Tomb Raider 1

By: Andrew Caldwell

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January 20, 2010

The original Tomb Raider was a game with many strengths. It had a strong atmosphere, contributed to by an intense feeling of dread and loneliness. And unlike some of the later games in the series, you didn't have any companions in any of the dungeons, making you feel truly isolated. You only encountered a handful of humans throughout the entire game, and since they were all trying to kill you, it did nothing to bring you any comfort or quell the atmosphere.

 

The original Tomb Raider was innovative and fresh. It introduced gamers to a 3D translation of the deliberate and slow-paced platforming of games like Prince of Persia and Flashback. And it made this transition very gracefully. Lara could do all the same things the Prince could do, (walking carefully to avoid falling, slowly lowering herself down otherwise harmful pits, running to gain more jumping speed, etc.) so if you were familiar with Prince of Persia, you would at least have a starting point for the concepts that would be necessary to understand in Tomb Raider. And if not, the concepts were realistic and made sense, so once you learned them they became second nature.

 

The plot began with treasure hunter Lara Croft, who was given the task of finding an artifact called the “Scion of Atlantis” by Jacqueline Natla. Before long, Lara discovered she was part of Natla's scheme to reawaken the lost civilization of Atlantis, and traveled to Peru, Greece, and Egypt in order to stop Natla.

The plot wasn't the greatest, but it was enough to keep you interested, and the real reason to keep playing was the exploration and sightseeing anyway. The temples and ruins aren't as impressive today as they were in 1996, but the gameplay is still fairly solid, although it is not without its quirks. The controls are very stiff, compared to today's genre conventions, and Lara is not as agile as in recent games in the series, but I think that gives the game a more realistic feel. And since each jump must be carefully lined up, and given enough of a running start to successfully complete it, it also means that no gap feels trivial, and the particularly dangerous ones are more terrifying, yet rewarding.

 

Most of the puzzles in the dungeons simply required blocks to be pushed or switches to be flipped, but there were also a fair deal of creative ones. One such puzzle involved using a statue of King Midas to turn lead bars into gold.

It was a very influential game, and essentially paved the way for a whole genre. Unfortunately, it also paved the way for more Tomb Raider games, each of which would fail to live up to the example set by the first, although usually for different reasons and to vastly varying degrees.