Okay, Indy went to Venice too, but not like this.

But along the way: Venice, largely in the form of a massive abandoned opera house, and that oil rig, and that shipwreck. A textbook itinerary.īut Tomb Raider 2? The story circles ancient China, kicking off at the Great Wall and headed eventually to Tibet and back to China again. Tomb Raider 1 obliged: Peru, Greece, Egypt, Atlantis. Lara Croft was strongly influenced by Indiana Jones, and Indiana Jones spends all his time in the ancient world. So a level, halfway through, in which you may well drown several times before taking your first steps. The history of Tomb Raider - 20 years of Lara Croft The history of Tomb Raider, as told by a certain Chris Bratt. It knows it has to give players what they want - more platforming, more Croft - but it's determined not to give in and give players what they want in the way they expect it. It seems to sense the strictures that come with the first game being a mega hit. And I love Tomb Raider 2 because it's wilfully different. This is probably my favourite Tomb Raider - my favourite game in a series that I properly love. Not all on the level of 40 Fathoms, but in lesser ways scattered through the game. Tomb Raider 2 is filled with this sort of stuff, actually. I couldn't conceive of a game screwing with me like that. My PC could barely run it at the time anyway: I thought a level had half-loaded. But the first time I played 40 Fathoms, I thought the game had broken. They know where to go, how to follow wreckage on the sea floor until you find a sunken ship, and beyond. This is what the walkthroughs never capture. They remove everything that you have been taught to use to guide yourself through levels up until now. Lara Croft is disoriented, so rather than put a visual effect on the screen or muddle the controller inputs, they just completely disorient you. This is astonishing stuff, a level that kicks off by removing almost all architecture and lighting, all signs of guidance. Everything is dark, it's hard to tell which way is up or down, but if you pick the wrong direction you'll very quickly find you're done for. And you're running out of oxygen from the moment you regain control. Tomb Raider 2 does eventually take us to more traditional ancient spaces.Īnd you leap out of a cut-scene into, what? Into darkness. But the submarine pilot is startled by sharks, and the sub hits an underwater cliff. Shit has gone down, and now she's escaping, clinging, without an air tank, to the back of a submarine that is making a break for it. Lara Croft, adventurer and T-Rex killer, is tracking an ancient Chinese relic across the world, and has just explored an abandoned oil rig in the middle of the ocean. 40 Fathoms comes about halfway through the game. Forget No Russian or whatever it's called - this is where my idea of what games could do was spun around three times in a blindfold and pushed off, wobbling, in the wrong direction. I am purely talking about the start of 40 Fathoms by the way.

Whereas what it really is, is an audacious riff on the things that video game levels aren't meant to be. They play 40 Fathoms like it's a video game level. These walkthrough artists are too good: too decisive. That's because 40 Fathoms is actually like a magic trick - you can only really experience it as it's meant to be experienced once. More specifically it can get in the way on one occasion in particular: 40 Fathoms.Ĥ0 Fathoms is an astonishing video game level, yet when I watch it on Youtube, the audacity of it never comes across in full. Their virtuosity can get in the way very occasionally, though. These walkthroughs, though! Tomb Raider was a very technical platformer back in the days of the grid system, and some of these players out there are just astonishing. Always a walkthrough: I have the game on Steam, but I can never get it to run quite right, and besides, part of me doesn't want to go back in person.

Here's a little piece to celebrate its quarter century.Įvery so often I load up a walkthrough of Tomb Raider 2 and take the whole thing in again.

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