Tomb Raider

When I was younger, I absolutely loved Tomb Raider. But as time went on, the games changed, for a bunch of reasons, and I feel that these changes were not for the best. This is something that the development team thought, as well, though at the time I didn't know that. The Tomb Raider team was truly one of the gaming industries' tales of woe, and seems to be a miserable experience hated by everyone involved, to the point that the turnover was huge, and the team eventually killed the character of Lara Croft to be rid of the horrors of working on the project. Tomb Raider 1 was a work of art, and it went downhill from there.

But like I said, as a consumer, I didn't know that. EIDOS worked hard to keep that information from the general public, and I was young, a teenager, and it was in the infancy of the internet, so all I got was the games. I just knew that something changed between Tomb Raider 1 and 2. I didn't know that the original creator, Toby Guard, had left the team because he couldn't stand the sexual harassment his creation, and in a way daughter, was getting. I just knew that something was different in a way that I didn't like.

But that is the reason that Tomb Raider 1 is my favorite game in the franchise. So I was delighted to see it pop up on my Switch in a beautiful remastered edition. I just finished replaying Tomb Raider 1, and I'm here to share my thoughts. As with all my reviews, there will be major spoilers for the entire game.

One of the first things I want to talk about is what Lara meant to me, and to other women who were girls at the time. The design of Lara Croft is unapologetically feminine. You look at Lara with her body shape, her long hair, her angular face, and there is no doubt in your mind that you are looking at a woman. And for me in particular, with my hormone disorder, you're looking at a woman who has my body type in particular.

I guess we're gonna talk about titties. I've got no choice. Here's a fun fact about me, I'm hourglass shaped, just like Lara. As a teenager, I was skinny, because I had a wasting disease. I literally just special ordered some bras off the internet, because the ones I've had for the past 20 years are wearing out, and my underbust measurement is 37, my overbust is 48. That's a 37K for my fellow bra-wearers. I got weird tits. But most people have weird tits and just didn't know it because they were taken in by the bra industry- seriously, the vast majority of people are wearing the wrong sized bra.

But here's the thing. I did gymnastics and dance when I was a kid. I was specifically told by my instructors that I would never make it in the industry because I didn't, "have the body for it,". What they meant, what they were telling a child, was that my tits were too big to be a gymnast. And my ass. I'm hourglass shaped. They'll tell you that right to your face, too. No matter how much weight you lose, how much you exercise, how much you starve yourself, how much you train, tits too bomb. You'll never do it. You were born wrong to have this hobby. You need to get elective surgery to fix your perfectly good genes, for aesthetic reasons, if you want to be able to do anything acrobatic, ever.

Then, I played Tomb Raider.

We're not gonna sit here and pretend that this isn't common and dangerous. That certain body types aren't prioritized over others in this space, to the point that actual children develop full blown eating disorders. The 90s were really a time of fighting back against that, it wasn't just Lara, another thing I'll remember until the day I die was in the movie SpiceWorld, a line about how you can do anything you want, with the right tools.

I think that a lot of people who bitch about Lara's design genuinely forget that big tittied children exist. Like they want, in their heads, to believe that once your grow tits you're magically grown, on account of, idk, straight up pedophilia? I have no idea for the reason why this is a thing. The adultification of children is it's whole other topic, but the point of this section, is that Lara showed that with a good support bra, you didn't have to listen to those fat-shaming, body-type-shaming, child sexualizing assholes.

Or did you?

As I mentioned before, Guard left the project, because Eidos wouldn't stop sexualizing Lara in all the marketing materials.

Now, Lara's grown, and I'm a normal sex-positive person who obviously knows that human sexuality is a normal, healthy part of the human experience. I'm not here to slut-shame Lara. I'm here to ask WHY Lara? Why use sex to advertise an action-horror game that has nothing whatsoever to do with sex? What is the context here? There are games where this would make sense. Like, for example, the God of War series, where you, as Kratos, have entire mini-games about the strength of your dick game. To progress the game, your sex appeal and dick game have to be strong enough to pleasure the literal goddess of love, to seduce sirens. Your sex appeal is a part of the game. Lara's pussy game is completely irrelevant to the Tomb Raider games, especially Tomb Raider 1. There's no sex. There's no romance. There's not even a love interest. This isn't Lara being sexy because she's here for sexy fun times, this is Lara being sexualized for no reason. For all we know, Lara may be asexual at this point.

It's her body type. People like those uppity gymnastics teachers and random heterosexual menfolk looked at her and said, "this is a person who is sexy," based purely on her appearance, and didn't give one fifth of a fuck whether or not that was true. This is a problem. It's a problem with society. Women who look a certain way can't just be badass gun-toting tomb raiders, they have to be sexy, because people get erections when they look at them, and therefore it is their duty, their burden from birth.

