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.
And that all fits, to be honest.
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!
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.
The good is very good.
Someone cared about this collection.
ThenTomb Raider 2is my favouriteTomb Raider game, because it’s already restless.
You get an oil rig, a Venetian opera house, a sunken trawler!
The games have been remodelled with new textures and models and objects, but the same basic geometry.
It’s a game in itself.
Her own Baker Street.
And it had a walk-in fridge!
But there are mechanical challenges when it comes to the remastering.
This is because of what designers were grappling with, what they were trying to do.
But the first Tomb Raider?
When that game first came out I did not even understand what I was looking at.
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.
Maybe - is this an argument too far?
- I would feel slightly cheated if the awkwardness wasn’t there.
My first hour with the collection was absolutely horrific.
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.
You have to steer Lara as if she’s a library trolley with a bad wheel.
Lara turns, and then her forward might no longer be camera-forward.
But I have played a lot of games since Tomb Raider 2 and I have been spoiled.
Maybe spoiled is the wrong word.
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.
Fine: how far?
Have you moved back enough?
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.
After a while I switched to modern controls.
And here is when I almost had a sort of prolonged Tomb Raider crisis.
Modern controls make a run at bring Core Lara Croft up to the present day.
you’ve got the option to recenter the camera behind the character!
it’s possible for you to grab ledges automatically.
Shooting is suddenly mapped to triggers.
A lot of it works.
But a lot of it doesn’t.
Partly this is because a 3D camera likes to have a meltdown in tight confines regardless of the era.
Partly this is because the game is incredibly bad at explaining itself.
I had to stumble upon photo mode by accident (grab the thumbsticks, I think).
And while the camera is modernised, lock-on while shooting is definitely not.
I am an idiot, obviously, so I am happy to take some blame for this.
This game does not explain itself enough.
But there is something else, something which I don’t think any modernised controls could really square.
Classic Tomb Raider is set on a grid.
This is why it’s so beautiful for some of us to contemplate.
The world of Lara Croft is a world of established units.
Want to run up for a long jump?
Jump back to the start of the grid square you’re currently in first.
Want to know if it’s possible for you to reach a ledge?
Count how many squares up it is.
And the tank controls are built around them.
These modernised controls have a complex relationship with the grid.
Over time, I’ve come to suspect they’re haunted by the grid.
This is crucial for measuring out jumps, and you just can’t do it.
It’s harder to do the sideways flip jump, too.
Each chandelier was one grid square in size, but the modern controls lost me within that small space.
Eventually, I had to stop trying to line up and just run and jump blindly.
But it was imprecision in a game that historically was a lot of things, but never imprecise.
I have come to terms with this, over the last week.
I now play the game switching back and forth between controls when the game suits it.
In a gun fight in a small space?
Chased by a boulder?
This sounds awful, right?
But here’s the thing.
It sounded awful to me at first too.
Below the dressing, it’s not even close.
It does not want you to be stuck.
It does not want you to stop.
This is not Tomb Raider - not Core Tomb Raider anyway.
These games wanted platforming to be a challenge and also a puzzle.
This was the action here.
You stopped and thought and measured and imagined the jump and then did it.
This was the game.
And cludgy as the new collection is, that feeling has been preserved.
Oh great, so some annoying games are still annoying?
That’s missing the richness.
It also misses the richness that emerged from the hesitations, the getting stuck.
I remember Tomb Raider levels so clearly because I spent so very long inside them.
Because I was stuck I got their atmosphere, their peculiar delights.
I got their deep, intractable weirdness, too.
No, the way that things are organised.
I love this about it.
Supports control remapping, walk to action, action indicators that highlight interactive objects.
Last night, I went online again and did exactly the same thing, almost three decades later.
A copy of Tomber Raider 1-3 Remastered was provided for review by Crystal Dynamics/Aspyr.
