There’s something uncanny about dipping “classic” games in a tub of HD paint for the purposes of a remaster. A reboot can completely reinvent an old character, intriguing players in the same way an adaptation of Macbeth might excite a theatre dweeb. But remasters often feel like someone has plainly yet painstakingly rolled over every inch of the original with linoleum. The worst remasters bring to mind the Spanish pensioner who butchered a fresco of Jesus Christ. As acts of restoration go, Aspyr’s work on Tomb Raider (and Soul Reaver) isn’t quite that egregious. Hard work has gone into updating the scenery and textures. Basic vine sprites become handsome twirls of plantlife. Egyptian reliefs are given form. But there’s a limit to this unfurling of digital lino. The results ultimately evoke the look common in mobile games when smartphones were becoming ever more powerful. This is Lara Croft if she were designed by Gameloft in 2011.
The first three Tomb Raider games got their own remastered collection last year, representing the birth years of a genre and rise of an unlikely marketing icon. Now, we’ve got this package-holiday overhaul of the next three games. In The Last Revelation, Lara unwittingly unleashes an ancient Egyptian god. In Chronicles, her friends reminisce about her adventures after her funeral. Don’t worry, she’s alive again in Angel Of Darkness – the odd PlayStation 2 duckling of the three. Lara is here a prime suspect in the killing of her mentor (and a gritty victim of the smudged mascara era of popular culture). All these came before an awkward period of attempted reboots and reimaginings, and a change of studio that eventually resulted in the 2013 retelling that finally stuck.
But that’s years away. So let’s continue the polygonal parade down memory lane, or the hall of warped memory mirrors, to be precise. The games are coated in HD textures, smooth-edged props, and replacement character models that elicit an era that is neither then nor now. It replicates an art style that might have been appropriate in the PS1 era, were the technology able to reproduce the textures and lighting of an overheating HTC. There is some good attention to detail but the overall effect is a clash between boxy, unchanged geometry and HD moss that looks okay when inspected straight on, and bizarre once mapped to an exact 90 degree corner. The reworked lighting in The Last Revelation and Chronicles favours bold contrasts between light and gloom that sometimes obscures items or passageways that were once obvious in the old game.
This conflict between old and new is positioned as a novelty. You can instantly press a button to swap between the new HD textures to a view of the game au natural, in its old pixellated form. Except, not really. The vertex snapping, low draw distance, texture warping, and other quirks of ye olde PlayStation are all missing, to merciful or sacrilegious results, depending on who you ask. I know these games also appeared on the PC but I and most others encountered them solely through Sony’s machine, so it’s those visual giveaways that I look for.
Some of my instinctive distate probably also comes from Crystal Dynamics’ intent (to re-sell a game) as opposed to Core Design’s original intent (to create a game). If you go back to the games on a PlayStation (or via some other nefarious means – I won’t ask) you’re playing a fossil preserved in amber. Every janky animation and wacky texture is part of the charm. Much of what looks to modern eyes like a wild mess was the result of intentional art direction working within the limitations of a machine that could barely see ten metres ahead of itself.
The beautician’s makeover in this remastered collection has been born of its own set of aesthetic decisions, of course. But those decisions don’t feel driven by creativity under limits. Instead, the choice to revamp these visuals feels dictated from on-high, results of a desire to reproduce and repackage a sellable chunk of nostalgia. The water caustics and wave effects of old Tomb Raider games are famous among VFX nerds for their twinkling ingenuity at the time. By contrast, the remaster’s water is a lifeless, transparent soup.
As an act of visual restoration, giving Lara a higher-poly facelift feels like shrugging her old works back onto the shelves. Witness here Crystal Dynamics pumping botox into an old game’s buttocks and insisting it is as firm as ever. But even when you put aside the visuals, Tomb Raider’s core design (geddit?) has not aged particularly well. Even if the remaster tries to address this too.
