for years i've longed for a game with puzzle-like traversal that'd offer me the same kind of intense anxiety i'd feel while climbing a boss like malus in shadow of the colossus. if you're like me and you've slept on this - knock it the fuck off

tomb raider provides platforming nervousness in spades with ruthlessly unforgiving - but incredibly smart, well paced and rewarding - stage design. the way it constantly forces you to analyze level geometry, take risks and conserve (extremely limited) save crystals only amps up to greater and more sadistic heights as it goes. and it's goddamn brilliant

PLAY this fucking game. do not write it off based on your missed jumps in the first stage or the drab exterior. this shit WILL hook you in. and just for the record: the controls are perfect. don't even start with that

Cultural osmosis is a funny thing. I, like many, only know about Lara Croft and her adventures through the media surrounding her, even though we never really played much if any of the games. I myself always had the firm impression that it was some kind of trashy Indiana Jones knock off with a sexy female lead or something of that nature. Probably a bit outdated, coasting on nostalgia for the original PlayStation titles. I had only ever dabbled in some of the PS2 games, seen the first movie, and got roped into playing the 2013 reboot. Admittedly, of my experiences with the franchise, Anniversary, the remake of this first game, was a game I really fell in love with. It's the starting point where my perception of Tomb Raider started to shift into something I became more and more interested in. Critical in the second phase of that process was discovering Youtube channels like the wonderful Steve Of Warr, seriously underrated creator, check him out. He gave me a good old case of talking so passionately about a topic he cares about, that it started to infect me with the energy to become a fan myself. I now really wanted to know what Tomb Raider was all about and why it left such a deep mark on gaming. Lucky for me, I had previously purchased the entire classic series on GOG for like 5 bucks. So I installed the automated PC fix and started Lara's very first adventure.

And just like I wrote in my first impression, I'm really impressed how much I dig this game. I might even go as far as to say that I love it. There is an absorbing atmosphere to the original Tomb Raider I havent felt in any game before. Exploring these locations feels like you're setting foot in places that hasnt been touched by humans in centuries. Both in a beautiful and unnerving way, when the silence is suddenly puncture by the sound of an enemies roar. I can now feel why so many people have childhood nightmare stories of sitting in front of their PS1 only to turn their TV off in horror as a vicious T-Rex suddenly stomps around the corner in Lost Valley. It even got me, despite the fact I knew it was coming. That really extends to all locations, and I can't say that there was a miss across the entire game atmosphere vise. Be it the structures of St. Francis' Folly or the final home stretch in The Great Pyramid, it was all excellent.

You control Lara through these Levels via tank controls. In 2024, a horrifying discovery for some for sure, but quit genius if you look back on what hardware Tomb Raider originally came out on. The PS1 had yet to introduce dual analog sticks and PC was restricted to keyboard and mouse, so you could easily design controls that work for both. In combination with Core Design's decision to structure levels on a strict grid, the game allows for extreme precision platforming while remaining immensely fair. You know at almost all times where Lara will land or how many steps she will take upon pressing the D-pad. The result is a game that delivers everything promised in the opening cutscene, with more freedom of movement than most games today. Combat sadly doesnt met that high water mark, with the limited camera not being able to keep up with enemies that love to poke Lara to death while she's stuck in a corner somewhere. It's by far the worst aspect of Tomb Raider, and by the time I reached Atlantis I was ready to strangle somebody. Atlantis was also the point where I felt a worrying trend come up, of the devs simply hating my guts. The final stretch is an absurd difficulty spike in my opinion, and not for the right reason. Unfair deathtrap after unfair deathtrap, bad enemie spawns, the lava pits.... the lava pits sucked so fucking bad. I still loved the whole design of Atlantis, the gross flesh covered horror Pyramid making me quite uncomfortable. Atlantis in TR1 is unlike any interpretation I have ever seen. Looks amazing, but I sure went back to Lara's Mansion a couple of times, just to decompress after the 100 times I miss timed a jump trying to dodge a flying demon, face plating Lara straight into the next best lava pit. I miss tutorial levels, Lara's mansion is the shit, bring back tutorial levels you cowards!

Finally, of all the things I loved and hated about TR1, there is one thing I still haven't mentioned yet. The actual story of the game. The story really isn't anything. Aside from giving Lara a very well defined character, it's your typical treasure hunt. Lara gets hired by a mysterious millionaire to recover a lost treasure, millionaire turns out to be evil, you beat the evil millionaire and explode her Island. The End. Probably an unfortunate result of inexperience and a short dev cycle. I don't really blame them too much, but I think it says a lot about how they really didn't know what the story was when your Villains' henchman consist of a Lumberjack, an Evil French Man, a Cowboy and a Kid on a Skateboard ? To be fair: Kid with skateboard sliding around the corner, with his Uzis akimbo drawn like he was on his way to assassinate Tupac and Biggie himself, was hilarious. If anything I hope the next game has more kids on skateboards, I would 100% support it. Anyway on to Tomb Raider 2, really looking forward to that game.

