Why game-makers want to get inside your head

In the first of a series of monthly columns, our critic examines the growing issue of mental health in the design of new titles

In the 1990s, 27-year-old video game archaeologist Lara Croft became internationally recognisable, in part thanks to her unfeasibly tiny waist, panoramic bust and a slew of appearances on the covers of magazines such as Rolling Stone, Newsweek and Time. We live in an era when such megawatt stars do not grow old. Instead, like Batman, Star Trek or Jesus, they endure as ciphers for successive waves of actors, writers and directors to inhabit and reinterpret.

Croft, in fact, has grown younger with time's passing. In the most recent entry in her series, last month's Rise of the Tomb Raider, she's a 23-year-old. More youthful, certainly, but also more complicated. While in the earliest Tomb Raider games Croft did little more than knock about in ancient ruins, fend off hostile wildlife and solve preposterous masonry-based puzzles, in this latest outing she's in therapy. The tomb raiding, it turns out, is in fact a way to work through her grief at her father's death.