You can swap between Lara’s classic “tank” controls and a “modern” preset. The modern preset makes some sense to my thumbs after decades of controlling a character with one stick and a camera with the other. But (as with the previous remastered collection) many of the precise leaps and jump-based puzzles of these dungeons were designed with the original control scheme and grid-based level design firmly in mind. It’s often necessary for Lara to sidestep or step lightly back or rotate just right so you line up the correct lunge or sideways somersault across a chasm. With the modern controls these precise movements are not possible, and even with the archaic controls you are fighting years of thumb training to revert to old ways.
I experimented with remapping the tank controls to try to find a middle ground I liked, but found it hard to come up with something natural. This is the difficulty of trying to remaster how an old game feels, you inevitably end up clashing with spaces designed under an entirely different mentality and purpose. You are trying to drive down a Roman road in a Toyota Corolla. Covering the Toyota’s wheels in horse hooves will not solve this problem.
It’s still sometimes interesting to play, in the sense that you’re going on a small expedition into the catacombs of video game history. You can track the forward trajectory of Lara’s capabilities from game to game. In Last Revelation she can swing on ropes. In Chronicles she can walk tightropes. In Angel of Darkness she can hop over railings and [gasp] make conversational choices in cutscenes. Core Design workers pumped out a Tomb Raider year-on-year for 5 years straight, an unthinkable feat by today’s standards, but one that meant annual games had interesting incremental improvements you could easily notice. Some game design archaeologists might get a twinge of delight seeing the action adventure staples of mounting, shimmying, and clambering being popularised years before Uncharted became the blockbuster to surpass Croft.
But they might also relive the ennui that had begun to set in with Tomb Raider games by this point in the series. Two out of three of these games are commonly cited as the least enjoyable of the lot. I was twelve years old by the time Chronicles came out, the precise moment my hormones might have dictated Tomb Raider be precisely my jam. But Metal Gear Solid had infiltrated the world months earlier, and my brain was too full of Stinger missiles, genome therapy, and Russian helicopters to care what the lady who sponsored Lucozade was doing. Revisiting Chronicles today, I see why I didn’t bother playing much of my brother’s copy. Playing Angel Of Darkness, I am grateful I never tried it at all.
The first of Lara’s PlayStation 2 jaunts is full of invisible walls, randomly interruptive fixed cameras, and obstacles that look climbable but are not. I was not the only one obsessed with MGS at the time. Core Design-ers seem to have been fans too (along with every game studio on earth). Lara’s moveset for this entry includes crouching into a stealth mode and hugging corners to peer around them. Insta-fail stealth sections are still being made today for some god-forsaken reason, and Angel Of Darkness is just one of many games that first shoved those into the tote bag of unthinking game design.
Lara’s classic tank controls are again in full use in Angel Of Darkness, yet this was an era when movement in other games was becoming more fluid and intuitive. Higher fidelity of environment art also works against Lara’s typically griddy and fusty moveset. Almost everything looks clamberable, craw-underable, step-upon-able. And yet only a few things are. Designers had yet to discover the magical properties of yellow paint. Switch to the modern controls and you’ll again feel a screeching clash of control scheme and level design, mildly upsetting to the human cerebellum.
The switch to HD textures and models is less dramatic in this one, with the old visuals retaining the bleary anti-aliasing of the PS2 (the best example of this remains Max Payne 2), while the new textures simply crisp everything up. The lighting in this one doesn’t differ between the two modes at all, though. And judging by the previous games, that might be for the best.
Probably the biggest benefit of playing Tomb Raider via these remasters is that they’ll allow you to quicksave anywhere, and there’s a way to map that quicksave to a multi-button shortcut. But from a purely aesthetic perspective, there is something needless and gestalt about it all. Lara Croft has not aged gracefully, which is fine – in the long run none of us will. But putting her through this TikTok filter and dismantling her tank treads has not made her knees any healthier, her stories more memorable, or her past any more playable. Only the most feverish crypt botherer should follow her into this ominously high-definition temple.