Travelogue: Detailed Analysis On Every Level In Tomb Raider

If you’re a Tomb Raider fan, I hope you enjoy this. Tomb Raider is well known for being the adventures of Lara Croft, who hunts for sport, and goes on globe trotting adventures that are some of the more memorable in any videogame. It also has really well crafted levels that deserve some commentary, I played through the game with save crystals last year and the experience was so fun I wrote a bit about each level.

Caves

The ease of this level compared to what comes after makes it difficult to remember the scary atmosphere playing it though the first time. It’s relatively empty of threats unless you fall into the bear pit mid-way through. It teaches you to look at your surroundings and practice some jumps, also introduces switches and the most terrifying song most people will ever hear in a videogame.

City Of Vilcabamba

I used to pronounce this City of Vicambia for no reason. This level is the first typical Tomb Raider Level; introducing swimming, keys, traps and some more difficult platforming. The first block puzzle plays host to an epic theme that really gets across the awe-inspiring feel of the old Tomb raider games, though since it plays over Lara pushing the block, it also demonstrates her toughness. There’s more wolves in this level, and you can be killed easily enough if you don’t use a small med-kit at least. It’s still a breeze though.

Lost Valley

The first great Tomb Raider level. The first time you play, finding the actual valley section feels like going to an area you shouldn’t be able to. It’s the first big open playspace, with waterfalls, temples and bridges spanning high up across the valley. The T-Rex shows what the game might have in store around any corner from now on, and three levels in the game establishes the possibilities for levels.

I think the Valley looks better in the darkness without the sky box that fans have put in, it makes the dinosaur enemies more menacing. The cogs needed to stop the river reminded me of an ancient clock the first time I played this. It’s also the first element of the game which is thoroughly based in fantasy aside from the Tombs themselves. This is an early highlight for the series.

How were there dinosaurs in the valley?

Here’s an answer I found: After a short meeting, Qualopec and Tihocan sentenced Natla to be frozen in a stasis chamber and placed under current-day Los Alamos, New Mexico, for all time. The island of Atlantis began to break up because of the stress generated by the Scion. The leaders placed all of the Atlantians in green bubbles that kept them in stasis until a solution could be found. The two remaining leaders decided to deal with the device the only way they could. Qualopec created a temple high in the Andes, in Peru. This temple was placed under a city created by the Peruvians, Valicimbla. Beneath this city, a lost valley laid where Qualopec had apparently animated a group of dinosaurs. In order to reach the entrance to Qualopec’s temple, a intruder would have to encounter these vicious dinosaurs.

Tomb Of Qualapec

This level has the first difficult platforming puzzle. It contains a room with two pedestals Lara will need to move around via switches to open a door back at the start of the level. It’s necessary to make one of the more difficult jumps encountered in the game; and it’s not obvious where, which may frustrate new players. The switch hidden in the wall was established in Lost Valley, but I’m not a fan of these kind of camouflaged mechanisms. The level has the first boulder trap of the series, and it’s much slower than in Tomb Raider 3, making it easy enough to avoid. Things come to a head with Lara grabbing a piece of the scion, only to encounter Larson on the way out. Beating him gives us the shotgun if we haven’t grabbed it already, and a cut-scene where Lara dumps on him.

St Francis’ Folly

What is a Folly?

Answer: Applied to a building a folly usually denotes something that is built to be looked at. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries aristocrats were nostalgic for the Classical and Medieval periods — at the time Romanticism as an artistic movement emerged along with the resurgence of Neo-Classical and Neo-Gothic architecture. It was a hobby I suppose. A far more healthy hobby than the wealthy's choice in “paintings” today.

Kind of like Vegas today with it’s replicas of landmarks, wealthy people would build ‘ancient’ monuments on their lands — fake castles and Greek temples on hills and in parkland — as one user notes: “have you ever seen pictures of lakes with little round temples on islands in the middle? It was a fairly common style of folly back then.”

“It can also be a structure, ancient or modern, that was constructed at great cost with very little lasting value, use or appreciation by local people. Examples could include the great capital city that the Pharaoh Akhenaton built when he changed the religion of Egypt completely; but which was a ruin less than fifty years after his death, and possibly the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.”

St Francis Foley expands on the ideas of Qualapec, there are still puzzles connected by a central hub, but they are much more tricky. The opening of the level features lions which take a few more hits to take down, as well as Pierre who obnoxiously pops out from behind the pillars to sap Laras health then run away.

Interestingly, we don’t see the actual insides of a church here, instead the are is immediately Greek in it’s tile-set. The descent into this level is deeper than that into Lost Valley, and the use of switches opens each area which the player can explore in non-linear fashion. The bats are a menace as you try not to fall off the ledges, and this level will probably have a high death rate on first playthrough. There’s luckily plenty of save crystals throughout, but the player has to think of where and when to use them. It’s the longest level so far, but mainly because of the pitfalls you can run into along the way.

