Tomb Raider
My 6th birthday party was themed after Tomb Raider. We played bingo with custom C-R-O-F-T cards we had custom printed. My dad hired a friend from work to come dressed as Lara Croft. He made me my own Lara Croft belt: a ring of felt with a skull sharpied on front, with two construction-paper gun-holsters. My presents included a few Tomb Raider comic books and an Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft action figure that for the next few years I would sleep with as if it was a stuffed plush and not a hard plastic figure.
We could begin unpacking the fact that I was, in the 2nd Grade, already dreaming of becoming a woman. Though there is a more shocking fact:
I did not play through Tomb Raider until last week, a month prior to my 28th birthday.
I owned all five of the original Tomb Raider games before starting kindergarten. Or rather, my dad did. While I had a number of kids games over on the family PC (Freddi Fish, Blue’s Clues, Play-Doh, Lego, etc.) (digital Play-Doh sounds sad and/or silly but that game was rad), our only console, a Playstation, sat next to a mix of games for me and games for my dad. A stack of jewel-cases where “Play With The Tellytubbies” was underneath “Grand Theft Auto 2”, underneath “Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation”, underneath “A Bug’s Life”, underneath “Fear Effect”, underneath “Punky Skunk”, and four other Tomb Raiders, and topped with “Rayman: Brain Games”.
I was playing games from this pile mostly at random. I was playing games from this pile before I could read. I was playing GTA 2 while wearing diapers. Imagine me here listing all of the various aspects of the world I was not aware of when I played Tomb Raider because it is literally all of them. I had no comprehension of existence when I played Tomb Raider.
The first three Tomb Raider games contain tutorial levels separated from the main game. You select “Lara’s Home” and are taken to a unique level: a large mansion containing a training course (of increasing complexity for each consecutive game). The fourth game opens to a mandatory tutorial level that is much more aggressively teachy. The fifth game has no tutorial other than a relatively safe first area
As a literal toddler, I would play these tutorial levels over and over and over. What many gamers saw as optional hand-holding warm-up areas became my first digital living space. Lara’s Mansion was the VR Chat Ambient Chill Relax 24/7 Furry Hangout Rain Bedroom of little Skyplayer’s preschool years. The three versions of the mansion were designed with increasing complexity in order to cover Lara’s expanding moveset. Young me only saw this as “was the red disc the one with the swimming pool or was that the blue one?”
This was all amongst the earliest influences on my brain comprehending 3D spaces. While I can, and probably will, write a similar piece praising Spyro the Dragon for likewise affecting how my brain is built on locational memory, Tomb Raider was just a much more grounded example. Lara moves stiffly, slowly, methodically, not unlike a toddler learning to walk. She rocks back and forth to turn in place. She takes careful steps back from dangerous ledges. She sidesteps one foot at a time to align herself with wall switches. She inhabits a house too large for herself. The mansion’s walls are belittling, the blocky polygonal stairs too large, the spaces between furniture vastly empty to accommodate player movement. Lara is only as proficient at locomotion as the player is with their controller, only as familiar with her own home as the player is with it, not much more than a child is to their own home. An adult player will complain about the tank controls, a child will see and feel a realistic depiction of their own lack of balance and confidence in movement.
Children can also run around in a circle in a video game for hours and be entertained while nothing in particular is happening. And be too scared to step outside the safe boundary of the tutorials.
I mean Lara’s Butler is scary enough!
Now that you are equipped to properly call out my nostalgia goggles, I will immediately say that as an adult I found the tank controls of Tomb Raider to actually be profoundly satisfying and nigh mechanically unparalleled.
Tomb Raider, released in October of 1996, followed Super Mario 64, released in June of 1996 in Japan but not until September for the US, by a margin slim enough that the former could not have been influenced by the latter beyond the developers knowing Nintendo was also doing A 3D Thing. This is probably an obvious statement to those alive at the time, but the mythology of Super Mario 64 existing as a progenitor of all 3D creation in the digital realm has buried itself deep in the cultural zeitgeist. I believe Nintendo is only as responsible as Core Design or Argonaut or any number of hobbyists exploring the computing power available in the 90s, even when it comes to things like “widespread public perception” or “game design precedents”. The 3D-Game was inevitable.
