Let go and Lara will keep climbing without you. There's a point where the game slips into a cutscene but pretends that it hasn't: nothing changes, with the exception that it's no longer accepting your input. There's no way to fail, though a few pre-canned moments will have a rusty rung give way and leave her hanging. Press forward and Lara climbs: press anything else and Lara stops.
Once you're on that bottom rung, the game will only accept one input: forwards.
Shortly afterwards, Lara hops onto the bottom rung of a ladder leading up a rickety radar tower whose topmost transmitter is her crew's best hope for rescue. Play on for another few hours, however, and you'll find yourself in a hybrid of third-person shooter and linear platformer, Lara trading the bleak little lethalities of life as a shipwreck survivor for a parade of regulation set-pieces: an escape from a burning building, a helicopter crash, a section where your guns are taken away, a climactic assault on an enemy stronghold. It's certainly what they've been talking about until now. Give it a few months and I suspect these opening hours will be what people will be talking about when they talk about Crystal Dynamics' reboot. Her first human kill leaves her blood-soaked and distraught. Her elbows shake believably when she mantles up onto a ledge. Hunger necessitates finding a bow and hunting deer. Lara sobs and trembles, and evident effort has been made to slow down and focus on the details of her experience. This early cruelty is the game's most strikingly idiosyncratic feature. Fail any of these and you'll also watch her be crushed, impaled, strangled, mauled and so on. In the opening hours of Tomb Raider she is stabbed, burned, drenched, assaulted and almost freezes to death: that's if you're doing well, meeting the demands of every linear climbing section, gunfight, finickety stealth sequence and quick-time event that presents itself. Stranded on the mythical island of Yamatai following a freak storm, 21-year-old Lara Croft's career as a videogame protagonist begins with suffering.
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