The Colliseum

The levels are getting more expansive now, and there’s a formula being established of an opening section leading into something much larger. The Coliseum itself is now one of the wider areas seen so far, and Lara spends a lot more time here working her way around the area. The goal is still to solve three sections and unlock the final door, but this time Pierre will appear more frequently, and this will be the most combat heavy section so far. If Uncharted owes a debt to Tomb Raider for anything it’s probably the cinematic ledge shimmying in the opening section. There’s a nice contrast between the water sections and the warm sand of the arena floor. One way the game shows heroism is by having you pass speed tests to get out of the holding cells which were presumably used for Gladiators. In fact these levels are all about putting Lara through the gamut of skills expected of ancient heroes. The next level The Cistern however, will take a different approach.

Palace Midas

Again we’re getting used to taking a detour around a central hub area. The switch combinations for opening the doors may have eluded new players in the PS1 era, when low resolution textures were the norm. The stages are getting so large now that it’s sometimes easy to forget you are playing the same level when you finally return to the central hub. To be honest, I would have never thought to press x I front of Midas’s severed hand, but I suppose if the player climbs onto it by accident and knows the story of ancient King Midas’s Golden touch, they will eventually figure out how to turn the bars from lead to Gold. The game will at this point have shown the advantage of shooting animals from higher up, and there’s a large amount of kills to make here. Interestingly, their AI seems to make them run for cover when Lara is shooting from atop a ledge. They charge her only when she’s on the sae level as them This seems to have been an early solution to a problem with the combat. Overall Palace Midas is interesting mainly for the iconic Death scene of Lara turning to Gold, and the nice little Garden area towards the end. Lara pulling apart the pillars also continues the parallels with Greek heroes.

The Cistern

It’s kind of a twist; now that the Greek trials are out of the way, we descend into the cisterns of the Folly. It’s almost as if these levels might have gone first as the opening act, if only because the tone is a little more suited to an Italian monastery from now on. Once you step into the huge room full of walkways; it’s clear there’ll be a fair bit of exploring to be had. You’ll get to know the layouts of each level very well from now on, and the guiding hand of the developers is more subtle. Most of the challenge here is simply taking the space in and choosing what to navigate to first. For that reason it’s actually one of the more relaxing Tomb Raider moments and it’s another highlight. If this is Tomb Raider’s Water Temple, it’s a lot less frustrating than Ocarina of Times. There’s only one switch necessary to raise the water and fill the Cistern, but there’s a large amount of keys you’ll need to see the end. I initially thought this would be the last of the games mid-section, since things wind up in an open area that would be perfect to take down Pierre in, but there’s a few twists and turns left before we can get the second piece of the Scion.

Tomb Of Tihocan

This is pretty much tedium for the first half, you’ll encounter very little you haven’t seen already and the deaths are far too cheap. I’m not sure if I remember these razor sharp door traps in later tomb Rader games but they are obnoxious here. The use of the block to open up various doors in a sort of jail cell area is pretty badly placed after what we’ve been dealing with only recently in Palace Midas. It’s the same gimmicks again only not nearly as interesting. About half way through things look up however; you really feel like you’ve reached the bottom of a vast mystery, and the centaur mummies coming to life are pretty scary and horrific. Lara discovers a bit about Atlantis and the Scion, and her struggling to translate the words gives the exposition an ominous feeling. One of my least favourite openings so far, but things end on a high point.

City of Khamoon

Not much of a city, at least compared to City of Vicabamba where at least the people had houses. This level is a mixed bag. I like some of the areas in terms of style. Water and sand are always a good mix in Tomb Raider, and this level has Lara doing a bit of everything. It does suffer from herding you in certain directions after you’ve gotten used to back-tracking, and if you aren’t carful you might end up locking the game. There’s a door at the start you use a key to open, and later it was the only lock in the level I remembered, so I took another key there. Pressed X and nothing happened. It ate my key and there’s no way to complete the level then. As a side note, I find it a little annoying in games when you’ve been exploring for a while and you find something but have no idea what to use it for. Personally I prefer that most pickups instantly make you think of an earlier section. That’s how puzzles and secrets build momentum in games. I suppose this isn’t always the best approach, but here it could cause someone ot have to start the whole level again. Then again the restarts are getting longer and longer here each time you die, and you’re expected to play for longer without saving. Thankfully, although dying is a setback, you tend to get back where you were speedily enough as you’ll have each section down by heart. City of Khamoon is not bad at all, but it’s mainly used to establish a few new enemies and set the tone of the Egypt levels.

