My introduction to the Tomb Raider franchise was the deeply unpleasant, poorly designed 2013 reboot, an awful game and an awful experience that somehow did not deter me from playing its sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and having a much better time with it despite the presence of a lot of modern AAA design elements that really put me off of that sort of game. Having, I guess, committed to those, I figured I would return to the roots, as I so often do with these things, and I’m glad I did because Tomb Raider 96 is both an excellent 3D platformer and in incredibly WEIRD game full of funny quirks and bizarre choices that are I think mostly pretty bad in concept but never affect the play enough to do any actual harm to the experience.

The core of the experience, then, is that platforming. If I had to compare it to a modern game it would be less the modern tomb raiders and uncharteds that are often compared to this and something closer to a precursor to the Ubisoft 3D Prince of Persia lineage. Most of the levels here do involve other elements like occasional combat and puzzle solving to a greater or lesser extent, but Tomb Raider MOSTLY just sticks you in often very large, occasionally complex 3D environments and asks you to kind of just jump over to that ledge, then that one, then that one. The platforms are often gussied up as pleasant environmental features like natural rock formations, bridges, statues, etc. I think the game does a good job in general of disguising how rigidly all of its geometry adheres to a clear grid structure, disguising it sometimes with the aforementioned décor and sometimes letting the jagginess of the early PS1 dev cycle create the illusion of restriction, when the reality is the game is clearly this square on purpose. And that’s a good thing, it lets the game demand a great deal of precision from you, but it also means you very rarely find yourself in a situation where you’ll be making a jump you shouldn’t be trying, or where you’re uncertain about the scripting of a sequence because of the environmental design. It makes the world feel a little bit more artificial, with how obviously constructed around Lara’s verb set everything is, but it makes for a more rewarding play experience.

Lara’s verb set rules, by the way. As one of the biggest ones if not THE progenitor of semi-realistic 3D platforming, it’s wild how much of this feels exactly right for the needs of the game. Tomb Raider came out before Playstation analogue sticks and LONG before 3D action controls had been standardized, so there IS a learning curve, but there’s also an optional tutorial selectable from the main menu to walk you through the movement specifically (it tellingly doesn’t teach you about weapons or inventory or contextual actions). Once you have a handle on things it becomes apparent that your set of actions is slightly more robust than something you might find in one of the older, less streamlined Assassin’s Creeds or those weird Lord of the Rings games. The big difference between Tomb Raider and one of those is that rather than any action being contextual, you have to actively press and/or hold every button for every action as you need them, for things like jumping at the right moments, grabbing ledges after a jump, shimmying, dropping and catching, everything you do requires active input. After just the tutorial and a couple of the early, simpler levels, these controls were singing to me. The experience is so engaging when you have to be ON it at all times. And while it is a somewhat clunkier experience by nature than more modern games, the team at Core Design was obviously aware of this and accounted for it. You have dedicated buttons for slow walking, taking small sidesteps, and quick 180 degree turns – everything you need to be able to position yourself with the precision necessary to do what the game asks. It’s a somewhat complex control scheme but it’s an excellent one, that understands the limits of the controller, the hardware, and the map design and elegantly adapts to their needs. This is how you create a genre.

Of course, it’s not all jumping around cool obstacle courses in Tomb Raider, but before we can talk about the OTHER stuff you get up to I think it’s important to discuss Lara Croft herself, and the game’s narrative. Tomb Raider doesn’t really HAVE a much of a narrative, maybe ten minutes of cutscenes spread over a fifteen-hour game, and usually with absolutely no connective tissue between levels, just a results screen that tells you how fast you went and how many animals you shot and how many secrets you found then BAM you’re in the next one. What scant few cutscenes it does have are MOSTLY here to make Lara Croft seem COOL AS FUCK bro. She’s a hot babe who lives in a MANSION built on STOLEN WEALTH. And YEAH, she may break into tombs and ruins and historical sites and ROB THEM and then SELL THE GOODS for CASH and yeah, she starts the game by taking a job to do exactly that for somebody and only stops because that person tries to double-cross and kill her, but she assures us out loud early on that SHE’S NOT IN IT FOR THE MONEY, only the THRILL. It’s a very weird and funny portrait of an anti-hero who is simultaneously supposed to be one of those detached 90s asshole characters who we like despite knowing they’re a shithead while still being thumb-twiddlingly self-conscious about her moral character. They’re constantly making sure to try to make Lara seem not as evil as she obviously is, these white British developers seemingly aware how much of A Problem this premise is politically even back then when mainstream media was still getting away with A Lot. She’s not in it for The Money, she seems at least KIND OF annoyed when an innocent man is killed by equally innocent wolves that she led him to, she HAS this big mansion but she’s converted it into a gym! (do not worry about the many stolen artifacts she is hawking in the foyer). She’s not as bad as THAT OTHER adventure archaeologist, the evil French one who uhhhh, litters? That is the only evil thing he does that Lara does not also do. She kind of vaguely thinks genocide is bad, I guess. It’s really funny, she’s seriously awful.

