Tomb Raider is an honest game, honest about its gameness, in a way I didn’t expect, though in retrospect I’m not sure what else I should have expected. If the typical oddball middle-budget game design of the 6th and 7th console generations shaped my adolescence, the unending stream of risk averse committee designed AAAA storefront experiences that followed completely alienated me. something in my adulthood has been driving me backward, not just to my childhood but to a period before anything for which I would have any feelings of nostalgia. there’s something about the freedom they had in the 20th century to just try anything, a freedom from convention. Tomb Raider, a game everyone knows about, for which they made a $115,000,000 budget movie starring angelina jolie, is a surprisingly idiosyncratic game wonderfully free from convention.
Tomb Raider is really nothing like Mario 64 in a way that begs just that comparison. It almost feels like a modern statement about some homogeneity of control schemes and character controllers in games where you move a guy around, but damn if they highkenuinely didn’t just come up with a truly worthy branch of the 3d Platformer lineage out the dome and nobody decided to iterate on it because it doesn’t immediately tranquilize you. If Mario is about jerking off, with all sorts of silly techniques you’ll never actually need to progress through any of the game, then Tomb Raider is a good fucking, not in the sense that it’s hard but because it just takes a little more thought and deliberation, more cooperation with the game, exploration, and the reward is so much greater even when the result is the same. the challenge is so much more layered, so much more systematic that even just the action of clearing a small gap becomes a source of intense satisfaction and anxiety. Tomb Raider does have its own share of masturbatory techniques, but they are so brazen in their uselessness you’d think it were deliberate commentary. Mario never prepared me for this, maybe it shouldn’t have. I’m getting tired of comparing the two. We’ve been doing it for 30 years. She’s out of his league.
The traversal system in Tomb Raider uniquely creates a challenge out of obstacles that would be trivial to pass in any other game. Lara isn’t a bounding box with a gravity force but a truly physical agent that operates under believable rules, and visually, audibly struggles to navigate the world in a way that matches the player’s own contact with purposefully textural mechanics. the grid based system alleviates the guesswork of jumping in a novel way, while still remaining tricky to execute and satisfying to land a rapid, calculated sequence of maneuvers. you’ll find all sorts of interesting details in the system, like how landing from a jump without running or rolling out of it allows you to instantly jump again without anticipation—your knees are already bent. careful players might find out you can initiate the two-step running jump by taking a walking step before a running step, allowing skilled players to do so with a shorter approach. there’s a kind of maturity to the systems here that would never fly in modern industrial gamedev. the level design matches this careful attention to detail. they really pushed how natural you can make a grid of blocks appear, and they found every permutation they could of the arrangement of these blocks to form unique platforming challenges. not to mention all the little clever, efficient setpieces (including many surprises i won’t mention—best to experience them blind), like a waterfall section that has you tumbling back down the rapids at every mistake, or a drop into a huge underground reservoir with partially submerged statues, leaving you to dive uncomfortably deep to explore for goodies and exits before having to come all the way back up for air. did I mention the swimming is just as fleshed out and natural as the platforming?
