Level reviews

"This feels like a time capsule, straight back to the earliest days of custom levels (and this author himself was there, too!). All the way to file distribution as you don't get a standalone release here but rather the tr4 file you should drop into a standard TRLE installation and use the original script files. Moving on to the level itself. The layout is pretty simple, you can move forward almost freely but generally speaking you should try to solve each room in order. There are a couple of enemies, a gotcha moment with a room filled with trapdoors, and a rather odd bug towards the end. I think a boulder gets stuck on top of a flyby camera trigger so if you reload towards the end you cannot move at all as the camera goes into flyby mode and just stands there. Oh, you can also skip the whole slope jumping sequence, which I'm sure wasn't intentional. 15 minutes, 2 secrets. 10/26" - Treeble

"This level is the first I played from the CaC TR30 contest. As an introduction to this topic, it might be the most classic of all the levels. You need a working installation of the original TRLE in order to play! There's even a PRJ and TOM file in the archive, the builder might have used the old winroomedit to build their level instead of the new Tomb Editor. Anyway, I downloaded another level that also used the Coastal Ruins script in order to play. To be honest, this level is a bit lacklustre. Built in a few days, it cannot compete with the level sets that are released nowadays, in which builders pour hours of their time. It is quite short, less than 30 minutes, and that would even disqualify it from the contest as the rules specified to "create a level with at least 30 mins of gameplay". However, it was a great callback to the levels that were released during the early 2000s. I think the builder should have spent a bit more time to refine the details. As an example: at the beginning of the level, Lara finds herself on a beach. In spite of the current, it is possible to swim into the "end of the world" as the small rooms depicting the see aren't large enough to be convincing. The floor of the small islets is also too close to the surface and thus waves with the water, a problem known for decades now. Seeing this, I was expecting a catastrophe of a level, but what followed was fortunately better. Another example: there's an outside place looking like a fortress with crenelation, and it would have taken just a few steps to give it more depth. But to be fair, the rest of the level was quite well-made, with interesting puzzles and convincing architecture. Some places were a bit flat in terms of lighting, but those were sparse. I actually quite liked the light effects using the light rays from Coastal Ruins. Most puzzles required Lara to step on the right tiles to trigger a door or another contraption. Two different textures were used to indicate that the tiles were a "pad" trigger. I think it would have been better to stick to using just one, as to not confuse the player (I found a trigger by sheer luck). I found the trap with the hole opening beneath Lara's feet to be a lot of fun. For some reason the builder used stationary flyby cameras instead of fixed cameras to show events. That resulted for me in a bug, where I was soft-locked in a "fixed" flyby camera after loading. I had to crash the game and reload a previous save. I think the biggest flaw of the level is that it ended when I thought I was at most halfway in. As a 2026 level, it is hard to recommend when the majority of the current releases are masterpieces, but in itself it is an entertaining short adventure." - TimJ

"Sharing only the level files instead of releasing the whole packaged level feels a bit lacking. It’s a compact little level, yet it has far more content than I expected, complete with puzzles, traps and enemies. The only downsides are the somewhat plain visuals, plus an issue with the save loading after the final flyby: Lara becomes unresponsive after loading it." - cheng