One of my earliest memories is being a toddler and thus too stupid to know how to double-click an .exe file. "Auntie's game," I would tell my elder sisters. "I want to play Auntie's game." I don't know why I called Lara Croft my auntie, but I did. Today we'll be reviewing Auntie's game, kids.

In fact, a lot of my childhood memories revolve around 'the real Lara Croft,' as I have to call her now to differentiate her from Square Enix's stock protagonist. At the time, Lara was a celebrity - an actual celebrity - on a level I don't think I've seen a video game character be since. Being played by the gorgeous Angelina Jolie in two feature films sure helped, but even before that, there was something about Lara's design and attitude that imbued this primitive pack of polygons with a charismatic charm. The actual plot of Tomb Raider may be somewhat thin on the ground, but it was enough to establish Lara as a badass heroine, while the game's blocky but practical, rough-hewn yet well-researched environments did the rest.

Another childhood memory I have is telling my sister, "We have half an hour before school. We can both play Tomb Raider for 15 minutes each." I was a very kind child, you see. At the time, actually beating a video game was a distant thought for me - as achievable as climbing a mountain. It's only now, 20 years later, that I've finally finished this game by myself - no walkthroughs. I feel like mentioning that because Tomb Raider is actually a pretty tough game. If you clear a risky jump, you better save. If you come to a place with branching pathways, you'd better save. If you walk a few steps without dying, you'd better make two separate save files to account for two separate universes where you fuck up by a centimetre and fall to your death. By the time I finished this game, I'd saved exactly 380 times, but by golly I finally did it. Pity the people who played through this on the PS1 version, which doesn't let you save anywhere.

Yet even if my mentality about video games changed, the principles of Tomb Raider didn't. Both when I was 4, and now when I'm 25, it was all about the joy of exploration. Tomb Raider provides this joy in spades. The platforming, the puzzle-solving and the slow yet definite resolution of a level that at first looked impossibly complex - Tomb Raider was an early champion of these elements in a 3D space. There is combat, of course, but it's merely serviceable because Lara needed something for her iconic dual pistols to shoot at.

I don't know when humanity's collective IQ dropped to the point that tank controls became too big an ask for players to grasp, because they always felt intuitive to me. That isn't to say Tomb Raider isn't unforgiving as fuck, because it is. It requires precision platforming, lateral thinking and a good deal of patience. The game is mostly fair - with only a few bullshit moments reserved for the endgame when you're already attuned to its deceptions - but it plays by its own rules, which are hard and fast.

However, I'm only saying all of this now because I've already had my love rekindled. Despite my childhood memories, there were some moments early on where I said, "Fuck this game," because Tomb Raider has aged. Its design is archaic, and its graphics are nigh prehistoric. Even with some fanmade patches that modernize the game as best as they can, there's no hiding the fact that this is very much a 1996 game.

I entreat you to give this game a fair shake in spite of this. I said the game has aged, not that it's aged badly. With enough patience - juuuust enough to let the Stockholm syndrome set in - you too can discover the joy of Tomb Raider, of its hypnotic cycle of exploring levels with sparse musical cues and only the sepulchral ambience, the thumping of footsteps and the occasional ding of a secret discovered to keep you company. And every now and then, the sound of bones breaking as Lara falls to her death for the dozenth fucking time.

Before the Tomb Raider I-III Remaster trilogy was announced, I had long given Lara up for forgotten - that the only people who would even remember the PS1 Tomb Raider games would be the ones who grew up with them, because who has the time or patience anymore? But look past its flaws, I assure you. This was a revolutionary game then, and it's still a great game now. Tomb Raider in 2024 takes the act of exploring something ancient to find a hidden treasure to a very meta level.

I actually find this pretty compelling, almost relaxing. Played 2.5 stages.

The art and ambience in particular is stunning, I love the use of light and vegetation. Spatially it's like this minimalist take on early FPS shooters... the secrets, the weird score popup at the end of levels. The lack of HUD elements in gameplay and minimal save points, no guidance is really nice.

That being said! The controls are really really bad - and I don't mean the precision and slow pacing, which I think are unique and valuable, but like there's just so much bumping into walls and doing these huge moves I don't expect her to do. It's just a level too unpleasant for the vibe they're going for.

The price for dying or slipping is pretty severe (being set back minutes of tedious traversal).

