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A surprisingly meditative replay of an old classic which more than stands up to the test of time.

Tomb Raider

Core Design, 1996

From my memories of Tomb Raider I expected a vast, slightly laggy, early-3D, action-oriented, run and gun with awkward platforming. Three decades later what I found was a very meditative experience.

Ironically for Lara Croft, this article is less video game archaeology, as there’s not much more to add from that perspective. Instead, I want to make the argument for Tomb Raider as a meditation on action games. I’ve played six Tomb Raider games this past year and it turns out that over the decades my memories of the first two or three games had merged into one. Most of the exciting set pieces that I remember turned out to be from Tomb Raider II and III, but this time it was the original that really stuck with me.

Core Design

The Nintendo 64, with 3D graphics and the first analogue stick, was set for release in June 1996. It would launch with Super Mario 64, what would become a genre-defining third-person 3D platformer. There weren’t many other games like this around at the time, although some forays into 3D gaming were being made mainly on PC.

Probably the most famous games created by Core Design up to this point were 2D platformer Chuck Rock and BC Racers, a soulless Chuck Rock themed MarioKart clone. Not even the team themselves thought their next title, Tomb Raider would be such a huge success.

Core’s stated goal was to make an Indiana Jones style game, the brief was action-adventure not quiet-and-contemplative. But designing a new 3D genre from scratch around technical limitations made it a fascinating mix.

The Neverdistracting Story

The story is very much in keeping with Core’s Indiana Jones target. The game starts out relatively grounded, but increases the magic and fantasy side of things as it progresses. In this sense it’s closer to the later 3D Indy adventures, which perhaps took a cue from Tomb Raider’s tone.

While movie Indy believes “no mystical energy field controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.... Wait sorry wrong Harrison Ford character, let’s try that again…

While movie Indy doesn’t "believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus-pocus", Lara is a believer. There’s no doubt in Tomb Raider that magic is real, and you will encounter it.

The story has the same theme as Indy’s best outing at this point, the Fate of Atlantis. Lara is sent to recover an Atlantean artifact, and that’s pretty much the extent of the lore. There are no specific objectives popping up on screen, the player can simply focus on getting to the end of the level.

The setting does help the player feel relaxed and familiar though. Despite playing what was probably their first 3D game, using an unfamiliar control scheme in a new world with new characters, the Indiana Jones touchpoints puts them at ease.

The first action you encounter is dart arrows shooting, and before long you’ll be chased by rolling boulders. A familiar and clever shorthand to set the tone, but they do fit in excellently as game mechanics.

There are more dangers besides, but most of your time will be spent raiding dark tombs, alone and in silence.

Tomb Raider: A Guided Meditation

The visual limitations make this game extremely focused. As with most early 3D games the draw distance is very short, and developers employ a ‘distance fog’ to hide this from the player. It’s usually white or the same colour as the sky, but the underground tombs of TR instead have an oppressive black fog, the darkness ever-present down hallways or all around, in larger caverns. This also brings visual focus to the brightly lit area around Lara.

Textures are plain, simple and few. The scenery is easy to zone-out, only paying attention to try and discern the heights and angles for any ledges you may jump to. The environments are nevertheless beautiful and interesting in function if not form.

Lara herself also rarely speaks and comes across quite unemotional, voice actress Shelley Blond was told to play it cool when recording Lara, like James Bond. A perfect blank slate player character.

Enemies, too, are minimal yet engaging. The few available weapons have limited ammo, so you’ll mostly be using your unlimited ammo pistols. You only ever encounter a few enemies at a time, usually only one. Nothing to think about, just focus on avoiding your enemy with the metronome sound of the pistols firing away. Minimal yet engaging.

Indeed, most enemies are animals. Apart from cutscenes Lara rarely encounters any humans, and fewer still who speak. Any encounters are a rare punctuation of noise among long, quiet stretches of silence. That is except for the constant quiet rhythm of Lara’s footsteps. A very quiet, zen experience.

That is if you were playing on PC. The PS1 release had more music, which is very nostalgic to people who played it on Playstation. For PC players, the consensus is it would ruin the peacefulness of raiding tombs. It’s a completely polarising topic and at very least highlights the effect of music on the gaming experience.

Speaking of which, console versions didn’t allow saves like the PC. Instead you have a few save crystals (checkpoints) placed around the levels which you have to find. You will die a lot, and I saved extremely frequently, so props to you if you battled through on console, although it sounds like much less of a zen experience.

Tank Girl

My biggest fear revisiting Tomb Raider was the archaic ‘tank controls’. The cursor keys to rotate Lara and move her forward and backwards, which can lead to you having to steer and reverse her like a vehicle. At first it feels clunky compared to modern movement, but soon becomes second nature. Once you get into risky platforming you really appreciate this clever design allowing you perfect precision platforming.

Lara’s world is grid-based, made up of standard sized blocks. One step backwards from Lara is a standard block in length. One ‘running’ step is a full block, and one walking step is half. A running jump will take you further than a standing jump, and if you can’t make it because it’s too far or too high, you can also ledge-grab. All of this is covered excellent in the tutorial level, practicing all these moves and combinations around Lara’s mansion.

