Tomb Raider Remastered
Julio Cesar Thap
Games can be beautiful because they are timeless, but they can also be beautiful because they are timely. When it comes to timelessness, you're going to struggle to beat Tetris. Its stark and nested blocks face every age with the same eternal silence, while the impulse to organise and tidy that they inspire is so deeply rooted in living things that it probably transcends species. Just this morning I watched a crow on TikTok working a stick into a clear plastic tube to dislodge a treat. This crow, that lives in a tree somewhere and probably eats the eggs of other birds because it is compelled to, this crow was ready for Tetris.
For timeliness, though, I give you Tomb Raider - the early Core games. These are the same games that have just been repackaged and remastered in a new collection with an annoyingly unwieldy name. And that all fits, to be honest. To play these games is to play - if you're me - something gorgeous and awkward, something that is gorgeous in part because it is awkward. But the timeliness of it all! I cannot even see these games without slipping back to the 1990s. Scream is on at the cinema. My ex-girlfriend is back from a gap year in Australia and keeps saying everything good is "immense". Everyone I know seems to have bought the same record bag to university. Chocolate bars are going through a great Cambrian explosion (forget Snickers, pick me up a Maverick!), and in every halls of residence there is at least one grubby grey plastic PlayStation, sat upside down so the laser works, with people clustered around Lara Croft's latest. They're stuck on a puzzle. They're playing together, as a kind of chorus. They're calling out suggestions. They've all missed the key that is hidden on the floor behind them.
A warning for what follows, then. Tomb Raider isn't just a game to some of us. It's a madeleine, my Maverick bar, dunked in Lucozade, which takes me back to the time that I was rediscovering games in general. And this time is now so distant, these games such a fond but unplayed fixture of my imagination, that just playing this collection is an act of rediscovery itself, by turns thrilling and melancholy, joyous and frustrating.
The good is very good. Someone cared about this collection. It contains the first three Core games, which to me are the classic texts of this era of Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider 1 sets it all up, starting with those wolves and that ice and then delivering an adventure with levels that seem to grow in complexity and ambition as the developers understand the potential they're working with. Then Tomb Raider 2 is my favourite Tomb Raider game, because it's already restless.
Tomb Raider 2! What I love about this game is that, sure, the treasured object you're chasing after is very old - I should say here that the remasters rightly carry a content warning about the racial and ethnic stereotypes they include, and this game's 1990s treatment of Chinese mythology is about as engaged as you'd fear - yet so much of the game sees you Indiana Jonesing through places which are not actually ancient, but are still harmonious with that kind of numinous scale a certain adventure fiction finds in old temples and mysterious dormant machinery. You get an oil rig, a Venetian opera house, a sunken trawler! Rust and industrialisation, and it works! Tomb Raider 3, meanwhile, builds on everything the first games have and dials it up - much too far in crucial respects. As IGN noted today, the game's treatment of South Pacific islanders includes tribesmen "implied to be cannibals" who use blowguns and issue "animal-like cries as they are defeated." Crystal Dynamics ultimately decided to leave these stereotypes in "in the hopes that we may acknowledge its harmful impact and learn from it."
The games have been remodelled with new textures and models and objects, but the same basic geometry. The modern stuff is harmonious, even if it's sometimes a bit too moodily lit for my mid-forties eyesight. It looks like Tomb Raider, and Lara herself looks more like the Tomb Raider from the first Crystal D games - upgraded, sure, but still the same fantastical character. Best of all, you can flick between the modern graphics and the classic graphics with a single button press and no time delay at all. It's a game in itself. You can walk through these levels switching between one graphical style and another every few seconds, warping between the past and the present.
Lovely stuff, and there's a camera mode for if you want to commemorate each moment, and then all three games come with their extra mini-campaigns and with their Croft Manors, that glorious essential component that took Lara from being a video game character and set her on the path to being something like a Sherlock Holmes figure. Not a detective, but a more-rounded creation, with a sense of history, an actual home that we could explore, while she still retained a certain mystery. Her own Baker Street. And it had a walk-in fridge!
