Finishing this game for the first time can give you a bad impression due to the awkward controls and the sometimes cryptic situations. But if you give this game a chance and get used to it's rules, it's one of the most influential action platformers and a codifier of the genere.

The large maps full of passages, secrets and corridors still feel immersive to this day. Graphic limitations are used cleverly to create a dark atmosphere that hide all kind of hazards, which combined to the wide variety of deaths we can get, it turns out as some kind of light horror game.

Doing the tutorial is highly recomended, so we can master Lara's controls and turn her into a professional acrobat instead of feeling like driving a tank.

Combat is very shallow, since it just consists in drawing your guns and shoot. Lara will do the rest and autoaim as we run around and jump while shooting to avoid the enemies. We still can find multiple kind of weapons for the thoughter enemies in the course of our journey.

It is always an exciting and intriguing adventure that will be forever fun to come back to and have a great time doing so.

The original Tomb Raider has so many paradoxical qualities that could only ever have been dreamt up at the time of its release. This game is popularly remembered as a kind of kitschy action/adventure but it also gives us a glimpse into a video game industry future that never actually materialized. Its design philosophy embodies a sort of evolutionary dead-end for 3D level design, especially as it pertains to the movement of the player character. To ask a new player – even a current Tomb Raider fan! – to play this game without any prior context would be like asking them to learn how to walk again, as if from scratch, thanks to the game’s emphasis on momentum and discrete spacing. But those clunky-feeling controls and finnicky platforming mechanics serve a purpose: they slow you down, get you to look before you leap, making this a proactive rather than reactive action game. Despite its crass title, Tomb Raider is a game all about subtlety – that just so happens to also demand you shoot the occasional T-Rex to death.

The highly intentional nature of Tomb Raider’s game design is complimented by the game's sort of diegetic approach to level design. While nothing in Tomb Raider is 'realistic,' per se, there is a coherent logic to the enemies and paraphernalia scattered throughout each level that encourages you to learn about them a little more deeply. Nothing in Tomb Raider feels arbitrary, and so every new area and item feels like progress. There’s a heavy emphasis on discovery and atmosphere – a huge percentage of this game’s big, memorable moments all center around uncovering new areas, like a lost village, an ancient cistern, or a mythical Atlantean burial ground. Because Tomb Raider is a quiet game with a modest soundtrack and sparse dialogue, the moments where you unlock a door and find, say, the fractured remains of King Midas’ Golden Death Memorial Statue feel so much more powerful. The game rarely signposts its ‘big’ moments, and it subsequently feels like a game without guardrails, like the secrets in the game are for you to find rather than be shown. Whereas later Tomb Raider games treat these moments of discovery like diversions along the path of action set pieces, in the original Tomb Raider they are very much the centerpiece of the experience.

All of Tomb Raider’s sequels are attempts to remake this game but without any of the weirdness and with more tertiary mechanics, which is nonsensical, because Tomb Raider is already the most perfect version of itself. I enjoy more of the Tomb Raider sequels than I don’t, but all of them feel are the equivalent of trying to improve the Mona Lisa by making her expression less ambiguous, or adding a man cave into Falling Water. The formula is already a complete! And despite the sequels’ attempts to go bigger in the action department, they always think smaller. As evidenced by the final section of this game, which is a totally bonkers digression into cosmic Geigerian horror, the potential space for what can be imagined in a game like this was already huge.