Tomb Raider: Anniversary Update 9

Temple of Khamoon

• Quite possibly the best level yet.
• Part of the joy here was that I aced it -- every artifact and relic, on my own.
  
• This is one movement puzzle after another, which made it very intense.
• Despite following the original level's outline fairly closely, the puzzles felt very different. This is where Lara's new movements helped push the game beyond the original in an essential way.
• I'm fairly certain that the block/key puzzle at the end was snatched from the beginning of the old Obelisk of Khamoon level. It will be interesting to see if anything else has changed in the next level.
  
• Biggest letdown: ambushes by cats all over the place. These suck.
• The first pressure-sensitive retracting floor is pretty annoying. I will need to look up how others dealt with it.
• If the levels can stick to this standard of quality, then the final half of the game should be gold.
• Thinking back to the original, it also had a ramping up, but I'd say that most of that was the deviousness of the puzzles -- which I equated with quality back then. The standard is a bit higher now: puzzles must be good and the level must look coherent while doing it.
• I think the coherence is why (as noted last night) the Cistern and Tomb of Tihocan were combined. It would have taken some serious reworking to make it all flow in a natural way. That they didn't want to put in that effort perhaps says something about how this game was made.

Next up: Obelisk of Khamoon. The game has me hooked now -- I may be in for sleepless nights of playing, as I experienced with TR1 so many years ago.