Which is all to say that Tomb Raider has ideas about 3D design that differ wildly from Super Mario 64 because they are two separate branches burgeoning from the theoretical 3D progenitor. Where Nintendo saw perhaps a more natural approach to design (rolling hills, free-flowing landscapes, open plazas with branching paths not unlike the Hub-And-Spoke design adopted by Walt Disney), Core Design saw structure and rigid shapes in the form of human architecture. In a 2007 documentary Core’s studio manager Gavin Rummery explains the level design being the result of working backwards from the design of Egyptian tombs. The interconnected rooms of sometimes-claustrophobic square hallways and grid-based rectangular rooms of towering ceilings came from the influence of human architecture, not software architecture (though the Saturn’s peculiar rendering techniques probably helped) (the Saturn rendered skewed sprites, not true polygons, something in between the “fake” 3D of Wolfenstein or Doom and the “real” 3D of polygonal meshes.) (All digital 3D is fake! It all gets rendered to flat pixels! It’s just arrays of points stored as plain ol’ integers!).
Hopefully this helps disperse the idea that Tomb Raider’s level design or control scheme are “outdated”. I truly don’t believe Tomb Raider has many software limitations that “don’t hold up” to modern eyes. On original hardware I would perhaps argue against the draw distance (though there may be those that argue for it adding to the atmosphere given, for example, Silent Hill), but the playthrough of mine I’m writing about now was done using the “Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft” collection (a mouthful, it seems “The Tomb Raider Trilogy” was already taken as a 2011 repackaging of the three later-6th and 7th generation games).
In so many 3D platformers, especially the collectathons, levels are presented as open playgrounds. Shining, often spinning objects sit atop tall geometry, drawing you in to search for the start of the guided hiking trail that will lead you to it. Pathways of small collectibles lead you meandering between landmarks, perhaps branching to small puzzle rooms. You go into a cave, solve a puzzle, get a reward, and leave the cave with a slightly heavier inventory. They are branching trees that stay close to the root: sometimes one reward will lead to a second, rarely will a more complicated chain emerge. Each time you return to the same open area, ready to find the next branch.
Tomb Raider isn’t doing this and it doesn’t want to do it. Some would say Tomb Raider’s linearity is a limitation: a way to render less, design less, display less. Screenshots do less justice of telling Tomb Raider’s intentions than a distant view of a Nintendo level.
“Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” opens to Indy trudging through a jungle and coming to the overgrown entrance to an ancient structure. There is no immediate awe to the interior of this structure. His local guides abandon him. He barely fits through the narrow hallways, he intrudes on a hive of spiders that have taken residence, the very stonework become hostile towards him with deadly traps and collapsing floors. Only after much ordeal does any room open to be larger than the last, and even then it’s the most dangerous one yet. Upon committing thievery the building completely turns against him, chasing him out.
“Tomb Raider” begins with Lara arriving at the plateau of a snowy mountain, standing in front of the opening to an ancient structure. Wolves storm out of the stone gates, killing her local guide. The player is given control.
The first “world” of Tomb Raider, for lack of a better word describing a set of levels, is one continuous trek through this ruined place. You spend quite a bit of time running through a snowy cavern, killing the wildlife you have intruded upon. The caves begin large enough, though already smaller than any tunnel you will find in Super Mario 64, gradually shrinking as you dare to go deeper into the darkness. Through a few levels the icy rocks give way to smooth stone, then to walls inscribed with ancient writing, then to mossy ruins of a long-forgotten civilization. All the while the gameplay is ramping up in difficulty as any game naturally would. Small hops become larger leaps. At first these jumps have floors below, requiring you to climb out if you fail. Then these chasms get deeper, falling means damage. Then missing a jump becomes deadly. You find a bear making its home underneath a precarious bridge, then you find yourself leaping off high rocks to avoid pits of spikes. The level design narrows, caverns become hallways, caverns become rooms. Danger begins condensing: multiple difficult jumps between any flat areas, those flat areas inhabited by jaguars instead of bats.
