Coming up on the end of Tomb Raider 1. Fuck me, such a fun game! The mutants are horrifying.
Edit: Finished Tomb Raider 1! An extremely enjoyable experience all-around. I played and completed most levels blind, or largely blind. I only looked up where to go if I'd spent something like 20+ minutes wandering around without finding anything I could use to progress. I know I looked up where to go in Cistern, but I can't remember if I bothered for any other levels. I almost did in Natla's Mine, but eventually did figure out where to go for the spark plugs.
Aside from a couple of dud levels, like Natla's Mines and Cistern, I thought the overall level design was strong. The game only has a couple of timed segments with tight timing, which was my main worry. I'm really terrible at timed challenges. If I have enough time to relax and think, then I can usually figure out how to pass the obstacle. But I get flustered with a time limit.
The remaster visuals are nice, but the original look is much cleaner. It's easier to tell what can be interacted with using the original visuals. The updated visual style has shadows on objects. This is fine, except when the shadows hide something which the original visuals explicitly show you. The original visuals, I assume, are some kind of baked-in lighting. So when there's a big bright spot underwater, that's like a sign from the developers to maybe look there. The new visuals "realistically" apply shadows, and this means they get haphazardly applied. Sometimes the end result is you can't see a switch, lever or shotgun shell in the remastered visuals, where it was super obvious in original graphics. That's one of my two complaints about the remaster's visuals.
The second complaint is the remaster camera. It's actually quite a bit worse than OG camera, and the funny part is the camera behavior changes when you switch between graphical styles. So you can very easily compare them yourself. The OG camera tries to stay behind Lara whenever it can. Even if it has to get pretty close to her, it will do its best to keep behind her so you can see the jump in front of you. Remastered camera has an extreme aversion to getting too close to Lara. It will instead frame her in an almost fixed camera angle whenever her back is remotely close to a wall, and will refuse to go behind her. You have to create a very large amount of room behind Lara before the remastered camera will decide it's ok to move behind her and show you the way forward again. There are some strategies to finagle the camera, but they don't always work and sometimes the camera will just snap away and go back to watching Lara from a straight-ahead view. Yes, I know Lara is attractive, but I am trying to look at ancient ruins, game.
All this to say I initially started out using the Remastered camera and swapped to it occasionally to check out the
sick new visuals, bro! But mostly played using the original graphics. Original camera was so much more playable and underwater sections are easier to see in the OG visual style.
Fantastic game, though. Great progression of levels, every weapon was fun to use, puzzles were tricky but not obnoxious (mostly), combat was tolerable (mostly) and Lara can carry 3000 rounds of uzi ammo in her shorts.