But if you ignore that what you have is a really interesting 3D platformer that's all about reading the environment. It really feels 'adventure-y', although I can't help but wish for something that was a bit more compelling conceptually other than raiding ancient ruins one after another.

Queria ter zerado de fato, mas acho que o 1º Tomb Raider não é para mim. Meu maior problema foi o imenso dano de queda; ele acaba sendo um jogo de plataforma mais realista do que outros da época.
Nos 7 níveis que joguei, tive muita frustação pelos controles estranhos; os pulos são calculados por blocos, o que demorei para entender como realmente funcionavam. Foram incontáveis mortes.

Por outro lado, é interessante a sensação de exploração. Nadar nesse jogo é estranhamente satisfatório...
A música tema e o som dos secrets são memoráveis. E é bem divertido fazer piruetas enquanto se atira nos inimigos homens.

Since I started playing this game three months ago, at the end the Lara Croft AI Youtube videos were a scam, a very interestingly laid out scam with very cool observations of the environmental storytelling that I didn't notice playing the game but which made me appreciate the little details Core Design sprinkled through the game to make it feel organic. The lack of level music and the sound design makes the adventure kick out some anxiety responses with the philosophy of 2D cinematic platformers translated into how the atmosphere is utilized (the developers seem to have experimented with this in the Commodore Amiga with the Rick Dangerous series beforehand but I haven't played them).

And not only that, it also can make for a nice adventure feeling. You can go around exploring, then find out an impressive area in the caves the game takes place in, you find out some incredible looking set-pieces and the musical cues do their magic

That said, the game is certainly aged, when I was referring to feeling like a cinematic platformer in atmosphere, I forgot to say it also feels that way in gameplay. The controls in platforming sections is mostly predictable and responsive, but the clunkiness can be evident in them and most prominent whenever you are fighting enemies. Trying to move around dodging those erratic patterns with tank controls isn't very fluid and can lead to a spastic camera whipping around uncontrollably and making your head ache, just as much as when you will get lost trying to find switches and openings in ceilings and floors because of the very pixelated graphics (this could be said to build into the sense of mystery but I don't think not noticing a lever because it blends into the rocks adds anything of value).

The story as well isn't anything amazing, Lara Croft is one-note as a character and the plot to find three mcguffins while fighting a woman that wants to do some genetic engineering is kind of underdeveloped. Apart from the atmosphere, the only other thing of artistic value is just finding details about the atlantean people and their downfall (the dinosaurs stored away at the incan ruins may sound bizarre at first but at the end you find out all the cultures you visited had some relationship to the atlanteans and their genetic engineering), and some of the puzzles involve references to mythologies to solve (like the Midas hand in the Greece levels). Beyond that, I got nothing more to say.

I never played the original Tomb Raider games on the PS1. Yes, shocking because Lara (yes, Lara, not the games) were hyper famous back in the early 2000's and she was literally everywhere. I played tiny bits from the reboot trilogy and I finished Tomb Raider (2013) several times.

Why I wanted to try out the original? Because I was really curious how Lara created a whole new era in the action-adventure platforming scene and to my surprise, the game is not that bad, it is just ridden with technical problems.

First off, Tomb Raider's music is great. It is one of the most beautiful and catchy OST's I have ever heard, the songs will 100% stick with you after the game. The game itself aged quite nicely in terms of graphics as the large halls, empty tombs and trap filled rooms are very nice to look at.

Sadly, the controls are not really good. The movement in this game is really janky and you can get used to it if you will, but I always struggled in some parts of the game, because Lara simply did not wanted to do what I had in mind. She missed ledges, jumped off from walls to her certain death, did a backflip instead of running in a direction, you get the idea.

It is a first installment in a long running series, of course it is janky as hell!
The action is alright, it is a tad bit too simple, but you can get over it. In a platformer however, movement is pivotal in terms of how the game age. I am sad that I cannot enjoy it as much as the game deserves it, because the movement and the jumping is janky.

Despite all this, I had some fun with the game and I want to play with the sequels.

This game brought out some sort of primal, chimp rage within me.

It's pretty neat, the level design for most of the game is overall great until around the final level of the Egypt section where some sections are purely just super stretched out platforming sections with no other sauce to speak of. The Atlantis sections are some really cool set pieces though and I thought the boss fights were alright.

My biggest issue with Tomb Raider 1 is how wonky the tank controls are, especially when it comes to platforming, it can be insanely frustrating and can make the game artificially difficult at points, its a pretty big learning curve. The combat is also not one of the game's strongest aspects either.

Besides that, I love the environments, the music, most levels and I especially love Lara. She's so cool...(and hot).

