After a dull opening act spent cleaning tables, the playpen made of WarioWare busywork gives way to la terreur when suddenly you're left to your own devices, combining the comte's mega-microgames into tangible thoughtlines that video games don't often afford us; now we're suddenly playing with the cards adults use!

Later sections often take a psychic toll upon the gamer's undeveloped brain, and it's only right that a game about the pyrrhic toll of cheating eventually becomes so mind-destroying that you end up looking at videos showing you how to cheat at cheating - any% WR for this game is just a guy turning on cheats and then letting the dialogue roll for 50 mins.

Don't want to spoil the potential endings for anyone (because this game is hinging quite a lot on its so-so-story), but I'm glad the developers were following my train of thought as it pulled into Epilogue Station. Bravo gentlemen! The first person to combine this gameplay with an existing card game is gonna clean out the gambling hall. I wanna slip-cut a Pot of Greed into a Yu-Gi-Oh draw deck while sipping a glass of Gamer Fuel.

Man, it's something else to vanquish a white whale. Tomb Raider was one of the first 3D games I ever played, and I've always had a real respect for it, but christ was it fussy. On PS1, where you're dealing with save crystals, load times, fairly limited draw distance and 1MB memory card read/write speeds, it takes a special kind of patience to make it past St Francis' Folly, and once the marvel of playing a game in 3D started to wear off, fewer and fewer people were willing to pass the threshold.

This kind of thing is what the Nintendo Switch has been all about, for me. How miraculously it can reframe impenetrable, pisstaking old games and make them fun again. I'm so glad that someone decided they ought to put the old Tomb Raiders on this thing.

For all the frustration and tedium that the original game has come to represent, it's difficult to see the Official UK PlayStation Magazine 10/10 that lies beyond all of that. Not only is the game a real technical achievement, there's a great sense of character to Tomb Raider 1 that drifted away as the wider media got overexcited about big boobs. An air of elegance to the consistent control system, the ambient, synthesised choral soundtrack and these huge, labyrinthian caverns hiding elaborate ancient relics. That isn't everything, though. There's a balance between this side of the game, and the game's absurd Hot Wheels playset from Hell stupidity. Aqueducts swarming with crocodiles, and elaborate ancient traps protected by starving lions and furious gorillas. Despite how deeply the series' lore has been mined, I didn't see any credit for the inexplicable cowboy boss beyond "the cowboy". The game's filled with big, mad, daft stuff, and I love it.

Tomb Raider was a massively influential game. It's easily forgotten, given how much the industry propped up Mario 64 as "The 3D Game" a year later, but I don't think you get an Ocarina of Time without Core Design's influence. When developers were still figuring out what verticality could offer a game, here's Lara Croft backflipping into elevated passageways and swandiving from slides. Compare that to mid-nineties 3D adventures like Descent or Jumping Flash, and you really have to marvel at how confidently Core were able to take on this design challenge. It's all owed to how strict its controls are, borrowing from cinematic platformers like Another World and Flashback. When jumping lands you in the same spot each time, you know the most interesting spots to place each successive platform. Level layouts are consistently clever and imaginative, but it never forgets that human beings are playing the game. There's a balance between strict, Sokoban-style logic puzzles, and wild spectacle. Sometimes they just let you chill out in a big room to look at a neat sphinx.

There's a solid sense of progression through each of the game's levels, and it gets freakin' bananas by the end. Starting out running through cold, undecorated caverns, and ending up in a giant gold pyramid, with fleshy, pulsing organic walls. Tomb Raider speculates that beyond the Aztec blowpipe traps and rusted old switches, there are 20th century living dinosaurs, roaming under our feet, cordoned off in a special jungle room, behind an elaborate clockwork water puzzle. They've been there all along, but no explorer in human history was clever enough to get past Level 2 until Lara came along. I love this stuff.

The Quality of Life stuff in this 2024 release is fairly conservative, but beautifully exploitable. You can save anywhere now, and don't have to worry about memory card management to do so, but I'd argue the more meaningfully transformative addition is the Photo Mode. Click in both analogue sticks, and you'll have full control over the floating camera. Not only can you take rockin' shots of the game's low-poly crocs, you can use it to scout out passageways and dangerous trap sequences whenever you like. Not having a map screen is kind of crucial to the Tomb Raider experience, but being able to quickly check underwater to see if you missed a switch or item, instead of clambering down from the tricky precipice you're standing on, is such a relief. Use it judiciously, and it doesn't make the game feel any less perilous or thrilling, but it takes out so much of the busywork.

