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

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.

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Today, while still being a fun game, it has some clearly outdated mechanics like it's entire combat, which suck the life out of the game each time you have to fight an enemy.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Some people will say the platforming/climbing system is outdated here but it really is the heart of the gameplay.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.

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.

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.