It is mindboggling how influential this game and its PS1-era sequels weren't. They sold countless copies and embedded Lara as a character into the wider pop culture, yet the number of notable games that take direct design inspiration from how they play can likely be counted on one hand. If it has any true lineage to be found it isn't in the likes of Uncharted or the post-Sands of Time Prince of Persia games but rather the work of indies like Bennet Foddy or Anders Jensen's Peaks of Yore. Works that attempt to reinject the feeling of tension into a player's movement abilities. Keeping the level of friction high at all times. However even those games evoke the same sensations via very different control schemes. I am obsessive about discovering new games. I regularly scroll through the ocean of noise that is the Steam new releases queue, hoping to find something neat in the endless procession of porn games and Vampire Survivors clones. I keep track of a million in-development indie projects. I would confidently say I am about as up on what's being made as a single person can get. Yet I never see anything even close to a 'Tomb Raider Clone'. Which is not to say some don't exist somewhere, deep in someone's itch.io page. But the fact that one of the biggest runs of success a series has ever had hasn't spawned a visible scene^ is remarkable in an age where every possible trend from gaming's history, no matter how archaic, is being explored by both indies and megacorps alike.

TR's controls were, are, and forever will be, exceptional. Yes, obviously they are somewhat awkward. But they are also also extremely precise with reliable rules about what works in what situation, how many steps you can take before a jump, which button presses have priorities over others, the exact timing for that last-second leap. Each jump feels chunky, weighty. Even just pulling yourself up onto a ledge has serious tactility to it. It all makes cutting corners with your decisions a no-no, instead nudging you to work through the proressions of your movement thoughtfully - often with pre-planning - or face the neck-breaking consequences. From the beginning of the game till the end there is heart-in-mouth excitement in even the simplest of challenges. This is the ideal. This is how it should be. Make no mistake: the controls can be mastered. It's just that 'mastery' here means a confidence in your actions, becoming more fluid in your transitions between movement states. Not an ascension to platforming godhood. I am both terrible at games and easily annoyed yet no fibre in my being would ever consider these controls 'bad'. They achieve exactly what they aim for and, more importantly, what I desire from them.

The problem, then, is that Core Design... Well they didn't understand the core of what they had designed. There are issues in level design and pacing, yes. Some of the puzzles are a nonsense. But all of that is small potatoes. The main downer is that this game and all of its direct successors are plagued by combat that is fundamentally at odds with the rest of its makeup. Lara moves deliberately. Her enemies move quickly, have wonky hit/hurtboxes and are often sprung on the player out of nowhere. Sometimes they have guns which operate on the same laser-accurate rules as Lara's. They are seemingly made for a different game entirely.

It's not that combat is difficult. Health and ammo is plentiful, dying only ever really happens when taken completely offguard. It's that it's stunningly annoying and fuck me there is a lot of it. Running around in circles holding the shoot button, sometimes doing a flip, the height of strategy being to position yourself directly behind your opponent such that they literally just can't do anything because they have to turn towards you before they inevitably do and grind another chunk off your healthbar. Your healthbar outlasts theirs, they die. You feel nothing other than a pissed off sense of 'thank god that's over'. Rinse, repeat for 15 hours. It only becomes tolerable when avoiding it entirely by just standing on a platform where the enemy cant reach Lara.

It's this aspect that makes the lack of extrapolation on the format from other devs even more unfortunate. I don't blame Core Design for how they formulated things. There's still plenty else it did well (the atmosphere, so thick at all times!). They were doing something new out there on their own when the industry was in a more nascent stage. We've a wealth of knowledge now about this type of game is best handled - hell just take out the combat entirely lads, it isn't absolutely necessary - and few out there keen on putting it to use. Here's to hoping the remasters spark a little something.

^I should note that the early TR games have a wonderfully vibrant modding and level-creation community. Amazing work is being done by a super dedicated group. Eg: https://www.pcgamer.com/meet-the-community-creating-classic-tomb-raider-adventures-in-2021/. Probably the most straightforward partial answer to the question 'where are all the new takes on old Tomb Raider' is 'the people who would make them are making them in Tomb Raider'

Finally played this for the first time on PC with Automated Fix. Not gona lie, I really dig it. The atmosphere kills and I adore the soundtrack. I can't even say I agree this has aged horribly, it's damn well-designed. Basically a cinematic platformer like Prince of Persia or Another World but flipped into the third dimension. And just as unforgiving as its 2D sibllings aswell. I will finish this game eventually, but Sanctuary of the Scion has me kinda stuck right now, so might as well take a break, maybe try some of the other games.