Finally, in the third level of a single linear path, when even the doorways narrowed and now you feel like you’re slipping between cracks in walls, you come to the Lost Valley. An immediate awe-striking view of a jungle untouched for untold years. The game did not hand you Bomb-Omb Battlefield and tell you to have fun, it hid this larger world from you miles beneath hostile territory. You bask in the graphic fidelity of a fully grown jungle.
And a T-Rex appears from the black fog. It eats you in one bite.
You respawn, now knowing this valley is in fact the most hostile place yet. You are not here to explore. You are here to get the thing you came for and to then get out.
Where Indiana Jones is satisfied with its location-centered short story and happily broadens out to a typical three-act character-centered adventure film, Tomb Raider isolates this as a gameplay loop, the rest of the game running that design to its logical conclusions. Each “world” plays with geometry and pacing but always comes back to that core design: you are always pushing deeper into the hostile unknown.
Tomb Raider and Super Mario 64 share the philosophy that The 3D-Game’s target is to inspire and satisfy curiosity through exploration. Mario, and really any similar Nintendo game, especially Zelda, envision this act of play as a child running around a park. Tomb Raider offers a more active engagement, a way of pushing back on the player. I find this tactile force-feedback the much more satisfying style when it comes to playing games as an adult. As a kid I forced Tomb Raider into the Nintendo style, by refusing to engage with the hostile areas.
This dichotomy is displayed just as clearly in Tomb Raider’s other, surely more, contentious aspect: the controls.
Tomb Raider is using what is often referred to as “tank controls”. In most 3D games the left directional pad or joystick will move the player in four directions. As soon as the control stick is moved the character will pivot their entire body to face the direction pressed. If Mario is facing away from you and you press “down”, or towards yourself, Mario too will face to look at you. This is what is colloquially known as “controlling a dude”. Tomb Raider’s controls are something I wish was more often colloquially referred to as “driving a car”. While Lara is facing away from you, pressing down causes her to backstep, moving in “reverse”. Pressing left or right will cause her to rotate in place, pivoting in a circle while remaining still, like a car pulling off a pavement-burning screeching-loud donut stunt, or, if she is already moving forward, will have her drift to the appropriate side in a smooth arc. Pressing forward will make her move forward, this is your “gas” button.
You could say that this makes her movement independent of the camera, though Tomb Raider’s camera employs more restrictions than Mario’s.
Tank Controls are often paired with a “fixed camera”, meaning multiple static camera positions exist parented to the world geometry, hand-picked by the developer, as in Resident Evil, a set-up that would be correctly described as having camera and movement systems that do not affect one another.
Tomb Raider’s relationship is better described as being the inverse of Mario’s: the movement controls the camera. In the original release of Tomb Raider there was no player camera control outside of a special “look mode”. While holding the first left shoulder button the directional control is changed to only affect Lara’s head, which in turn carries the camera along with it. In the re-release the player is allowed some control over the camera with the right analog stick, but trying to force the camera to face Lara head-on will cause it to quickly swing around her, placing you back behind her. In either situation if the player wishes for the camera to turn and rest to the left, Lara must physically turn to the left.
This creates a close connection between the player and Lara. Nintendo’s games often feel, by design, like peeking into a toy diorama or a miniature world. Tomb Raider puts you closer to the action, demanding focused vision and intentional movement. It is planting the philosophical roots that would become the modern third-person cinematic experience, your God of War and your Last of Us. Though those games have, with time, sanded away the satisfying friction that comes with the other half of Tomb Raider’s interface: movement.
The original Super Mario Brothers popularized a subtle, almost unconsciously intuitive quirk of control: holding the jump button makes you jump higher. There are dozens of frames one could release the jump button to cut the jump short, incorporating their prior velocity to create a nearly unique jump arc. Despite this complexity, it only takes a few minutes of practice for the jump in Mario to become second nature. It begins to happen with only milliseconds of conscious thought, a reaction more than an idea.
Tomb Raider gives you a small handful of canned jumps. On a flat surface, pressing the jump button will always result in Lara jumping over one grid tile and landing on the one beyond it. Tapping the back button will have her hop one tile backwards, the perfect amount of running room for you to press forward and hold jump, executing a running jump that will always take you over two grid tiles and land on the third. These can be combined with a “grab” command that has her reach out to grab the ledge of an adjacently forward grid tile. Ignoring movement intricacies used by speedrunners that are not required for the game’s completion, these four jumps are your only options.
