Cancelled Tomb Raider VR Game "ProjectU" Concept Art Surfaces Online

Cancelled video game projects leave behind a peculiar kind of fossil record — concept art, design docs, and renders that survive long after the studio goes dark. Vertigo Games Amsterdam, which shut down earlier this year, turned out to be sitting on one such artifact: a Tomb Raider VR game codenamed “ProjectU,” cancelled in January 2026.

The discovery came when MP1st, a games media outlet, sifted through the legacy of the now-closed studio and found references to the project. From there, they tracked down former employees’ blogs and unearthed concept art showing canyon exploration environments, puzzle devices, and NPC designs — enough to piece together what the team had been building.

Notably, none of the public concept art explicitly mentions Tomb Raider. Every piece is labeled simply as an “unannounced project” from Vertigo Games. The connection is inferred from visual style and context — the canyon vistas, the traversal-focused level design, the kinds of puzzles that look designed for hand-tracked VR controllers. MP1st has contacted former employees for confirmation but has not received a response yet.

The Tomb Raider IP is currently owned by Embracer Group through its Deep Silver subsidiary, with development handled by Crystal Dynamics. That studio is working on two non-VR Tomb Raider titles, both expected in 2027. Whether ProjectU’s visual concepts or gameplay ideas will influence those games is unclear — cancelled projects often seed ideas into later work, but Embracer has made no indication that anything from this VR effort will carry over.