Link to my full review of Tomb Raider: https://www.backloggd.com/u/NovaNiles/review/1411026/

Playing this as a 6 year old was amazing. The sense of adventure and discovery was basically set in gaming by Tomb Raider when this first released.

Today, while still being a fun game, it has some clearly outdated mechanics like it's entire combat, which suck the life out of the game each time you have to fight an enemy.

Tomb Raider SHINES when it is about exploring, platforming and solving puzzles. Thankfully the game is mostly this, which is why 2018's Shadow of the Tomb Raider was my favorite of the survivor trilogy as it ditched the Uncharted cloniness of the first 2 games and went for more of a focus on puzzles and exploration.

The puzzles in tomb raider aren't really deep. Each puzzles comes down to finding ways to unlock doors, which is mostly trying to find switches or keys in levels that you will need to platform to.

Some people will say the platforming/climbing system is outdated here but it really is the heart of the gameplay. Unlike most modern games where climbing is automated and mindless, here you have to actually think about your jumps and the timings of your jumps as any misstep could lead to your death.

A big strength is the exploration aspect of the game. There are so so many secrets and hidden areas you will need find and platform your way to in order to find weapons, ammo, health kits. And you will really need these to help you get through the game as Tomb raider has somewhat of a survival game aspect to it.

Each level is a cool exploration of a releastic location where you would actually find tombs. Nepal, Greece, Egypt etc. SPOILER: I really really don't like the concept of the final levels though and it really doesn't fit in this game.

With the positives said, there are many negatives. The biggest one which was mentioned before and almost ruin this game for me is the combat. And it's quite abundant and sprinkled out through the levels, especially in the later levels where it's everywhere. There is no rhyme or reason to the combat. Sometimes you will get hit, sometimes you won't. It's all about facing the enemy and pressing shoot, hoping you kill them while jumping and dodging around before they kill you. Just make sure you are playing on PC or an emulator so you can quicksave before each fight.

I won't get into it too much, but the final levels are really awful and made me almost want to drop this game. It doesn't have the soul or spirit of what makes tomb raider good and felt rushed and lazily put together.

Tomb Raider is worth playing through once if you are a fan of classic gaming and history. You will still get a lot of fun out of this if you can put up with some of the outdatedness of it. If anything, it's worth experiencing to see how the iconic adventures of Lara Croft all began.

I wanted to like this game. I really did but theres so many issues that i cant bring myself to finish it. To cut to the chase, the game is slow. That isnt necessarily a bad thing but when the game wants to also be so fucking punishing at the same time, it turns the game into a slog. When you may solve a puzzle or find out where to go its fun, but then you might die to some bullshit trap or the 500 gorillas that half health you with every hit. So youll be doing some of these segments multiple times over. In modern games like celeste for example, when you die the game doesnt punish you heavily and spawn you near where you died. tomb raider will take you back to where you last saved, at least on ps1 which can be so fucking far back that it makes tou want to stop entirely. But i kept pushing because i enjoyed the games atmosphere. The controls are strange but i like them. Grabbing ledges manuvering terrain is way more interactive than most modern day games like assassins creed. The general game is fun but its so intent on curb stomping the player at every moment with awkward puzzles, and constant insta kills. Some puzzles require timing so tight that i was doing some for 20 minutes straight. Initially enemies arent so bad but ehen you get to egypt, you get lions and gorillas that hit so god damn hard and are everywhere. There is also some random ass dude who pops up from nowhere sometimes and just starts shooting you. Youll never know hes there until you see your hp bar draining rapidly and then he doesnt even die, you have to get him off screen after hitting him for a bit. This humanoid gun combat and 2 shot kill animals make most of combat just health tanking and chugging med kits. If this game removed the combat and was designed to be more forgiving in some aspects, it would be amazing. I couldnt bother to finish it and stopped at the king midas level because it was so confusing to play through. I looked up a guide and knew instantly how to beat the level which took out most of the fun. On top of that, it was gonna take so long to actually play the level that i just gave up because i got bored and was annoyed at confusing puzzles. In a way, this game is like a zelda game without the shitty story and just the dungeons, but now the dungeons are just a mishmash of bullshit. I also wish the levels werent so wide and expansive. It makes traversing them so boring when it takes so long to get from point a to b. It also make the levels confusing mazes because theres so many different path ways, and if you stop mid level, you forget and just get fucked. The music is also annoying, its very loud and basic. The nice mood that you might get from, for example, portal is just ruined when the ost comes on every time you enter a new room in tomb raider. Tomb raider in a way is relaxing, where you just solve puzzles in peace, but it refuses to be that and instead wants to be an aggresive globe-trotting adventure which i just dont think its built for.

