LOST CIVILIZATION

The community creating classic TOMB RAIDER adventures in 2021

- Dominic Tarason

The ’90s Lara Croft still lives. While Crystal Dynamics reinvented Lara as Girl Rambo, dedicated fans are keeping her original lycra-clad incarnation fighting fit thanks to the editing tools included in 2001’s Tomb Raider V: Chronicles. Community hub TRLE.net hosts over 3,000 new adventures to play added over the years, many full-length games packed with fresh environments and enemies.

For more than 20 years fans have been mastering and refining Chronicles’ tools, which let you export standalone games for easy sharing. Tomb Raider’s 25th anniversary has brought out the very best, though even 2021’s most notable releases are still just a sampling from a vast vault of treasures.

Movement At The Monastery by Australian developer Lochie is an example of what ‘classic’ Tomb Raider looks like today. Challenging even for veteran players, Lara is invited on a surreal adventure through a titanic Tibetan monastery, a single structure holding dozens of challenges, sidequests, and secrets, capped off with a spectacular cinematic finale.

Lochie got into Tomb Raider editing as a teen. Now 36, he has grown appropriately meditative on the process. “It’s like a creative purge, you get to write a story, design and detail rooms, add music, sound, and cameras, and even scripting if you so choose, and you only have to take on as much of these things as you can bother with,” he says. It’s not all relaxation, as he adds, “At some point the level starts to own you, and before you know it you have to finish the damn thing so you can go back outside and get your life back in order.”

MOD NATION