on the other hand I didn’t love the boring combat and how often you are required to engage with it. It really brings down the eerie vibes (and the vibes are just impeccable, I mean I love when a game relies on ambience instead of music and actually let me comment on just how good the sound design is in this game, which is very good, feels both intimate and spacious in a way that really sells every flavor of dank evil cave) of exploring an ancient, possibly supernatural, maybe even a smidge liminal sort of space when suddenly a door opens and unleashed is a band of rabid gorillas making oddly human sounds and you gotta just jump on the nearest platform they can’t climb and wail on the triggers for a while. The amount of wanton animal murder rouses some latent vegan part of me because holy shit does it feel bad to be forced to essentially execute dozens of helpless animals every ten minutes. I guess it is a form of ludonarrative harmony, though, that a ransacker of ancient human gravesites would take no issue in killing the way Lara does, and her superhuman precision in wiping out even the most distant targets with her double uzis implies she has had a lot of practice doing so. I understand why they put this in the game—she is sooooo hot and badass when she got her guns out—but it would be a lot more interesting if she could have used them more against smarter, more justifiable human targets, and as an added dimension to puzzles. The constant hostility of these animals feels for some reason like an echo of a greater theme, that Tomb Raider believes these dead exotic civilizations would have been so cruel and evil were they still around, that you, the hero, are well within your moral duty to kill everything and take all their shit. Just felt worth mentioning after the splash screen at the start that says “sorry the game is low key racist, thanks for buying it”. There is more generally an undercurrent of brutality to the game that lands between tastefully mature and flagrantly pornographic, made more suspicious in retrospect by the voyeuristic torture simulation aspect that the Tomb Raider franchise has become infamous for. the game matter of factly portrays Lara’s many modes of death in a way that reminds me of Rain World, except uncomfortably recontextualized by our avatar’s apparent design as a sex object foremost. the camera does not pan away but leers directly at the dead woman just as it would were she still alive, allowing the player to orbit and zoom on her corpse for a long time before selecting a savepoint to return to. prior to playing this game, my only preconceptions about Tomb Raider were of white painted ledges and pornogore snuff movies, just one of which I can dispel with confidence.
Another elephant: remasters are stupid. I would rather just play a nice port with gamepad support. art doesn’t really need to be fucked with, but I understand some people get really sad if they do not make a lot of money next quarter.
Playing the Tomb Raider remasters with modern controls will absolutely rob you of the carefully crafted platforming challenges that literally define the whole game. the specific interplay of mechanics originally designed for the game are instrumental to the game’s pace and feel. modern is only a fix if you view gameplay as a problem. entire mechanics are removed, like the back step and multiple jumping techniques, and most platforming sections become repetitive and toothless. i’m not saying classic controls are better because they are harder. the problem is that modern controls essentially cut away half of the gameplay, leaving a corpse of a game obviously meant for a different set of systems. if you just don’t fuck with tank controls you’d be better off playing a different game. i mean this in the least judgmental way (i have quit games over far more petty quibbles ask me about it). there are other games that would suit you better than the travesty that is an amputated Tomb Raider. don’t waste your time.
While I mostly stuck to classic graphics, I also took a peek at the new visuals here and there. it’s clear to me that not only did this game really not need a graphical overhaul, it seems they went out of their way to make it as shit and flat and ugly as they possibly could. I can’t lie and say the classic graphics are always easy to look at, but the game undeniably had an artful, deliberate goal with the severe, vibrant vertex lighting that got replaced with a ubiquitous gloomy haze and modern color grades draped lovelessly over strangely literal, realism-hopeful (ai-upscaled?) reinterpretations of the original environment textures, totally massacring the gestural impressionism of the source material. with the level geometry unchanged, it feels like an overly ambitious modpack. there are lots of choices made to make the game’s environments seem more realistic when the dreamlike quality of the original levels ironically felt more immersive. They completely missed the strange appeal of a game where you never see the sky, choosing to add skylights where they never were before. I really don’t understand what they were going for. It’s clearly the worst genre of graphical update a game could receive, and one of the most heinous executions of that genre I have ever seen. You can find more tasteful texture mods for Minecraft. And don’t get me started on what they did to Lara Croft. the very 90s bombshell femme fatale thing she had going on was certainly not a groundbreaking feminist statement by any means but at least it was more interesting than the sex doll we got in the remastered graphics, doubtlessly created for aging millennials who grew up yearning to merely fuck this psycho queen, a recreation of their wistful memory of the Sex Object instead of the reality that she is a Kill Person, about whom one more correctly should feel an ocean of fear and a droplet of sadistic arousal when she gets torn to pieces by panthers or impaled in suspiciously overbloody spike pits—SORRY! don’t blame the messenger, the designers just put all that stuff in the game themselves.