With live streams of Tomb Raider I-III Remastered on the official Crystal Dynamics channel we see a common, popular conversation that comes up often: speedrunning!  Many people are interested in the concept of speedrunning, but it can be pretty daunting to get started, find resources, or establish what you’d like to do for your own speedrun.  We’ve taken the time to reach out to a few speedrunners of varying levels, to give us some easy time-saving tips to get everyone started!     Kicking us off is YooBrandii, a long time Tomb Raider player and early in her speedrunning career.  Brandii has some great beginner tips for everyone at all levels, such as the grab/stumble cancel- the grab stumble cancel is also super handy in canceling Lara’s stumble from a high jump. This can save you those critical couple of seconds you need to make a good time. To do the grab cancel, make a running jump forward and as Lara is near hitting the ground (use photo mode to help) and her arms are just about in a “T” position, press the action or grab button and that will keep Lara from stumbling. Instead she’ll land in a quick squat position and stand right back up. Brandii calls it her “bend and snap”! 

Another easy one to practice is the roll stumble cancel, where you press the roll button right as Lara is either standing at the edge of a platform, right as she’s about to run off of it, or as she’s about to land from a big jump. The first place this is handy is in the Caves level in Tomb Raider I Remastered. 

ImRizza has a few tricks up her sleeve, dabbling both in the speedrunning and challenge running world of Tomb Raider.  In her comprehensive video covering tricks for Tomb Raider I Remastered we get to see a wide variety of shortcuts-such as the Obelisk jump, which allows Lara to perform a pixel perfect jump with the correct alignment and timing of an edge grab. This trick allows you to bypass entire chunks of a level if it boasts verticality for the critical path.   

Another nifty trick she shared with us is the “crack” strategy: you can line up Lara....symmetrically...with a wall edge, prompting her to fall backwards through the floor to a safe area below, leading to this particular sequences critical path hallway.  If you look closely, you can see during the trick that Rizza uses a fake ledge grab to push her body forward (now where have we seen that before?), safely into the hallway. 

Did you know as well that by rubbing against walls after a running jump, it will carry the jump's momentum and push Lara forward, like she’s ‘bouncing’ off the wall?  Well now you do, and you can see it navigates Thor’s room here with ease.   

SmoothOperative gives us a more challenging (but still simple) trick that can be used: flickers! 

A flicker occurs when Lara is aligned in the middle of a wall and caught in a constant state of rolling. This makes Lara look as if she is flickering in and out of existence. After ensuring alignment is precisely correct, holding ROLL allows Lara to travel along the length of a wall quickly, passing conflicting tile seams in the process. To do this, we use the flare to embed into the wall to begin the flicker.  This video provides a demonstration of what the trick looks like in Tomb Raider II!  

Wouldn’t it be great to just bypass the Offshore Rig?  Who needs those jerks with wrenches anyway? 

Be sure to catch more awesome content from these three contributors on their Twitch channels, where they make Tomb Raider speedrunning look easy: 

ImRizza | SmoothOperative | YooBrandii 

What are some of your favorite tricks to pull off in the Tomb Raider series?  Are there hidden strategies that the community should know about? Let us know on our socials @tombraider or in our live streams! 

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