Tomb Raider II, Great Wall, by nokickingpenguins.

Created using Paint.NET

Tomb Raider II was one of the first video games that I owned and one of the few that my mother played. I think I completed it, but everything after the oil rig is all a bit of a blur.

The most interesting bit of this level is the hidden area right at the end. There’s a hidden tunnel below the zipline which you can reach by carefully grabbing the edge, dropping down and then grabbing a ledge as you fall. This tunnel takes you to a ladder, which leads down to the bottom of the cliff face. At which point you fight a T-Rex and find a golden dragon statue. However, this tunnel is very easy to miss, because the player has no reason because the zipline is so obviously the route forward. I personally only realised that there must be something more than just instant death when Lara plummeted to her death after I’d left go of Ctrl half way across. To add insult to injury something large and green stood on her. This blew my little mind, as clearly the designers wouldn’t have put a monster down there unless it could attack you. And clearly it couldn’t attack you unless you could get down there safely. Which meant that I’d missed something. After this revelation, I spent hours looking for a safe way down until I found the ledge directly below the zipline.

I’m not sure if the T-Rex was programmed to do that, but I’d like to think that it’s something that someone from Core Design deliberately added.