Obelisk Of Khamoon

Part of what’s dragging Tomb Raider down at this point is the structure of a room with three or four different challenges. These sections are becoming a way to pad out the game between new ideas. For this reason Obelisk of Khamoon doesn’t really hit it’s stride until you reach the slopes and stairs gimmick, where you have to use a switch to climb part of a tower. It’s become clear to me that part of the enjoyment of a lot of levels is replaying them when you know where to go. You feel like you are mastering the game, without the frustration you get as a new player. It’s also not clear what the designers are going for until you’ve tackled two thirds of Egypt’s levels; when suddenly you find yourself going back to the City of Khamoon to place the four artefacts into the obelisk. You realise the levels having been stacking ever since the Cistern. Sure you return to the Lost Valley very briefly in Tomb of Qualepac, but it’s not nearly as impressive as it is here. Two levels become part of the same overall puzzle of getting into the Sphinxes Tomb. Because it’s something new, it’s easy to forgive some of the tedium involved in setting up this neat bit of Game design. The truth is Tomb Raider 1 is often seen as the most pure in terms of the core mechanics of the series. It often relies on the very basics of it’s gameplay to get across feelings of achievement, fear or curiosity; but because of this it’s heavily reliant on any diversions from that formula to keep the player engaged. Obelisk Of Khamoon puts you through frustrating sections where you feel like you’ve seen it all before, but the it doesn’t forget to give a payoff at the end for your efforts.

On a side note, the Atlantian mummified monsters that leap out at you in quite dark spaces are some of the most terrifying enemies you’ll ever encounter in a videogame.

Sanctuary of The Scion

Egypt winds down with a memorable sight seeing tour around a huge sphynx. Most of the fun to be had lies in figuring out how to navigate your way to finding both Ankh Keys which will be needed to access the final surprise below. Before that though you’ll be dealing with the introduction of flying creatures that are more threatening to Lara than the bats in St Francis’s Folly. You learn to take these out fast enough if you want to climb around higher platforms safely. Tomb Raider is a game which gives a liberal supply of med-kits and ammo throughout each area, but you’ll still need to have picked up at least a few secrets to mange the increasingly difficult combat sections. The Atlantean creatures move much faster than Lara and seem designed to get the upper hand on her, since she’s got more limited movement. Nothing here is too difficult, but the frequency of encounters is increasing. The final section o the Sanctuary has Lara exploring a huge gulf hidden beneath the Sphynx, swimming into the depths below to huge Egyptian monuments. The scale is impressive for PS1 and the use of darkness only adds to the atmosphere. The last boss before you pick up the scion is Larson, who you can finish off just as quickly as before without much hassle.

We then get an FMV leading us to the final section of the game, Atlantis; only this time you’ll be starting without weapons.

Natlas Mines

This level is basically one big Resident Evil style puzzle, with lots of back-tracking. It feels very noticeable that you can’t take out your guns, and it gets worse if you wind up trying to deal with the first boss. An inexplicably out of place cowboy. You’ll need three circuits to get the pistols back, and if you don’t use the save crystals wisely it’s a real slog having to repeat sections here. The level might take you upwards of forty minutes first time through. Presumably this is to build up to the reveal of the Atlantean pyramid. It’s a style of level that will see it’s natural successor in Tomb Raider Chronicles, where some of these ideas are expanded upon. Unfortunately, it feels a bit out of pace with the rest of the game, and comes across as more of an experiment. I don’t mind Natla’s Mines for what it is, but it really does feel like something you just want to get through as quickly as possible to reach the real end game. It also feels very odd climbing over lava filled caverns in absolute silence; some sound effects might have improved these areas, as the texture work is pretty good otherwise. Skater Boy and Shotgun man are also fun to take down, even if they do make Natla seem very odd in her choice of henchmen.

Atlantis

You will live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension. Atlantis opens with flickering light as you enter a room with gestating eggs. You’ll have to deal with the experimental life-forms from the get go. There’s something very freaky about waiting for the eggs to hatch and then hearing the screams of the monsters as they pull themselves nervously around the room after you. The entire tile-set is a mash up between organic flesh and metal structures. It’s like something from h. R Geiger’s Alien. Although the combat encounters re still frustrating, the feeling of being inside the belly of the beast as you fight screaming filed creations is a highlight for these games that really know how to turn up the horror when its necessary. There are a few tricky platform sections to get through, and there are now various timed challenges in the stage too. Atlantis tests you, but is liberal with save points. It’s a memorable stage and a fitting penultimate test before the final encounter with Natla.

The Great Pyramid

We final get to see why Natla was sealed away in the first place, and it’s kind of funny to hear her Texan accent in the ancient past. Her aims of speeding up human evolution are apt given just how new Tomb Raider and 3D gaming was at the time. But maybe it was too much too soon. She’s a good nemesis for Lara, and her interest in creating life and focusing on the future is an interesting foil for Lara’s focus on the past. In any case, you’ll open the level fighting the “abortion”, and it’ll knock you all the way back through Atlantis f your not careful. Just keep firing uzis and don’t stop moving until it shatters and explodes. You then get to experience Tomb Raider traps at their best. The Great Pyramid is a short level, yet the frequency of the traps and obstacles keeps a high pace that rounds off the game with a bang. Natla isn’t so much different than her brood of creatures, and she’ll fall after a few hundred rounds twice. This level doesn’t disappoint as the finally to a game which though slow at times, gives a real feeling of accomplishment upon finishing it.