Can’t fathom it.
Happy 25th birthday,Tomb Raider 2.
Here’s a little piece to celebrate its quarter century.
Every so often I load up a walkthrough of Tomb Raider 2 and take the whole thing in again.
These walkthroughs, though!
Their virtuosity can get in the way very occasionally, though.
More specifically it can get in the way on one occasion in particular: 40 Fathoms.
These walkthrough artists are too good: too decisive.
They know where to go and they go there.
They play 40 Fathoms like it’s a video game level.
I am purely talking about the start of 40 Fathoms by the way.
God, what a start.
40 Fathoms comes about halfway through the game.
But the submarine pilot is startled by sharks, and the sub hits an underwater cliff.
And you leap out of a cut-scene into, what?
You’re deep underwater.
And you’re running out of oxygen from the moment you regain control.
They remove everything that you have been taught to use to guide yourself through levels up until now.
This is what the walkthroughs never capture.
But the first time I played 40 Fathoms, I thought the game had broken.
My PC could barely run it at the time anyway: I thought a level had half-loaded.
Or maybe I had lost it myself.
I couldn’t conceive of a game screwing with me like that.
Tomb Raider 2 is filled with this sort of stuff, actually.
Not all on the level of 40 Fathoms, but in lesser ways scattered through the game.
This is probably my favourite Tomb Raider - my favourite game in a series that I properly love.
And I love Tomb Raider 2 because it’s wilfully different.
It seems to sense the strictures that come with the first game being a mega hit.
And other stuff too.
Tomb Raider 1 obliged: Peru, Greece, Egypt, Atlantis.
But Tomb Raider 2?
So far so Indy.
Okay, Indy went to Venice too, but not like this.
This gives Tomb Raider 2 a very distinctive feel.
I think of the opera house with its dusty carpeting and floors with missing slats.
It’s the ruined engine of a vast modern ship.
The game is full of this, full of gantries instead of boulder-dashes.
So you settle in.
Croft ends up living in these worlds, and so does the player.
That’s never truer than in the Opera House.
In my memory I was in the Opera House for a week at least.
I had just finished university and all my friends and social connections had left town.
I was working in an insurance office and renting a room at the top of a boarding house.
My horizons had never been smaller.
No wonder it took me so long to get through it.
I look back now and think: Tomb Raider 2 was ahead of its time.
Over the years I’ve realised that Tomb Raider 2 is about as good as games get for me.
It’s up there with Zelda and all that jazz as far as I’m concerned.
It’s about places, interesting places which I don’t get to visit in my own life.
It’s difficult and awkward at times, but it’s transporting and intelligent and extremely beautiful.
How can this be.
