Celebrating 25 years of Lara Croft with … a cookbook?

This gleefully incongruous piece of tie-in merch pays tribute to a quarter-century of Tomb Raider with recipes. So can we expect a spaghetti carbo-Lara?

Tomb Raider recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, which means 25 years of articles about how Lara Croft transcended video games to become a global icon even your gran has heard of. As a female games critic, I am personally asked to explain her enduring popularity 25 times an hour, to the point where I have boiled my answer down to this: for many of us, she symbolises a moment in the history of gaming where we saw ourselves represented for the first time. Not as a princess trapped in a castle, but as an enigmatic, acrobatic embodiment of fierceness. Naturally, the adolescent boys of the 90s also regarded her with the same distanced respect, right?

Anyway, here's what nobody says they remember fondly about Tomb Raider: the food. Lara doesn't have a signature snack, like Mario with his mushrooms or Pac-Man with his Mini Babybels. She's never seen taking a break from shooting dinosaurs to chow down on a Kendal mint cake and some lemon-barley water. The early games allow you to explore her ancestral home, which has a walk-in freezer, but all it contains are giant legs of ham.