Much of this is wonderful and - to be honest here - I love this collection and the effort that has gone into it. But there are mechanical challenges when it comes to the remastering. And before I get to them, I need to explain why they don't actually ruin everything for me, even as I'm aware that they might ruin everything for a lot of people.
In a way, I think early 3D games like Tomb Raider come from a place in game design that feels even more ancient than really early games. This is because of what designers were grappling with, what they were trying to do. Pong, say, retains a certain immediacy even as it reduces Tennis to two radar blips and a few straight lines. You can play it on an oscilloscope, if you happen to have one, and yet there's no cognitive hump to traverse if you do so, and this is because it's delivering a 2D version of a game that instantly makes sense. Mario has that same instant comfort because we all know about left-to-right, and one squeeze of the run button tells us almost everything we want to know about the physics in play too.
But the first Tomb Raider? When that game first came out I did not even understand what I was looking at. I didn't understand how the 2D textures had been arranged to make 3D spaces, I didn't like what I saw at the time as a weird glitch when the textures created little black tesselation artefacts at the edges of the screen. Could I imagine Mario allowing that level of visual imperfection? (Reader: I now love those artefacts.) And when someone eventually handed me a pad, I couldn't work out how to move Lara around. Her design spoke to such grace, but I was clumsy as I stumbled about those first few tombs. I grabbed at ledges and didn't connect. I walked into walls. I fell many times to my death.
What I mean to say here is that I expect a certain amount of awkwardness in a collection that takes games from this era and brings them into the present day. Maybe - is this an argument too far? - I would feel slightly cheated if the awkwardness wasn't there.
Anyway. It has taken me a long time, playing through sections of all three games over the last few weeks, to reach this kind of clarity on things. My first hour with the collection was absolutely horrific. I leaped straight into Tomb Raider 2, that first level, down in the pit beneath the Great Wall of China. A level I had played many times long ago, a level in which I could still remember exactly where to go. And I couldn't do it. I could barely move.
The collection comes with two control schemes, and I started out with the most venerable: tank controls. These were the controls I think I first used back in the day - or a scheme that was very similar to them. You have to steer Lara as if she's a library trolley with a bad wheel. I can almost feel that sensation of pushing forward, but also down, with both hands on the grips in order to move forward. Lara turns, and then her forward might no longer be camera-forward. The relationship between Lara and the camera is complicated, until you learn to understand it, at which point it's still never quite invisible, never quite something you can forget. Instead, and I remember feeling this at the time, Lara versus the camera becomes a meaningful part of each puzzle. It's odd and awkward, but it's consistent, the relationship always works the same way, and so it earns a place in the game as a sort of ghostly mechanical element.
But I have played a lot of games since Tomb Raider 2 and I have been spoiled. Maybe spoiled is the wrong word. One thing I had noticed without really appreciating it over the years is how much modern games use special case context-based fudges and little moments of kindness to ease you through their gauntlets. They will realise that you're aiming for a certain ledge, and like a tall person in Tescos reaching for a high box of Cornflakes for you, they will step in and help and get you there. Tomb Raider 2? Tomb Raider 2 does not do this stuff for you. It does not care what you're trying to do. And so it's almost rudely exacting. Not straight on to a wall? You're probably not going to grab it when you jump. And grabbing a wall takes two buttons, remember, jump and action. Running jump? Fine: how far? Have you moved back enough? Are you sure?
Reader, in the real world, I am learning to swim at the moment, and I am lost in this period of breaking all these movements that should be graceful and smooth and completely mindless down into little pieces that I have to carry in my head and think about, very artificially, in sequence while I'm underwater. And that's what it was like working through the first level of Tomb Raider 2 using tank controls in 2024. I loved it, eventually, and I even got a bit of speed going. And, deep down, I still think this is the right way to play this game. But it's not easy. This was 3D gaming from an era when developers were not working with a lot of best practices in place. This is a game from an era when you were meant to reserve space in your mind at all times to think about the controls - when the controls, the sheer embodiment of being Lara Croft, was sort of the whole deal really.
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