now playing — tomb raider

played on playstation

Online discourse around popular games sometimes devolves into a familiar topic, “Who would be on the mount rushmore of gaming characters?”. There’s no question that the quartet would include Mario, Link, and Pikachu, but I’ve often seen Lara Croft suggested as an addition…this is a remarkable achievement considering that her biggest claim to fame is three PlayStation games that came out in the late 90s, followed by a series of sequels and reboots of varied quality, and two Hollywood movies.

It had always seemed to me that Lara’s impact on the gaming zeitgeist is a little outsized compared to the quantity of great games she’s starred in…but then again I had never played any of the originals. I was a little too young to play them when they were popular, and by the time I was old enough to go back and be interested, they were already two generations of console back, and seemed pretty antiquated.

The last few weeks though I dedicated myself to sitting down and finally playing the original game all the way through, with as little help from the internet as possible, on original hardware, and just do it right.

Tomb Raider is ostensibly about Lara Croft globe-trotting after a set of macguffin’s called Scions…you’ll go to Peru, Egypt, Greece, and Atlantis in search of these items, and in trying to outrun and outwit the evildoers who are also after them. The plot is thin but mostly an excuse to get you to exotic locations full of traps and enemies, and to present the titular tombs for you to raid. You will spend 90% of the runtime exploring the levels, searching for keys, navigating platforms, and another 10% of the runtime fighting enemies like lions, bears, dinosaurs, demonic centaurs, mummy's, and a few bosses throughout the game.

Tomb Raider is also a surprisingly long game with plenty of replay value. It took me probably 20 solid dedicated hours if not more, with no guide or walkthrough, to get to the end credits. You will spend a lot of time trying to figure out these levels, and they constantly provide a great balance between being challenging, and having a sense of awe and wonder inspired by the setting of antiquity. Once you complete a level you’ll be told how long it took, how many secrets you missed…etc. Levels that took you over an hour on the first attempt can be easily completed in a fifth of that time once you know exactly what you’re doing.

There are also a nice variety of level designs. Some are more linear, particularly at the beginning, but you’ll also have these massive levels that require 3–4 items to progress, and you can kind of tackle it in any order you would like. There’s a greek level where you are raiding the tombs of different gods (Damacles, Neptune), and it’s in a massive vertical room. One small issue with the level design and visuals is that some of the necessary elements to progress like keyholes and levers, will blend into the background a little too much. I got stuck a few times on things like this and had to look up small hints, only to find that I had run past a keyhole or lever while looking for it.

The tomb settings are mostly predictable in that they are just full of skeletons and dusty caverns, but what I wasn’t expecting was Atlantis to basically be this hellscape ala Event Horizon. I was pleasantly surprised by this twist, and had a great time fighting demonic forces and watching the stakes ramp up significantly in the last chapters.

When you start up Tomb Raider, the first thing you are overwhelmed by is how sluggish and deliberate the controls are. Lara moves like a character from Resident Evil, where the up-button always mean forward, and you turn her with the left/right. The platforming is not, as it is in Uncharted, merely a cooldown between chunks of action or cutscenes, but a challenge in itself. Guiding Lara between jumps and over pits of spikes is thrilling precisely because of how narrow the margin of victory is here. At first it almost seems impossible that you’ll get used to these controls, but slowly and surely you do.

Lara has a surprising amount of flexibility in her moves, like being able to choose whether or not to try and grab the ledge during a fall, or drop from a hang and grabbing a ledge under you. Lara can swan-dive into a pool of water, do somersaults in mid-air, do a 180-degree flip trick to turn around quickly…once you get used to all the controls you’ll find that they work a lot better than you would initially think. The platforming is the MAIN part of this game, and they did a lot of work to make it fun and challenging to do correctly. I think people who dismiss it as clunky or not having aged well are being a little blunt in their criticism — if this controlled as fluidly as Uncharted the game would be super boring because there’d be no challenge. The fun of this game is learning to grapple with the controls.

You must learn the value between running/walking, you must learn how to look down into a pit before you hop through it, and you must learn the proper distance between you and ground, lest you fall to your death as many times as I did.

Graphically, we all know that Tomb Raider is a very old PlayStation one game…and it wears though limitations on it’s sleeve. I do think the tombs are very atmospheric and are capable of inspiring wonder even in the primordial graphics of this era. Coming out of a tunnel and seeing the Sphynx in front of you is so cool, even if the room is too large to be rendered all at once by the console. The game does have slow-down and framerate problems, but nothing that hampers your experience. I found the audio, particularly the soundtrack, to be really great. It’s atmospheric and inspires a sense of adventure in the player. The game also is comfortable letting the player be alone with their thoughts, and will go long stretches with no music at all. I also enjoyed the lengthy CG cutscenes that fleshed out some of the story elements…these look good and remind me a little of those early LucasArts games like Grim Fandago.

Something I found myself thinking over the course of the adventure is how much it reminded me of the early Resident Evil games — indeed at times Tomb Raider almost becomes more of a survival and resource management game, where conserving your strongest weapons and largest healthpacks for an unseen future is a large part of the inner meta-game of the player. Save points are limited, so you need to space out the time between using them, or risk a bad fall and losing thirty minutes of progress. You never know when the next room is going to have a handful of tough enemies in a confined space, waiting to piece you up. You never know when the next section is going to be much tougher than the last, so you need to use the save points sparingly…sometimes I would pass them over entirely and only come back to them once I knew the challenge ahead was worthy.

I think the largest thing I take away from my time with Tomb Raider is how much we just don’t get challenging games anymore. Most “hard” games now, are difficult because of the challenge of the combat. Tomb Raider is challenging on a deeper level. There is no mini-map, no navigation, you truly do feel like it’s you against the elements and there’s nobody to help you, there’s no codec like in Metal Gear Solid for the colonel to call you and offer assistance…it’s truly a one-woman show. Maybe that’s what made Lara so iconic in the first place — her game is really just about one woman against seemingly impossible odds, and you guide her through all of it. She comes off as capable and competent, because you the player are proving yourself capable and competent every step of the play experience. It makes you feel accomplished in the way that a game should. Seeing the end credits doesn’t feel like a consolation prize…you feel like you should get a little medal with a star that says, “I finished Tomb Raider without a walkthrough”.