I remember the main criticism of the rebooted Tomb Raider game was essentially, “where’s the tomb raiding?” iow: where’s the platforming fun that we were expecting? The answer turned out to be: well, we shoved it into a few non-essential side puzzles. The “tomb raiding” that there was was well designed but felt as if it was a bunch of tacked on afterthoughts as far as the game itself was concerned.
So the interesting thing is that this particular article is specifically talking of that original Tomb Raider, and argues that the best puzzles were in fact non-essential and off to the side. The suggested reason is that they only discovered some of the more interesting parts of the design space late in development, and couldn't put them on the mainline of the game.
Just to clarify, this is a article written in 2013 on the original Tomb Raider, not an article on the game often called "Tomb Raider (2013)". Damn ambiguities :-)
An interesting fact that I have noticed, but I never see anyone mention, is that Tomb Raider has virtually the exact same controls as the older Prince of Persia (the original 2D platformer) game.