So it's 1996, and the HDD on my first-ever computer (an Acer Aspire -- check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly5dh5KgVW0) had a grand total of 1000 MB to play with. And maybe 100 MB of that was already taken up with boilerplate stuff. No matter, though -- Tomb Raider installed and I want to say it was 126 MB. I had quite a bit of fun getting into this, but the most fun I had with TR was a year or more down the road when I first played it on a PS1 with those rocking controllers. THAT was truly fun, and I still remember those joyous moments.

I jumped into Tomb Raider because I know it was such a major event when it came out, and is in many ways a major part of gaming history, but after playing over 10 hours of the game, I have to apply the Starfield principle and abandon this. It is a real shame, because part of me does want to see it through to the end, but I just have way too many games which I could be playing and having a better time with than this. I have to mention right away as well that I played on the PC port of the game, which seems to be an inferior version fo the game from what I have read, but nevertheless I can only review what I played. I will mention that in an era of digital ownership and remasters replacing originals, I do think it is commendable that the original games are still available.

I don't believe the game isn't bad, but, in my opinion, it definitely isn't good either. For the most part, I just found it to be incredibly boring. The first cutscene, featuring Lara backflipping off of a cliff to open fire on a pack of wolves with her dual pistols, got me excited, promising a corny 90s action hero story which I was 100% down for. But this pretty much disappears right away; the mind-numbing levels made me pretty apathetic to whatever Lara's goal was, and to be honest, that was never entirely clear to me, as the story is pretty bare-bones. To be honest though, I was not going into this game expecting a story at all, so that is not something I hold against the game.

For a puzzle game, I don't think there was anything which actually constituted a puzzle that I solved. Most of the levels consist of you traversing rooms which usually branch off of a central room, until you pull a lever, which unlocks more rooms, or pick up a key to unlock a door, which unlocks even more rooms.

That does undersell the game somewhat, because to be fair, the level design is excellent. Each one feels unique, and it is easy to know where you are in relation to any part of a level at any given time. The platforming setups are intuitive and Lara has a vaste swathe of different moves she can use to traverse the world. The game cleverly gives you the tools to move around the level however you want, in levels that are designed to guide you in a certain direction.

There is also an element of exploration afforded to the player, but the major flaw in this is that there is actually no reason to do it. I really think it is exceptionally lame that finding secret or hidden rooms (marked by a chime the game plays when you find one) means you get an extra couple of shots in your shotgun, or an extra small health pack. Ammunition was rarely a problem given your pistols, the default weapon, have infinite ammo, so "rewarding" the player for putting extra effort into exploration with basic resources seems like a major oversight. For some people, it will be worth it just to have the 100% completion on the level, but to me this just made the secrets irrelevant.

The most damning mark against the game for me was actually not, as so often seems to be the case, the controls. I think the tank controls actually make a lot of sense for this kind of platformer, letting you line up your jumps carefully and giving the developers the ability to map Lara's moves in a way that makes sense. I also think the grid system makes a lot of sense. Having that basic unit of measurement made it easy to tell if you could make a jump, climb a wall, or (in theory) how far Lara will move. However, the way Lara herself controls is where the game lets itself down. I guess they call them tank controls for a reason, because Lara controls like you are driving a 100 tonne piece of war machinery. Lara often walks too far, doesn't walk far enough, jumps too early, doesn't jump at all, jumps in the wrong direction, doesn't grab a ledge but grabs it the next time when it seems like you did the exact same thing, won't pull a lever, won't move a block, tries to climb onto a block when you're trying to push it, it is actually painful. The way Lara turns around, rotating like a dish in the microwave, is so slow it feels like it takes 15 minutes to turn 90 degrees. At least she has a roll she can use as a quick turn, but you often can't use this when you're on a smalll pillar you dont want to risk her falling off to her death, or when you don't want to turn all the way around.

What I would say is that you do get used to the controls themselves, and I wouldn't give up right at the start just because of them. Maybe you won't be as bothered by the jankiness as I was, which would negate a large negative from the game when you experience it.

The way Lara controls also makes combat way more difficult than it had to be. Getting backed into a corner is often a death sentence, because the stun lock will prevent you from jumping over the enemy, but by the time you turn Lara around to run in a different direction, you're already dead. If this doesn't happen, combat can actually be pretty fun. When Lara decides to respond to your inputs, you can dodge and weave around enemies in a satisfying way that actually makes you feel pretty cool. There is nice enemy variety and you have to bear in mind what the different enemies can do in order to fight them properly. There are a few different weapons which you can use; mainly just to do more damage, but they are there. Like I mentioned earlier, ammuntion is rarely a problem given your pistols have infinite ammo, but I did have to make sure I saved my more powerful weapons for stronger enemies. However, combat also often takes place from a ledge above the arena, where you can wait for Lara to lock onto the enemies and shoot them with pistols until they die. This is often the easiest way to approach combat, and also the least fun.

