the end she just accepts it anyway. If Tomb Raider gets rebooted again or something, I wish they'd just do away with the whole "hyper-rich family of Egyptologists" because it just comes with way too much baggage.

If your favourite part of the main game was stopping to read documents every 5 minutes then I have amazing news for you.

For real your enjoyment of this DLC will depend entirely on how much you care about learning about the Croft family history.

Edit: This used to be a sole page for Blood Ties DLC, but it's now updated to include a full celebration pack which had "Lara's Nightmare" too. Unfortunately it's been too long for me to properly review the mode, but I did remember it being pretty fun if not repetitive towards the end.

This was a really great DLC. The Blood Ties part was quite different from the main game. Instead of lots of shooting and climbing, you're inside a slowly falling apart Croft Manor, exploring and solving little puzzles. However the majority of this DLC is reading notes and documents and such things left around the house, recordings by Lara's father or diary entries from her mother or threatening letters from her douche of an uncle. The main premise of the DLC is that your uncle always hated your father for taking away his sister and such, and has been threatening Lara for years about the manor, now finally writing to her saying that she has no claim to the estate and that he will have it ceased. Lara at this point isn't even sure if she wants to keep the place anymore, but she decides to take a look around and find out the truth about what happened with her mother all those years ago. With everything I've said it probably doesn't sound too interesting or even very fun at first, but I was really surprised by just how much I enjoyed this. The documents and relic collectibles are in the main game of course, but despite getting 100% completion just yesterday I honestly could not tell you a thing about them and I immediately closed the tab on just about every one of them. But with this dlc it works, because instead of being side stuff giving background lore and detail, its the main focus and actually how you figure out the story so its a lot more incentivized to actually take a look at them. The great thing about these is that they all have voice acting, the character reading out their words and this adds so so much to the experience. Some of the letters from Lara's mother especially got to me and I found myself tearing up from it on more than one occasion. I won't get into spoilers but Lara ends up finding something in the house that gives her a reason to keep it and I think it was a very nice conclusion.
Then there's Lara's nightmare. Its a twist on the story, Lara is having a, you guessed it, nightmare about Uncle Atlus and its basically turns into cod zombies but one continuous wave until you destroy all the skulls and fight the boss. This is really short, but its quite tense and I ended up having a lot of fun with it. Definitely not the main attraction but its a fun little alternate mode. The whole thing kinda reminded me of Resident Evil a bit, puzzle solving in a worn down place before fighting a bunch of zombies. Really barely any complaints with this. Great dlc

Rating - 90/100
Trophy Completion - 100% (10/10)
DLC Completion #7 of 2022