I love Tomb Raider. In no way would I ever recommend it to anyone who doesn't already have a strong taste for this era of game design, though. Everything takes so fucking long. If you have to push a block multiple times, it's going to be a long night, my friend. For as strong a design principle as the restrictive grid-based structure is, it also turns a lot of the experience into an overwrought sequence of wobbling into the correct position. Every mandatory switch you need to pull needs to be successfully wobbled towards before you can activate them, and in puzzles with multiple switches, this can be agonisingly tedious. There are the optional "modern controls", but I'd suggest using them would be akin to driving a car with your face. Don't look at Tomb Raider as if it's a big blockbuster action game for fans of thrills. You have to be a very boring old prick to stick with this shit.

I'm really glad I did, though. Tomb Raider is a very different idea of how to design a 3D game, and it makes a great argument for doing it this way. Sure, these principles lead to the all-time studio crushing embarrassment that was Angel of Darkness, but they also gave us everything Fumito Ueda's ever made. There's such a rich sense of satisfaction to successfully navigating the game in a way that Crystal Dynamics have never managed to replicate. In a world filled with Yellow Paint and Unlock Everything DLC packs, you need a little Tomb Raider 1 to remind you what a game can be. We were heroes, once.

Genuinely perfect. It is truly astonishing that this game can do so many things at once and nail all of them. It's silly, dramatic, sad, and by FAR the best Yakuza to date in both story and gameplay. The three styles allow endless expression in your combos, and the heat actions are either the funniest or most brutal thing ever. The minigames never got boring no matter how many times I played all of them and the substories are perfect side missions. Even if you have no interest in the Yakuza series, you're doing yourself a disservice by not playing this masterpiece of a game.

Good game!

I’m glad I can just say that plain and simply with a main FF game. It’s got a straightforward vision and it came out finished. The highs are so high, especially those boss fights.

My biggest gripe with it is that it does neither of its two genres particularly amazingly. The character action/ combat system is fun and definitely has some depth, but it’s pretty broken and no enemy REALLY feels like a threat.

The ’RPG’ part is kind of meaningless and all it really contributes is a bunch of padding. Stats are basically meaningless, I never thought about equipment once. It’s definitely closer to doing the DMC stuff well. If they just tightened up the world design and took out a bunch of the fetch quests, it’d be a much better game. You can basically ignore all of the side stuff. While the story is refreshingly simple, it would have been nice if they went a touch deeper with some of its ideas. I also don’t think having some more goofy Final Fantasy creatures and races would have been jarring. The one Moogle that shows up is nice. Throw a few more in. Chuck in a few Shoopuffs.


But whatever. It did a lot of stuff so well that I can forgive a lot of that. The soundtrack kicks ass. There’s a nice man called Gav. It does the kaiju boss fights that Bayo 3 tried to do, but actually good. Clive’s slutty outfit is ridiculous.

Cw: Transphobia, present trans politics

When Haru said that she's incapable of fighting for her rights as a trans person, I felt that. That it's just too much for her to handle, it's something I've actually been grappling with, with all the current anti-trans laws, getting into leftist politics and just growing into the woman that I am. I feel like I should be able to do everything I can to fight back, I want to with all my power, but I'm just not capable of it, I can only do so much and I have to accept that and it really sucks. Even though the game takes place in Japan, the fact that it goes into how it's so hard to even go out with friends and celebrate your birthday in public as a trans person, reflects so much how society still has a massive amount of work to do in accepting LGBTQIA+ people, minorities and diversity in general. For a game to simply explore this hardship in 2019 with its easily digestible writing and cute aesthetics, remaining relevant to my life now, it surprisingly stuck with me. Despite the depressing circumstance that Haru has to deal with in all walks of her life as a trans woman, her friends doing everything they can to celebrate her birthday in whatever way regardless, genuinely warmed my heart. Despite people who are too ignorant or close-minded to be accepting and understanding, despite people who make it their mission to cause others suffering, despite everything wrong with living in a capitalist society, what makes life so unbearable to live will always be triumphed by everything that makes it oh so worth living.

I didn't like BOTW so I don't know why I thought this would be any different, grabbed by the hype once again! I just never learn!

Nothing about these games gives me that revolutionize of the open world genre buzz that they're praised for and honestly, it pisses me off that I don't get it. It makes me feel INSANE when I see the praise, but it's just not clicking.

The new building mechanics feel clunky to me, but I do see the vision. It's a toybox with more toys to fool around with. For me though, the thought of doing shrines again, especially with these mechanics, just makes me want to turn off.

For positives, I do enjoy the visuals. I think the art direction and presentation are gorgeous. It's got that Nintendo charm that always appeals to me, which further makes it sadder that it doesn't hit for me.

I've put in around 10 hours and I've had my fill. Overall, it's my own fault. I knew I wouldn't like it, but a mixture of FOMO and hope that something would grab me took hold. It has put me in that Zelda mood though, I'll probably replay one of the older ones soon.