Overall, this game was pretty disappointing to me. With only three levels left, it really does feel like I should just push through to the end and get the completion, but I just could not be bothered. When I play a game, I want to feel something. But the feeling I experienced when playing Tomb Raider was pretty much exactly the same feeling you get when doing chores. Maybe if I had put on a podcast in the background, I would have had a better time.

Tomb Raider 1 - Remastered 28 Years Later. A Classic Revisited

There are a few gaming memories that I have interconnected with Tomb Raider despite only playing the game now 28 years after its debut. I can recall while on a family holiday seeing a lady with circular orange-tinted shades and what looked like sporty hiking gear in Majorca Spain which felt completely out of place. Without any knowledge of who Lara was, I just chalked it up to be a unique fashion sense but my dad let out a belly chuckle before rummaging for his yellow disposable tourist camera which felt so light and cheap you wondered how the finished product was going to turn out good at all but it wasn't an everyday occurrence and he knew that this opportunity would never happen again. It was the Lady cosplaying as Lara who saw me and decided to ask if I wanted a picture not knowing who she was was shy and apprehensive as most children and before I could say "NO" much like Lara does when she doesn't know what to do a flash went off and that was it. I'm sure somewhere in a dusty box there are photos of this capturing the awkwardness on my face for all eternity. Nowadays cameras are no longer a novelty, it's become less about rare moments in brief slips of time that are captured and more about vanity exposed for monetary gain through content creation and influencer influenza. There was a certain charm to having photos taken on excursions out and from the Lara cosplayer's perspective there was no incentive to dress up as the heroine except pure admiration of the character, no other angles however how pointy they appeared on a CRT monitor back then. This phenomenon wasn't exclusive to me as years would go by before stumbling upon a video featuring a completely embarrassing exchange between a young boy and Lara on our national broadcast. The Late Late Toy Show is a ritual Irish families indulge in with the lead-up to Christmas that would showcase kids and what they were hoping their parents would buy them or Santa would bring them if they were
good that year. The event was more for the adults laughing at the personalities of these young bucks with an audience of middle-aged to old-age invite-only members who would frequently receive free gifts just for attending. You couldn't be more transparently supercilious to bask in praise from an audience that was being spoonfed gifts periodically throughout and soaking in false praise. The show's facade comes crumbling down with how undeservedly praise is given to the host, it should be judged on its own without self-aggrandizing but alas has been a staple of Irish Television.
It goes against the reserved nature of us Irish people, as many Irish don't like to receive gifts or compliments, we're a candid sort who detest being told nice things.
The falsehood of it shines bright now as an adult but as a child, you couldn't see through that mirage and why would you? With that backstory in place what occurred on one night in particular was nothing short of cringe-worthy.
https://youtu.be/NtHlr9QAzYY
A Paid Lara Croft impersonator poses with fake guns while the plank of wood Pat Kenny does little to break the air in what is an uncomfortable scene for all in attendance and those watching at home. The entire facade shatters, there is no more fake joy and laughs from the audience, just complete embarrassment on display. The Actress isn't to blame but it reflects a deeper and more sinister side to people, how false pretenses can crumble and reveal to all what is truly going on could only happen on Irish TV. The Act fell apart and the result is nothing more spectacular than uncomfortable silence throughout the ordeal. This sticks out in my mind as a defining moment that highlights how the public perceives Lara and the separation between her character to weirdos like Pat Kenny and children who were just playing the game at the time.

Tomb Raider at one point was a pop cultural phenomenon that propelled games from enthusiasts' bedrooms to Hollywood. You couldn't walk through life without hearing her name, seeing her, or even meeting her. This was due in part to the extensive marketing campaigns done that made her the face of the film, perfumes, clothing, and the face of Lucozade.
All the gaming magazines were talking about Lara but there was another side to it all. A B side if you will. There was no question that she was seen as a sex Icon despite the creator's vision of her being an Indiana Jones type in her own regard but it can be impossible to fight back against cultural stereotypes so for the most part they swallowed their pride and let marketing run rampant. What worsened this was the fact magazines pushed a narrative that there was a nude cheat that was hidden and featured screenshots from a fan-made mod that just redrew her textures and skin tone. Not exactly the most riveting piece of pornography, just some pointy polygons but that didn't matter in the late 90s. With the vision of how they intended Lara to be received by people being undermined by the marketing department and burnout from many late nights of overworked conditions many at Core Studios left after the development of the first title.
The money only began to funnel in soon after the passionate folk left which is a shame and the direction of Lara's future would be decided by the remaining team and the prying eyes of Hollywood executive types.