This is what makes platforming the star attraction of Tomb Raider. The grid-based levels and the intimate controls meet in harmony to present the main challenge of the game as a tight loop of observation, planning, and execution.
Any given room in Tomb Raider can be broken down into an ordered list of these four jumps. Any given gap between broken pillars or jagged cliffs can be counted on grid, asked by the player which jump this particular gap calls for, and narrowed down to a specific solution. As we charted before the player is introduced to these types of gaps one by one, with gradually increasing punishment for failure. This complexity is increased through the level design, not the available movement. You will never get a power-up that affects jump height or unlock a new kind of movement tech (within this first game anyway).
Instead the game may ask for more planning and planning under pressure. It will introduce sloped surfaces, where Lara will automatically plummet if you do not decide whether or not to jump and whether or not to grab by the time she slides off the end. It will introduce traps: retracting blades that add an importance of timing, spikes that require slow movement to avoid damage, puzzles that require retreading of areas with retracted platforms, or perhaps from a reverse direction, requiring a fresh perspective and replanning.
Where some games suffer from a feeling of redundancy that comes from canned interactions, single-solution platforming challenges leading to the thought that you are simply acting out a set of button-pressing instructions designed by the developer, Tomb Raider manages its complexity ramp to keep the challenges fresh. Where,say, Uncharted will present over-the-top blockbuster fake danger vignettes for every few seconds of wall climbing and ultimately present only a facade of complexity, Tomb Raider will give the smallest of static spike pits enough real danger to be far more worthy of your attention.
There’s just enough room for self-expression to place the final cherry on top of Tomb Raider’s repertoire. The standing jump can be performed in any direction, allowing for sidehops and backflips. Chained jumps will initiate more quickly in succession. This allows you to complete otherwise fiddly zigzagging sets of platforms with essentially a string of bunnyhops, where Lara never has to change direction or stop moving. Climbing up from a ledge has a stylish acrobatic cartwheel variant if an extra button is held. Lara can perform a graceful swan dive with a complex three-button running jump but it never serves any gameplay purpose. You are given movement options, but complexity is always defined by level design.
And then the bubble bursts.
Maybe that’s not an apt metaphor. It’s not a sudden pop. I didn’t finish that last paragraph and stare at the blank page for a moment, and then hit enter a couple times and start having this epiphany.
No, it’s been a few days. It’s been a few quiet showers. It’s been a few panic attacks, a few half-filled job applications, a few nights of restlessly tossing and turning while that horrendous buzzing scatters my brain waves. It’s been a few skipped meals and a few evenings of guilt for the ones I didn’t skip. The ceaseless news cycle all the while.
It’s directly after an episode of Sarah Zedig’s Trans Questioning 2 that all this stress comes to a point. I’m staring at the ceiling and eating a Wendy’s Frosty and listening to the rare patter of Californian rain. I’ve finished Studio System: Guardian Angel today and played the new Monster Hunter beta and didn’t get any art done. I’ve begged myself to relax for a day and hid the pill inside the peanut butter of content creation. I feel bad that even the act of playing an artful video game is something I view as a step in my own art, but even that selfishness is manufactured as an excuse to myself.
My mind comes back to this article. I think of the bulk of it being so mechanical. I wouldn’t argue that there isn’t an art in breaking down the mechanics of a video game into a digestible explanation. I recognize the voice in my head telling me it's pointless to be rambling about a nearly 30 year old video game as being wrong. Lots of people write things like this, lots of people read things like this. It’s remarkably easy to me, in fact, to ignore the negative thoughts and the imposter syndrome and the nagging fears.
I could make this three times as long. I could write about the puzzle mechanics and the underwater segments and the sound design. I could praise the original pixel textures, taking some time to download a repository of all the ripped files to show you a few of my favorites. I could put them side by side with the new Remastered versions, showing how clearly they used Generative AI that, even with human touch-up, refuses to make sense under scrutiny. For some time I played with the idea of including my complete review of Tomb Raider 2 inside of this one. Tomb Raider 2 is truthfully awful, as it misses the point of Tomb Raider and focuses on all the least fun parts of this game. This could become an entire series retrospective. I could treat this as a video essay script. A lot more people would watch that than are going to read this.
