A good part of the Internet has already sung high praise for the OG Tomb Raider trilogy remaster’s loving determination to rejuvenate the classic. I’m glad it has. Being alone in finding it quite a marvel would leave me feeling pretty sad and possibly stupid.
One aspect of the remastered trilogy that I believe I haven’t seen enough praise for, however, is the game’s achievements, which I absolutely adore. There’s something for everyone here. Some achievements are expected, some are difficult to find, some are hilarious, and many are straight-up bonkers.
Tomb Raider I-III Remastered has some of the funniest achievements I’ve ever seen
To drive my point across, I believe that there’s no better example than the fact that there are achievements for killing bald enemies, specifically in different ways. As a man who still has hair but whose family tree hairline foretells a barren future, I could feel attacked, but the specificity at play is just too funny to get mad at. Also, we do know for a fact that bald people tend to be evil — in games and movies, that is.
Similarly, there are expected achievements, like one for killing the T-Rex, the most memorable encounter in the original game.
Cool, but expected. That’s when the game pulls a fast one on you, as there’s also an achievement for not hurting it at all. I spent most of my life thinking that just being nice to it was not an option.
I’d have never found out about this one if I hadn’t cheated and looked at Steam’s achievement list. Finding all of these achievements by oneself is, dare I say it, more difficult than all of the challenges Lara goes through in any of these games put together.
Yeah, some of the achievements are just bonkers, such as the one for finding all the different (36) ways to kill Lara in the game or the genocide run one where you kill everything there is to kill in the game. There’s also one for making Lara scream twice during one single fall, which is another thing I wonder how many players even knew was a thing.
One of my favorites is this very specific achievement called “Play it like you did on a console in 1996”. You get it by saving the game fewer than 86 times during a playthrough. Dude, that would sting me hard if I were a younger gamer.
Petting animals has become a big thing among gamers, so naturally, there are a few animal-related achievements. There’s this seemingly simple one for petting a cat. The problem, however, is that there are no cats in this game. It forces players to go on a whole new puzzle-solving trip to find out how to get that elusive cat (Spoilers: it’s by doing a handstand atop the sphinx).
And that’s not even the wildest animal-related achievement. There’s one for killing a Gorilla at the highest point of the level, all for a King Kong reference. Hands-down, though, the wildest of the bunch is where I had to bring 11 wolves in front of four Toltec warriors for the cheekily named “Dances With Wolves” achievement.
I tend to abhor achievements and trophies in games
These achievements aren’t just funny, though. They add thematically appropriate layers to this game, as I assume no gamer is more likely to be a trophy collector than a Tomb Raider fan. I really like what they’ve come up with for this game in terms of achievements, and that’s as high praise as this game can get from me.
I think we might all have the “completionist gene” in us to a degree. I loved every moment of my run toward Global Elite in Counter-Strike GO, and I’ll never fully recover from failing my Diamond promo in League Of Legends. Achievements in single-player games, however, are something that I never much cared for. That’s especially true for story-driven games that I think only stand to break the player’s immersion by popping up a trophy notification at a supposedly dramatic story moment.
The moment I got to my friend’s place to see him have a character cutting off his fingers to save his son from a psycho in Heavy Rain, then immediately getting a “Golden Finger” trophy notification, was the moment I made the mental note to deactivate all achievement notifications forever. Luckily, I began playing Tomb Raider remaster on an account that wasn’t my main account, which led me to start seeing some trophies popping up, and they were just too damn fun to disable.
Is this a sign to give achievements/trophies another chance? I’ll at least put some thought into it, and that’s already an achievement.
You can now try to unveil all the mysteries of Tomb Raider I-III Remastered on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