Pair that with the fact that puberty starts as young as 9 (for me) and go fuck yourself. We need to take this social idea and shoot it right directly in the head. Titties do not equal sexy. And Lara was the perfect opportunity to tell people who think that that they're going to get shot. That's the message that Guard wanted to send, and the message Eidos ruined.

So Lara caved. She got the breast reduction surgery. Instead of changing the society, she changed her body, and sent the message to girls everywhere that that is what you have to do. I will never forgive this company for doing that. I will go to my grave pissed about them sending the exact wrong message when they had the perfect opportunity to do something truly feminist and... just morally correct. They changed the design instead of using their far reaching social and economic power to change the society. That's not OK.

If Lara were a real person, I wouldn't judge her for this. But she's not. This was a corporation that decided to send this message. I completely understand why someone in Lara's position, were she real, as a celebrity who was getting unwanted attention would make the informed decision to have elective surgery. But she's not real. She's a character.

And, I firmly believe that this isn't a decision that Tomb Raider 1 Lara would have made anyway. Let's talk about Lara's personality and how it's also been butchered at time went on.

Lady Lara Croft prefers to go by Dr. Lara Croft, because she earned her doctorate. She was born into her title. Lara grew up rich and spoiled, and it shows. But she's also undergone hardship, after surviving in the Himalayas after a plane crash, Lara learned to rely on her own resiliency. As a result, Lara is an arrogant, educated, take-no-shit kinda bitch who will shoot you as soon as to look at you. The amount of fucks she has to give is very low, and a lifetime of entitled rich-bitch extravagance combined with athletic and academic training has given her an attitude that I quite enjoy. She doesn't really make friends easily, she's a loner. In fact, you're alone throughout the entire first game. This self-sufficiency is a big thing for her.

As the series went on, they for some reason wanted to change this, and to this day I have no idea why. I get that you sometimes need to work with allies, but the Rise of the Tomb Raider games decided to just completely change her personality and make her a people person with a whole crew and everything and there was absolutely no reason to do that, other than the same thing with the tits.

Women need to be socially intelligent to be women. Women need to have moments of extreme emotional weakness to be women, am I right? Women need to be interdependent, right? That's how sexism works. It's not like having the kind of trauma that would come from being the sole survivor of a plane crash and having to survive in unforgiving terrain as a literal child would knock that shit right out of you, especially if you never got it fixed. No, we need to do a complete science denial because sexism.

I'm literally a psychologist. Fuck off.

Why did they call these later games Tomb Raider? It's a completely different person. If you want to make a game series, you don't need to slap an old IP on it. You made a completely new game, let it stand on it's own merit. Live or die, do it with honor. Don't just steal Lara's name and put it on a completely different person. There's simply no call for that.

Even though I was playing on switch in handheld mode, the controls really felt like I never left. It felt like the old Playstation, on my big box TV. Just like Lara, I had recently moved, and everything was in boxes. I had actually planned to play this on the TV, but I finished the game before I unpacked or furnished my living room.

The game does have 2 different control schemes, the classic controls (listed as tank controls) and something else listed as "modern controls". I did not touch this and I suggest that you don't either. Every review I've read about these modern controls say that they're terrible to the point of making the game unplayable. The tank controls are intuitive to me, but apparently not to younger players who are used to games where directions are picked based on the camera, rather than the player character, but I really feel like you'll get used to them if you give them a chance. Play the tutorial level, Lara's home, with the tank controls and I truly think that your body will adapt and you'll have a much more pleasant experience.

The levels are laid out expertly, much better than in subsequent games. You can really tell that this game was a labor of love, before all that corporate bullshit drama I spoke of earlier with the higher-ups demanding crunch time, impossible deadlines, and replacing the team as older members left due to the marketing and inhospitable work environment. This was before all that, so the level design is top notch. The puzzles aren't so difficult that you would need a guide, but they are difficult enough that you feel a sense of accomplishment when you figure them out.

The level design also plays to Lara's "shoot first and ask questions later" personality, a tactic abandoned later when the team decided to abandon the realistic portrayal of PTSD and the fact that this personality trait is an obvious trauma response (though, to be fair, there are scenes of Lara in therapy, so she may be actively working on it, but I still don't like how it was handled). In this game, your best course of action to progress the game is to shoot first and ask questions later. If you, an archeologist discover living dinosaurs, kill them dead. Don't think about how that's a scientific marvel, kill them dead. You're here to raid tombs and get that aggression out.

The level designs are based around the character and the story, creating an immersive environment that is a delight to play through. Sometimes beautiful, and once you get to Atlantas, straight up disturbing in a way that makes you wonder what the hell is wrong with Natla.