Gameplay:
At its Core Tomb Raider is a strict platformer that requires precision timing, jumps, and most importantly patience. The guns that you have are equipped with unlimited ammunition but that doesn't mean they're the best.
You can obtain weapons such as the shotgun, magnums, and an Uzi earlier by discovering them hidden in levels but you'll probably end up conserving these weapons for such a long time that eventually when the game strips you of them and you have to kill bosses that drop them naturally, the game is almost over. The Uzi floating also looks so out of place in the remaster that it looks less like a secret and more like a bug in the game. The smaller crt and resolution probably masked this but it's not the case here.
Speaking of the remaster differences you can enable modern controls or tank controls and for my playthrough, I had been playing on tank controls and had forgotten there was an option for modern. When I tried the modern controls I wanted to get sick because the game is not designed around them and having full directional control more than often will make you fall and have to repeat jumps so much that it becomes more cumbersome than modern. The updated look of the game is decent but it can't be changed how the level layouts are block based so you'll have modern textures plastered on them that make it look like a Modded Minecraft affair rather than a remaster.
The plus side is Lara looks less like a Neanderthal and more like how she appeared in renders of the time.

Combat wasn't the team's forté and you can tell as the aiming is done automatically by sticking to a nearby enemy which can cause a plethora of issues when dealing with groups of enemies clustered together. One aspect that took me a while to come to grasp was using the R1 button to slowly move Lara back enough from the edge of a block to have enough distance to not fall off without being able to jump.
As for the story, it's barebones and serviceable for a title released in 96 and the remaster keeps the acting and fmvs the exact same so you'll still have that amateur performance with rigid animation. The FMVs have been run through an upscaler and to be honest, do little to nothing except smudge what was already there.
Another slight problem is lighting, the remaster can look dark in several spots that you'll end up swapping to the classic look just to see where you are and what traps are hidden from your view (I've heard this is the case for the later tomb raider games in this collection also).

The game is quite enjoyable at times despite the hard to master controls but once you put time into it you won't have any issue with any of the platforms in the game. Lara's Mansion really should be the first thing you do before even starting the game as it allows a playground for you to master the controls. Modern games don't need to do this because they've homogenised control schemes and player feel for years since the inception of this game that they don't require a tutorial area to familarise oneself with the game feel. The remaster makes a lot of areas pop and the original intent can be seen now unlike the low quality textures that can be hard to makeout what they are supposed to represent at times.


The Worst Levels:
While I enjoyed several levels there are a few that stick out far more than others as a pain in the ass. The 5th level St Francis folly has these giant collums and on the remastered version appears taller ever so slightly than the original graphics (which you can swap to with select) however you will run around attempting to climb without success before leaving the room and going in circles. On a first playthrough, I'd imagine many looked up where to go when stuck as it's not apparent where the correct way to go is at all. The Cistern level can be a loopy situation where you go somewhere too early and then have to repeat the same route that takes over 5 mins to get back to and if you didn't save scum you'd be wasting more time if you fell or died. There's a part in the cistern where you must drain the water in order to be able to stand and pull a switch but it's so remote and disconnected to the adjacent room that it makes no sense to backtrack so far in order to do it that the solution escapes your mind.

Overall Tomb Raider 1 has aged considerably but it's still an important piece of history that will now allow people to delve into it with relative ease with the quality of life features added. The game still requires oodles of patience and if you can make it to the end you'll have a newfound appreciation for taking your time with a game than rushing through it without a second thought. I imagine this was a real test for those who rented it from video stores back in the day to see if they could beat the game before having to re-rent it again. Also having to be wary of the residue that might have been left by the previous player who got stuck on an early level before using the game guide to finish themselves before the game... At the time the likes of crash bandicoot, metal gear solid, Final Fantasy VII, silent hill and other genre defining games were available and as Tomb Raider recieved critical acclaim and sales leading to sequel upon sequel it fell to the wayside forgotten due to advancements in tech and the burn out of the developers who wished to kill the character and series for good after the long run without breaks she had.
While not a sprawling epic like Final Fantasy VII or a tightly knit platformer like Crash, Tomb Raider holds it's own legacy that is a great look back at the time period it was made.
It had it's awkward beginnings before being rebooted in 2013 but hopefully there'll be a redemption coming for the series that shows what the devs originally envisioned for the series and character without the manipulation and distortions caused by those looking to deepen their pockets.

I'll have to give the other ones a go at some point but until then I'm burnt out too and if that's just from playing it, imagine how the devs felt those sleepless nights working on it.