So that’s Lara, some kind of meandering adrenaline-seeking sociopath, so it is fitting that the other bit of the gameplay loop that kind of mindlessly pads out these levels is all the GUNPLAY as she mercilessly guns down random bats, wolves, bears, crocodiles, gorillas you fuckin’ name it, if it breathes Lara will shoot it with guns. A borderline comical amount of animal violence and it’s all so needless. Bats do no damage to you and they go down in one hit why are they here??? There is no aiming mechanic you just pull out your guns and mash the fire button until there are no more bats. It’s super funny to fall into a hole in the first level and be absolutely run over by a gigantic bear you didn’t know was there. None of the combat in this game is good and there’s not even that much of it but it feels very cool to jump around and shoot guns in mid-air. There are precisely two human enemies in the game and they’re both miserable to fight so I GUESS I would rather just mow down endless wolves but I am mostly wondering if Tomb Raider couldn’t have just had more slapstick adventure action in the vein of running away from large boulders or something.

Or maybe more dinosaurs. There are dinosaurs! coulda just been dinosaurs the entire time. See this is the secret third pillar of Tomb Raider: that it’s an extremely bizarre game, where just every element that ever made its way onto the ideas whiteboard also made its way into the game. What if there were dinosaurs in level THREE, no buildup, no story context, no sense of design pacing, and then they’re just GONE. Hell yeah gamer. At one point there’s like some King Midas themed shit and every time you turn into gold and die it’s accompanied by this incredible cartoon BONK sound effect, like, why?? You remember Pierre the evil French archaeologist? He appears in like EVERY level to try to kill you like the fuckin terminator. You never know when you’re gonna turn a corner and find Pierre there ready to pop you, and you have to shoot him like a hundred times until he does NOT die but instead runs around the nearest corner or behind a pillar or something where he will DISAPPEAR, ready to harangue you again in the next level. This happens like twelve times it’s insane! This game’s primary inspiration is obviously Indiana Jones but we cannot forget how big John Woo was starting to hit in America and I guess also the UK in the 90s and this is extremely obvious in Tomb Raider because Lara has the iconic two pistols and all of her attacks involve huge jumps and flips and shit it’s so funny and out of place in this otherwise very strictly laid out rules-heavy platforming game to have Lara just blasting infinite ammo pistol shots as she does a ten foot horizontal flip eight feet in the air from a standing position. All of these choices are nonsense but they add up to a game that does have something of a unique identity from its inspirations and certainly from its successors. Tomb Raider 2013 could never and more importantly WOULD never.

I don’t really know how to sum up a game as uneven as Tomb Raider. I feel like I just spent a lot of time bashing parts of it that feel half baked or like they don’t work, but the core appeal of it is so good, and makes up the majority of what you’re actually doing outside of setpieces. I barely talked about the puzzles which I think have a pretty high hit rate. They’re not like Puzzle Puzzles as much as they are just further extremes on the idea of environmental challenges most of the time. When it’s focused on stuff like this, using your core verbs to interact with the environment, Tomb Raider is almost unassailably good fun. It’s just when it does almost anything else that things get shakier. I do appreciate that it leaves the immense racism that is baked into the premise MOSTLY in the margins, as much as possible, in favor of a much stupider story about Atlantis. All the villains are Bri’ish stereotypes of Americans and French people so the worst shit gets left to context but it’s impossible to truly escape from it, as much as Core Design tries to divert you from thinking about it. I do feel that the things that are successful in this game and the things that aren’t are SO obvious that it’s hard to imagine Tomb Raider 2 being this weird, which would be a shame. That combination of incredible polish and comically rough edges in all the right places really make this one what it is, for me.