Tomb Raider: Chronicles is the last of the PS1-era games but isn’t what you’d expect from a send-off of a franchise and a generation of consoles. No, that would be what we got in Last Revelation. This game sends off the PS1 with a whimper.

I’m writing this a few days after beating Chronicles, and already the game is coalescing into a blank spot—one where I apparently played this game for roughly ten hours. It’s like I was told all the weird things I did while drunk or watched a tape of myself sleepwalking. I have little to no memory of doing so, but there’s the proof, right in front of me.

This game was developed under a tight budget and tight timeline. It’s the shortest of the PS1 Tomb Raiders, and its existence came from a mandate by Eidos, the franchise’s publisher until that point. Lara couldn’t die at the end of TR4, so get back to work. At this point, the new generation of consoles was fast approaching. A new team at Core handled develop- ment for the next-gen hardware while most of the veteran staff created this game, using scraps of the previous entry to help build this one.

If you’ve played any of the prior games, you’ve played Chronicles. The gameplay here is no different from the previous four games, save for a brief underwater section where Lara dons a deep-water diving suit and a little forward flip to get out of vents and tight corridors.

It’s tough to cite one specific part of Chronicles as the reason why I just didn’t feel much this entry, but one thing I can point towards is the plot. It’s the clip show of video games, and its frame drives that point home. Lara’s faithful butler Winston and a few never-before-seen friends drive to the Stately Croft Manor after her funeral to sit beside a fire and reminisce on her past exploits, each of which make up a chunk of the game. When one of these memories end, we cut back to the fireplace and queue up another exploit.

The chapters revolve around one central gimmick, such as Lara being a defenseless child or having her dress in a skin-tight leather getup and raid a tall corporate building filled with goons and cyborg men. Yes, this game gets a bit silly with the enemies at times. There have been plenty of supernatural baddies before, but they always seem to come from some sense of otherworldliness. Take, for instance, a casket which should never have been opened or a curse unleashed on the world. These never come from a place of science, and they seem out of place here.

Once these were over and I reached the end of the game, there’s a cut back to Egypt for one last kicker. Von Croy has been digging up the pyramid from the last game in a hunt for our heroine. He finds her back- pack and presumes her alive.

I will give the game a bit of credit here. In most pieces of media, if a character finds an article of the hero’s clothing—like a hat or jacket—at a site of disaster, they immediately assume the hero is dead. There’s no way they could have survived that, let’s continue our evil deeds.

This game turns this trope on its head, though likely inadvertently. If I found an iconic part of my friend’s clothing impaled on a spike, I probably wouldn’t assume they were dead. I’d probably wonder why they bothered to ruin their favorite hat.

But there isn’t much else to say about this one. If you’ve played the previous games and are hankering for more tomb raiding action from the fifth generation of hardware, this does indeed deliver. But for me, it’s reusing the same animations, modes of gameplay, gunplay, and controls to a point where I’m eager for something new and different.

Core delivered that with their next game, Angel of Darkness, though it is the most critically maligned title in the series. Join me next time, in which I get my wish at a price.