Let's stop and talk about Natla for a second. She's another character who I absolutely love who got ruined in the later games. Natla, in TR1 was a mad scientist, straight up. She was that trope. There was no magic, no bullshit, just a mad scientist. Natla wanted to create genetic mutants and set them forth on the planet to see what the hell would happen, because she believed that human evolution in particular, but the biosphere in general, was in an evolutionary rut that would lead to a genetic dead-end. She had the power to actually pull that off, as one of three rulers of Atlantis, alongside her brothers, so they would up sealing her in a cryogenic chamber to keep her from doing that. She awoke after a nuclear bomb released her from that chamber, and rebuilt her power from the ground up.

We can't have a lady mad scientist, though, who gets her power through her own ingenuity, so later games literally just gave her magical powers and fell back on the witch trope, because this company hates women, I guess. I don't know why all these changes were made to weaken the originally very powerful female characters.

The character design is where this difference really shines. In the original TR1, and the remaster here, you can see that Natla doesn't magically sprout wings because magic. She's literally grafted one of the mutants onto her spine in a matter of minutes, because she's a badass mad scientist. You can see it on the character model. It's arms and legs are wrapped around her, and the neck merges with her neck.

And her creations, by the way, are absolutely terrifying. Tomb Raider is an action/horror game, not simply an action game. Atlantas, by itself, is horrifying, but even before we get there, when we gets hints at what Natla is doing with the centaurs, it's straight up body horror. These mutants don't have skin for some reason, and each and every one of them scares the everyloving shit out of me.

But, the most terrifying is the doppleganger. I distinctly remember killing myself on her, because that was the first time just shooting something didn't kill it, and instead caused her to shoot back at me and kill me. But when you look at this thing, your first instinct is going to be to shoot it. It's terrifying. Looks kinda like ET in the face.

She's actually less terrifying in the remaster. Part of the fear is the low-poly artwork. But Natla made that! And she had to make it recently! After meeting Lara. That's terrifying! I've said, 'terrifying' a lot, but I felt the kind of acutal terror with Tomb Raider that I don't often get with straight up horror games. And you couldn't shoot this thing. You still need to kill her, but it's a whole big thing!

This game allows you to switch between the new, updated graphics and the old PS1 port graphics on the fly with a push of a button. This is a feature you will need. You will do this a lot. Because the new look is absolutely beautiful, when you can see it.

For some reason, whoever was in charge of the lighting for the remastered look decided to just fuck that job up completely, so for big chunks of the game the screen is so dark you can't see anything, and you'll have to switch to the classic graphics to make the game playable. I've read other reviews and I'm the only person bitching about this, so this might be an old people thing, but I wanted to play through the entire game with the new graphics and I just could not see well enough to do it. I would turn my switch lighting all the way up, then go to play a different game and get absolutely blinded.

And I'll totally accept that. I wear glasses, and I have light sensitivity that causes my eyes to strain real easy in low light. But look at that picture! That's the kind of difference throughout the whole game. Somebody somewhere made the decision to create a beautiful graphical overhaul and then make it so dark that you can't see it!

I get that most of the time you're underground or in tombs or whatever, and realistically it makes no sense for the lighting to be as good as it was on the PS1. I understand that in the really real world, those environments are going to be dark.

But it's not the really real world. It's a videogame. Not everything has to be realistic. I've spoken many a time on my opinion that chasing realism makes videogames worse, and this is an example of that concept in action.

I heartily recommend this game. This is a keeper. I wish the development team would release a patch to fix the lighting issues, but that is my only problem with it. There is that weird modern control scheme included, but it's completely optional and doesn't actually affect your gaming experience if you don't turn it on.

Tomb Raider 1 was revolutionary when it debuted back in the 90s, and though it may be a nostalgia trip for me, I truly believe that it holds up for today's gamer. And, knowing what we know about the behind the scenes now, it's also a glimpse into an alternate universe, where game studios didn't fuck up things quite so much, a game that was a true labor of love. This kind of quality could have continued into the future if we saw videogames as interactive art rather than sellable, marketable, content that needs to be shoved out regardless of the effect that has on the team, and dumbed down to 'ladies are sexy' regardless of what that does to the consumer.

Imagine what Tomb Raider 2 could have been if it had been done right, the way the creator and the original development team wanted. Imagine Tomb Raider 3 that was it's own thing, not a bunch of ideas left over from this alternate universe Tomb Raider 2 with a story slapped over it. Imagine a Tomb Raider 4 that didn't kill Lara off and a Tomb Raider 5 that wasn't literally just post a bunch of unused content with a funerary bookend in lue of a story. Imagine a world where this series continued along the path carved by Tomb Raider 1.

And the price really can't be beat. You get three games for like $30. And though the other two aren't as good at this one, they're still decent quality adventure games. I do still intend to play through them. For me that's not even 2 hours wages for hours and hours of content.