Even if I stop here I’ve checked off every box with due diligence. I went through the motions. I talked about my childhood. I made this personal. Then I dove into the mechanics. I hopefully offered a unique outlook on old discussion simply by being a unique individual, as we all are. Now here at the bottom I make it personal again. Even this diatribe is fitting in the formula. It’s so easy.
Why am I doing this?
Now there’s the hard one.
I don’t have a job right now. I am very lucky to have found someone to house me. I have enough money to keep me alive until I find another day job. Meanwhile I’m filling my days with the Fantasy. Every year or so I find myself in a time between jobs, when the stress of living is lifted just enough that I have the drive to create things. I have just enough time to breathe that I remember I have the drive to create things. I see so many of my friends living off their creative work and I recognize within myself the ability to do the same and I get caught up in trying to chase that end because it feels so close.
It’s really not. I can buy a lottery ticket just the same as anyone who has won millions. I can write a video game review just like so many that I read that are by people with incredibly large Patreons. I have piles of notebooks of ideas for video games and youtube videos that I know I have the talent to create and I know have all the criteria to be popular, but I think about the end goal and I think too hard about what drives me and it all falls apart.
I hate money. I hate capitalism and clout and branding and the grind and I hate watching people sell out and I hate seeing my friends selling Makeship plushies and I hate the numbers I hate the numbers so god damn much. I hate their successful Patreons and their viewcounts and I love what they create so much. I wish one could exist without the other. I wish I – no I wish everyone could exist without the numbers.
If waking up every day and feeling the urge to play and review a 30 year old game and share my childhood with it to you and infodump about it for a while was enough to be alive then I would do it. I would do it every day and it could all be played straight and I wouldn’t feel this awful urge to ironically twist everything I create.
This is where my artistic ability breaks. I lack the genuinity. I have every skill needed to put all the crazy imagery in my brain down on the page. I can see exactly how this essay should have ended. The concluding paragraph has been seared into my brain by my middle-school teachers. I can see the final note at the bottom, the same note at the bottom of every blog post on every blog. I see the exact words -
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- as these words have been sitting in my brain for a few weeks now, begging me to finish the Content part. The Fantasy promises so much, asking for me to just do what I do best, telling me that every lottery ticket I buy with my hard-earned time is another chance for it to come true. The Fantasy feeds my ego. It tells me how close I am. It tells me how many of my friends have already been selected. It offers me avenues of revenue. It fills my dreams with Makeships and fanart and recognition. It tells me my art is worth more than me. That my friends are so far above me for having created their own, that I cannot be anything until mine is complete, that all I have to do is follow the formula.
I try to fight it. I try to lie to myself. I tell myself my art isn’t good enough. That I’m not old enough. That my time will come but for now I need to stop trying. Fill out an application for Costco and stop listening to the Fantasy. My imposter syndrome is a self-diagnosed injection of Reality. It’s a conscious decision.
And these two parts of me smash together, a hundred miles an hour collision that finally makes the bubble pop and I start typing this.
Nearly everything on this blog so far follows this meta formula. I get three quarters through and have this internal battle, Fantasy versus Reality, where neither comes out on top and I end up breaking character in defiance. I try to find the kernel of genuine emotion, because neither the emotional personal stories nor the mimicry of professional infodumping are genuine, even if the former tries to claim so over the latter.
I know this part is the genuine one, because I don’t know how to end this. I can’t offer a resolution. Every atom in my body is screaming at me to give in to the Fantasy. To create for money. To keep up the daily panic attacks long enough to create something that will be seen and I will be deemed worthy of being kept alive. I don’t care what others will think of my art. I don’t care if it will touch someone emotionally. I don’t care about building a community or becoming famous or making sure the next generation can find solace in my words the way I find it in the ones before me.
I just want enough money to be alive.
Anything I create before I have the money to live will be tainted by that desire.
I hope the world will one day get to see the things I could create if I could create with genuinity.
I give the first Tomb Raider a 4 out of 5, to keep it real.
Tomb Raider 2 gets 1.5 out of 5 its shit.