A report surfaced that the now defunct Vertigo Games Amsterdam was working on a new VR game based on the Tomb Raider series. We dug into this, and here’s what we found out.
An article from yesterday on MP1st stated that a Tomb Raider VR project, internally codenamed Project U, was canceled at Vertigo Games Amsterdam in January 2026 several months before the studio’s closure in June.
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Note: this article references artwork publicly posted by several named former employees at Vertigo Games Amsterdam. UploadVR has not directly spoken to any of these employees about the accuracy of MP1st’s report.
The article cites an unnamed former developer’s website saying a vertical slice milestone, an industry term for a small portion of a game produced during a game’s development to demonstrate its art, mechanics, and features, was praised ‘internally and externally.’
The report goes on to say the project’s cancellation was not a direct result of the studio’s closure, rather a reorganization occurring at that time. It also includes several concept art images and a 30 minute video of game footage. The first few minutes show a first person view walking through a canyon. The rest of the video is much rougher looking environmental footage with some parkour, puzzle solving, interacting with a large flower (more on this later), and a fight against a large creature.
In our fact checking, we located the artwork from the article, but at this time, we cannot verify this was intended to be a Tomb Raider VR game as reported.
We found the concept art from the article, including those pictured before, on the ArtStation profile of Felipe Paim de Barros, all with Vertigo Games Amsterdam logos:
Credit Felipe Paim de Barros on ArtStation
A concept art version of the interactable flower shown in the gameplay footage was found on the ArtStation page for Davi Van Den Berg, a Brazilian concept artist living in the Netherlands. Van den Berg’s LinkedIn page says they worked as a Concept Art Intern at Vertigo Games and is currently open to work.
The ArtStation album description included a thank you to “fellow concept artists Thomas Boutinaud, Felipe Paim de Barros, and Art Director Janet Ung.” We confirmed all three worked at Vertigo Games Amsterdam.
Some of Van Den Berg’s concept art can be seen here:
Credit: Davi Van Den Berg on ArtStation
This brings us to Thomas Boutinaud. Boutinaud’s ArtStation page did not contain any images we could cleanly link to a Vertigo Games project, but an unnamed album on his MyPortfolio website did:
Credit: Thomas Boutinaud on MyPortofolio.com
There are a lot more, but of particular note on Boutinaud’s page are depictions of a male character, not the female Lara Croft, the star of the Tomb Raider series, as the footage in the original article is purported to be. I should note that a feminine sounding ‘oomph’ can be heard when the player mantles at the top of a rock wall they climbed in the video footage.
In the history of the game series, only four males have been playable characters: ex-Legionnaire Kurtis Trent in Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness in 2003, ancient Mayan warrior Totec in Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light in 2010, rival archaeologist Carter Bell, and Egyptian god Horus, both of whom are from Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris in 2014. The latter three were only playable as secondary co-op characters alongside Croft. Trent was playable for three levels independent of Croft.
All four are pictured here in listed order as seen in their respective games. None of them are the character from Boutinaud’s images:
That said, the lead could be an entirely new character, but again, the MP1st article says the footage is of Lara Croft herself in a first person view. All of the aforementioned artists list the concept art as from an untitled or unannounced project at Vertigo.
Also, remember that in 2021, Meta announced that Vertigo Games was signed for five new VR projects based on Deep Silver’s franchises. We know the first was 2024’s Metro Awakening VR and never got any additional information about the others. While not a direct line, Deep Silver’s parent company is Embracer Group, who also owns Crystal Dynamics. Crystal Dynamics is currently developing two new Tomb Raider flatscreen games, both due out in 2027.
We have independently reached out to multiple former employees at Vertigo Games Amsterdam for comment and will update this article with any additional information.