This avoids frustrating trial-and-error deaths. You can’t fall off ledges while walking, so it’s easy to measure up a difficult jump. There are so many combinations of steps, jumps, running, grabbing, sliding, even backflips that take you different vertical and horizontal differences. Every jump is a little puzzle needing the right combination and execution. It keeps your brain working just enough as you take your time to make the jump. A far cry from the instakills and frantic QTEs of the modern TR games.

It may sound clinical, but still feels analogue and organic, and as you gain experience you will also be able to judge much of it on the fly, yet without risk of falling. It also feels fair, you also won’t waste time trying to make a jump that isn’t possible, a common experience in platforming.

This deliberate, predictable control design was probably a result of the first foray into 3D design. But it ensures the player move with forethought and purpose, every step of the way.

Camera

This control scheme fits neatly with the 3D camera. The camera moves automatically and almost always does the right thing, freeing the player from frustrating camera controls of many early 3D games, and rarely suffering from clipping issues. There’s no mouselook so one less thing to worry about, but you need to turn Lara around to focus on what you want. This means occasionally having to make a jump ‘blind’ which would be a nightmare if not for the deterministic tank controls.

The modern controls from Tomb Raider Remastered (2024) fare even worse. Mouselook would be nice, but the camera already did a great job auto-targeting enemies and highlighting important areas. Unfortunately it still does this under the ‘modern’ control scheme of Remastered, wresting control away from the player and worse, making Lara run in the wrong direction when the camera changes. Players of old fixed camera adventure or horror games will be familiar with this, holding down a direction when moving to a new room and then immediately walking back out of it again. When auto-targeting kicks in you’re still instinctively tugging at the camera to try and aim with the mouse, but it doesn’t work at all. The original controls are so integral to the game’s design that to me they are a non-negotiable part of the early games. Lot's of unnecessary distractions, not very zen.

Mario 64 had fantastic camera controls and much more natural 3D platforming, not grid-based. Given that was built for the first analogue controller, and TR was built for the PS1’s D-Pad, the design and implementation of both games feel suited to each. With two of the first 3D games to nail the brief so well on their first try, it inexplicably was years of control scheme trial and error before the industry settled on a more Mario 64 standard for 3D movement and camera controls.

As the Tomb Raider series moved away from this tile based design, they had to develop a way to prevent frustration. The 2013 Tomb Raider trilogy fudges the jumps and actions, stretching them out artificially if the game wants you to make the jump. Or it may show a cutscene of Lara almost falling, regardless of how easily you made the jump. It tries to replace mechanical tension with ‘cinematic’ drama, but once you realise you’re a passenger, it utterly fails. Playing the original trilogy after playing the latest yellow paint games feels refreshing.

The Death of Lara Croft

On the subject of the reboot sequels, a quick thought on Lara’s death scenes. Lara has a few death animations, a crumple to the ground from a big fall or impaled on spikes. No gore, just a stark reminder of the brutality of cave-diving and adventuring alone in nature. In the later games these have turned into many extremely gory death scenes created specially for lots of unique set-pieces. Much was made of the Lara ‘torture porn’ of the 2013 reboot series, and these realistic death scenes seems add a very odd snuff fetish bent to proceedings.

Lara v1.0

I won’t go into the decades old sexism debate around Tomb Raider unless there is more to say such as from the books. I will say that Shelley Blond’s Lara is the classic Lara for me. Keeley Hawes was more down to earth and understated in later games, which I also enjoyed. Angelina Jolie’ unlikeable badass in the movies was, to be fair, the exact Lara Croft that was in the public imagination and the one from TR1’s cutscenes. A very different Lara from stoic, more neutral gameplay Lara that adds to the calming vibe.

Puzzles

There are many solidly designed environmental puzzles to be solved, switches, levers, blocks to be moved and so on. They are often broken up into mini puzzles and the platforming required to solve them is also often a puzzle unto itself.

Indeed many puzzles are just figuring out how to get up, down or across somewhere. Sometimes there are multiple routes, sometimes you can find unintended routes. By exploring, observing and pushing on through, you figure out what to do next. It’s very minimal and much more satisfying than modern yellow paint games in my opinion.

It’s worth noting that if you ever get stuck, the amazing Stella’s walkthroughs has the best and most comprehensive set of guides I have ever seen for any game.

The Tomb Raider

It’s so easy to forget that this was one of the first major attempts at a 3D game. If you grew up in the 90s and 2000s you will remember many potentially great games ruined by the player or camera controls (or lack thereof). My rose tinted glasses come off within the first 10 minutes of playing many classic games, or I end up wishing I could play more, but it’s not worth the barrier of entry. In Tomb Raider, everything feels extremely natural. It feels like a modern game made to look retro such as Valheim.

For me it was a surprisingly meditative and focused experience that I enjoyed more even than I did decades ago. Perhaps it’s because the industry, especially this genre, has moved to constant bombast, yellow paint and reducing player agency. Or maybe I’m just old.

Whether by technological necessity or not, the visuals, audio design, controls, level design, pacing and the world grid construction all combine to a focused, deliberate experience. A quiet, considered, focused game with enough complexity to fully internalise and engage, yet not be overwhelming. For me Tomb Raider I has changed from ‘just’ an important and great classic, to a gaming experience I absolutely adore.