I love this, I did play the Tomb Raider games when they came out on PS1 but even back then, I found the controls too annoying and clunky to stick with any of them, to the point where I never actually finished a TR game. Fast forward to 2025, and I've now finished TR1 and nearly TR2 on this remastered collection. Very happy they finally decided to modernize these games, particularly controls-wise, but also all of the graphics. Sure there was a certain charm about the original releases due to how 'blocky' everything looked, but these remastered versions feel like they're giving us a chance to see how the developers would've been able to make these games look had they the technology to do so back then.
To someone who has no idea what this game is like, the best way I can describe it is that it bares some resemblance to 'This War of Mine', in the sense that you have to stay alive and reach different checkpoints on a mountain while various things are gradually depleting your character's different stats. Whilst the premise sounds very basic (it's pretty much a case of getting from A to B to C most of the time), there are tons of different random events dotted around each mountain's hexidecimal layout, and these different events will either help or hinder you. For example you might explore a cave and find some useful equipment, or on the other hand you may come across strangers who don't take kindly to you and end up affecting your stats negatively. The events are quite varied and interesting for the first few hours of gameplay, but then you will just keep seeing the same ones over and over eventually, which does make it a lot more repetitive. I also feel like the game is a bit conflicted in the approach it's trying to take. Like is it going for realism or not? In some senses it feels like it is, but then the story is anything but realistic, and some of the events just don't affect your character the way it feels like they should (e.g. you can get hit by a huge boulder and lose less than 10% of your health). I also do not understand why there's no hunger stat in Insurmountable; there's energy, body temperature, sanity, and oxygen meters but no hunger. This makes no sense and as a result, you can spend days on a mountain without eating anything and your character won't mind. The game is reasonably challenging -if- you set the difficulty to the highest one (Insurmountable). If you're playing on anything other than that, the game is just ridiculously easy once you know what you're doing. Overall it's an interesting survival game, but one I'm glad I got for free. I think most people will struggle to remain interested for more than 5-10 hours.
