The best Tomb Raiders are coming home and I cannot wait

Although the specifics change, it seems like there’s always a period in games that feels especially distant. And I mean distant in a wonderful way. The hardware may only be up in the attic or photographed and prepped for eBay, but the games themselves feel remote, bizarre, unprecedented and alien. No game looks as briskly abstract as G-Police at the moment. MDK looks like a game about insects, but insects covered in early Stealth aircraft armour.

It’s the first PlayStation generation that feels weird and magically ancient right now, for me at least. I look at those games and I’m just fascinated. Games once looked like this? I remember it, of course, but it still feels like a beautiful fantasy. Games once looked this good? This odd? This gorgeous juddering phantasmagoria was once mainstream?

And chief amongst these games, again: for me at least, is Tomb Raider. The original Tomb Raiders, which for me means the first, second and third Core games. And happily, these are the games that are headed to current platforms next year. I discovered this yesterday during the Nintendo Direct and I whooped for happiness.

Real talk: Tomb Raider 2 is just about my favourite game of all time. Well, it’s certainly the most transporting. It sends me back in two ways, to two places. I’m back at the Opera House, the Oil Rig, the bottom of the ocean. But I’m also back in my very early 20s, just out of university and in that great, melancholic lost year that follows. Shared houses. Bedsits. Communal kitchens. Upstairs at a computer I recently used to write a dissertation on and which is now just about handling Tomb Raider 2, with all the setting set to low, so that Lara Croft looks both sun-burned and heavily contoured. Zany contrasts. Improbable limb joints. Valium slowdown whenever I do that iconic jump to the side. The flames in the last levels suggest not hell and damnation, but the big flickering segmented TV screen walls of something like Ghostwatch.