Volume 10: Back on the Training Wheels

There are precious few luxuries to being as late to this gig as me, so I have to take what I can get. I might not have been around in time to get my foot in the door any earlier, but I was born late enough that I didn’t have to sit through the infancy of the 3D platformer. Instead, I sat through it voluntarily! 

Tomb Raider is a series that I have a strange connection to. I played the Wii versions of Tomb Raider: Underworld and Tomb Raider: Anniversary when I was barely old enough to string a written sentence together, and it taught me not every game is about blindly charging forward, and sometimes the best way to succeed is patience. 

Incredibly irresponsible parenting aside, I seem to have learned that same lesson in playing the original Tomb Raider for the first time now. By which I mean I spent hours being humbled by archaic tank controls when I very obviously had the choice not to use them. In a lot of ways, it was like learning to use a controller for the first time all over again; nothing can prepare you for how weighty Lara is and how finicky her movement is. It’s a necessary cost, largely down to the time it was made, but not one without unique advantages. 

I spent my first hour with Tomb Raider unceremoniously throwing Lara into walls, failing jumps and having to come to terms with the methodical process of holding a grab button to actually land on ledges. It sounds stupid, but I had to unlearn everything I took for granted and swallow my pride. I had the option to go for the easy way out. I didn’t. And through that, I gained an appreciation for what Tomb Raider is rather than what it isn’t.

As much as I could point and laugh at how “bad” the controls are, Tomb Raider was designed with a slightly stilted accuracy in mind. Croft Manor teaches you that jumping is to be treated with care. You can take all the time you want lining up for a running start, just make sure you can make it. Once I accepted that one rule, everything else (kind of) fell into place. 

Tomb Raider is best in these quiet moments of exploration. Most levels are open-plan sandboxes with a central puzzle to solve before moving onto the next area. Whether finding a key for a door, or a few items to fix an ancient mechanism, Tomb Raider does a good job at signposting your objective without so much as a prod. Actually finding those items is another matter, and can often feel obscure to the point of frustration. Tomb Raider falls victim to a design philosophy very much built on getting as much out of as little as possible.

Midas Palace immediately springs to mind as the level to make me notice how ruthless Tomb Raider could be at times, hiding critical items behind bizarre locations and challenges. By the time I reached the end, I’d clocked up a time of about two hours. A guide on YouTube clocked in at about twenty minutes. It’s clear you can very easily snap Tomb Raider in half using a walkthrough, and I refrained as best I could; there’s joy to be found in combing the hallways of an unmapped tomb, rushing it just robs that feeling.

So why is Tomb Raider also so insistent on making me fight?

For how much I could get used to having to move Lara around in such a way, there was no saving the controls when any kind of time pressure appeared. “Combat” in Tomb Raider is an exercise in facing a certain direction and hoping you can jump backwards long enough to outlast the enemy, hoping there isn’t any kind of wall. It’s this, or standing on a ledge and waiting for a pistol to kill a raptor. Take your pick. There was not a single point where I thought having to shoot was additive to the experience.

I can forgive the odd fire fight against a particularly bothered family of raptors, but there is a pivot partway through the game where human enemies begin to interrupt your exploration to shoot you before running away back into hiding. It’s a point of failure totally out of my control, and it never feels well signposted. With how restrictive the controls are, and how delicate each room is, I am never in an advantageous state to try and find out where I’m being shot from. I die trying to fight back, or die because I took a tumble off a ledge. 

With manual saving being as punishing as it is, there were moments where I lost upwards of an hour simply because of an obstacle I couldn’t have seen coming. My ability to search ancient tombs should not be measured against my ability to shoot random dudes. Funnily, it was this part of Tomb Raider that informed the reboot trilogy over two decades later, and I can finally see why people thought it was such an odd pivot! The entire back half of Tomb Raider felt designed to test nothing other than my tolerance for unfair design. 

Where areas like Cistern and Palace Midas were   satisfying tests of my patience to thoroughly explore without supervision, Atlantis felt like an unfair slap around the face and a total abandonment of what makes Tomb Raider so special. Playing Tomb Raider for the gunplay feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of what I’d be playing a game called Tomb Raider for. Having dipped my toes into the general consensus of Tomb Raider, at least I don’t think I’m on my own with this one. 

Another reason I decided to give Tomb Raider a go now was my preview session for Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis at Gamescom. Even having not played the original, I got an increasingly uncomfortable feeling Legacy of Atlantis would be taking a pessimistic approach to reimagining the first game, and that fear only feels more warranted now than before. In seeing what made the original so distinct, I worry all of those elements will be lost in a sea of pointless additions to sand off the edge. 

At no point did I think “this needs skill points” or “I want to scan for clues.” While I might have wanted to throw the controller down in frustration, it never felt like I was too far from having the chance to enjoy myself. And it was on my own terms. I wasn’t worried about a flimsy sense of “realism” and thinking about how silly it is to find first-aid kits in an ancient tomb, I was there for the atmosphere. 

While games might have largely moved on from using tank controls for 3D platformers, Tomb Raider let me have a glimpse into a time I wasn’t around to enjoy, even if I could do without Lara Croft’s dual pistols. While I might not be able to “appreciate” Lara in the same way audiences back then did, I can still appreciate just how bold she is for a character in such a slow-paced game, especially for the time it was released. 

If this is what it took for people to try something new, I salute them. From initial hatred to reluctant enjoyment, I continue to discover it’s never too late to play.

Skybox is worker-owned and reader-supported! If you like pieces like this, support us at www.patreon.com/skyboxcritics or ko-fi.com/skyboxcritics and help us elevate games media.