After playing the new remake of Tomb Raider, I'm convinced you can't actually remake Tomb Raider

Before I tell you about Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, the second remake of a game that has also been ported and remastered more times than I can count over the last 30 years, I want to tell you about Tomb Raider, as I played it in the late 1990s. I remember it in fractured snapshots:

• Finding that trapezoid box in my dad's sock drawer after he came home from a business trip, and somehow not exploding with excitement
• Pressing the Function key that switched from lo-res to hi-res graphics, awed by the sharper polygons
• The eerie quiet of that first cave, punctured by each intrusive shot from Lara's pistols
• Diving through glittering pools, worried about how quickly she'd run out of air, but exhilarated by the feeling of arriving at a new place no human had set foot for hundreds of years
• Learning the hard way to quick save before jumps, because not pressing a key to grab a ledge at the right moment was as likely to kill me as misjudging my spacing
• Falling off a waterfall and hitting the ground below with a sickly snap, the camera lingering on Lara's limp body
• How real Croft Manor felt as a place to explore Lara's life and practice her acrobatic moves
• The almost casual way you come around a corner into a lost valley and see that T-Rex come lumbering toward you out of the darkness
• Cycling through those "look at our 3D models" menus, the way you begin the game by opening Lara's passport exhibiting style in a place I didn't know games could be stylish

I never saw the end of Tomb Raider. I may have barely even seen the middle, but I do remember the wobbly floor under a tempting lever that collapsed with me on it. With no good save to go back to I just… gave up, instead replaying the first few levels I enjoyed. I was not a very determined kid.

I didn't see Lara's first adventure through to the end until Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which I bought in the 2010 Steam Winter Sale and enjoyed a great deal. But even within the span of a decade games had changed so much that Anniversary was fundamentally different from the game it recreated.

Much of Tomb Raider's grit and obscurity were done away with, puzzles made more intuitive, jumping friendlier with automatic ledge grabbing and a generous grappling hook. The mansion was now a puzzle box tutorial rather than a playground. The T-Rex no longer wandered in from the dark—it was siloed off into a tropey videogame boss arena and defeated by quicktime events rather than panicked pistol fire. Lara had developed reservations about killing in cold blood.

Yet just a decade removed from the original game, Anniversary was still more like a game from 1996 than a 2026 remake will ever be. A manual grab option restored some of the platforming's original rawness. The menus retained that swirly '90s flair. Still three years before the trendsetting Uncharted 2, Lara wasn't yet prone to talking to herself while solving puzzles.

The Legacy of Atlantis developers call their new game a "reimagining" rather than a remake, but in playing it I was mostly struck by how strictly we've come to define the form of a big budget videogame in 2026. The menus look identical to everything else. The arrival of the T-Rex triggers a scripted chase sequence. The Peruvian jungle is now lush with life, realistically bright with beams of light pouring through the trees and shadows darkening the corners. Scraped white edges mark the rocks Lara can easily clamber between. Bright targeting circles appear on the objects she can yank with her grappling hook.

Making a 3D game was a new and uncertain thing in 1996. Tomb Raider's developers at Core Design were figuring it out, and the game they ended up making was by its nature experimental. It controlled like nothing else. Its environments were foreboding by necessity of a short draw distance. They didn't have the programming sophistication to make Lara hesitate near a cliff's edge, so precision was essential unless you wanted to break her neck.

By comparison, Legacy of Atlantis feels like a game of Tetris played with nothing but I blocks. It's all been figured out. This is how you do a puzzle, this is how you do locking-on, this is how you signpost the jumps. There are options to make combat or puzzles easier or harder, so you can say everyone can dial in the exact experience they want. Crafting ingredients dot the area, so there's always something to click a button on just a few steps away.

These are not inherently bad things, and Legacy of Atlantis, despite some clear unfinished wonkiness (Lara's jump currently has her hang in the air in defiance of gravity for a smidge too long) is not a bad game. But it has "reimagined" a game that was once weird in the most conventional way possible, 30 years later. I don't know why the developers needed to use generative AI to make it when it all seems so perfunctory.

I'm glad that you can still buy Tomb Raider, and Tomb Raider Anniversary, and Tomb Raider Remastered—Legacy of Atlantis won't replace any of them. But its modern sheen made me reflect on how much of the 1996 Tomb Raider's identity lies in the space between what its developers could make and what they wanted to evoke.

In 2026 it's easier than ever to get close to the latter, creating a near-photorealistic game that looks and moves like a Hollywood swashbuckler. But that's the glitter of fool's gold. The real magic of Tomb Raider lies in all the unassuming bits that now seem old, clunky, hostile.

Big-budget game development can't produce an artifact that feels like that anymore. But I don't actually think it's impossible. If Amazon really wanted to reimagine Tomb Raider as it was 30 years ago, it would hire the developers of a game like Pseudoregalia or perhaps Dread Delusion. Otherwise we're just dressing Lara in the fashion of the decade, dooming her to chase the latest trends instead of giving her a chance to create some new ones.

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