Before diving into the technicalities, it helps to understand what you’re installing. Lara: The Gatekeeper (not to be confused with Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft) is an independent top-down action-puzzle game developed by Storming Tech in 2003. You play as Lara, a mystical guardian tasked with protecting the “Ethereal Gate” from invading shadow creatures. The game is notable for its hybrid gameplay—half logic puzzles, half tactical combat—and its moody, pre-rendered backgrounds.

The reason the "Lara: The Gatekeeper install" process is notoriously tricky is threefold:

Do not worry. All of these issues have workarounds.

Upon installation, the opening sequence changes. Instead of the Endurance shipwreck, Lara wakes up in a circular obsidian chamber. She wears her classic teal tank top, but it’s tattered. Her dual pistols are gone. In their place: a single iron key, warm to the touch, fused to her palm.

A text log appears, written in first-person but not in Lara’s usual voice:

“The Gatekeeper does not seek treasure. The Gatekeeper prevents the threshold from being crossed. You are the seventh iteration. The previous six uninstalled themselves. You will not.”

Gameplay becomes a loop of anticlimax. There are no enemies — only doors. Hundreds of doors. Each door leads to another identical chamber. Every fifth door contains a mirror. In the mirror, Lara’s reflection moves one second slower. If you wait, the reflection speaks:

“You don’t remember installing me, do you?”

The objective is not to escape but to “verify integrity.” You must choose which doors to lock permanently, sacrificing potential exits to keep something — never named — from entering the central vault.

Insert the CD. If you see an error saying "This app can’t run on your PC," that’s the 16-bit stub failing. Do not despair.

The Workaround: