The Tomb Raider franchise is one of the most iconic and beloved game series of the past two decades, and millions of gamers remember exploring sunken temples filled with low polygon crocodiles and devious traps. Turning such a memorable franchise into a mobile game is just asking for a mob a rabid fans to harp on about the destruction of their childhood, but the developers of the recently released turn-based mobile game Lara Croft GO say that they set out to keep the childhood memory of Tomb Raider alive while still making a fun modern game.

Rather than using the hyper realistic style of Square Enix’s more recent Tomb Raider games, Routon and his team looked back at the low polygon aesthetic of the original games, but they did not go for an exact recreation.

“Instead of looking at footage of the first Tomb Raider, we tried to capture what you see when you close your eyes and think about the original Tomb Raider,” Antoine Routon of Square Enix Montreal told GamesBeat in a recent interview. “So it’s not an exact replica … not a literal take on the old game. It’s like trying to capture what you think you remember playing the game as a child, and putting that into the game.”

Routon and his team already succeeded at turning a beloved series into a well-received mobile game with Hitman Go, a turn-based puzzler that captures the stealth and strategic assassinations of the Hitman games in a format not unlike a tabletop game.

“Before launch I remember some people on NeoGAF being like, ‘WTF is this?!?’ and, ‘We never asked for something like this!’ ” Routon recalled. “And we were like, ‘Did we go too far? Are we crazy? Did we ruin the license?’And then we released and we were super-happy, because people were really happy … and some of the best compliments we received were along the lines of, ‘Oh, man, this feels like a true Hitman game.’ ”

Lara Croft GO is available now on both iOS and Android. So far reviews have been generally positive, and the game currently holds a score of 84/100 on Metacritic.

Image credit: Square Enix Holdings Ltd