There's a clip of Conan O'Brien playing this, and you can tell he's definitely not a gamer, and he's so shocked by a death animation. I don't really understand their place in the game, they are so disproportionately violent compared to everything else, and it's random.

There is a novel called Blood Meridian that has a lot of incredibly violent scenes to the point many consider it unfilmable, but that violence is depicted as an almost detached spectacle, the prose is externalised and the scenes are never lingered on for pleasure. It's generally considered perhaps the most violent classic novel, but the entire metaphysics and purpose of the book exists in this violence.

When I first played tomb raider, I didn't notice half the violent scenes, because the medium is so unnecessarily stuffed with it. It wasn't until replaying it after seeing the Conan O'Brien interview that I really honed in on it.

In comparison to Blood Meridian, it's so much worse. It doesn't really have a message or a story purpose beyond showing the setting as dangerous, and it lingers on the violence, taking pleasure in the sudden violence, that has befallen our protagonist who we deeply care about and can internalise her suffering easily. We see a young woman, who we live through and care for deeply, come to a brutal, sickening end due to sheer bad luck, and then we hit restart.

I'm not even really mad about it, like it said, I'm so desensitised to video game violence that I only noticed the brutality of these scenes after seeing Conan. Perhaps the creep of violence in the medium alongside the fact that in 10 seconds, she's fine and you do it again is enough to justify it, but it's weird that it exists so normally in the first place.