The Cave Review
Indie games have become all the rage. With many AAA titles failing to meet their monstrous expectations, gamers are finding happiness playing games with a smaller scope. However, this can be a tricky field to navigate. A $60 game with a multimillion dollar budget gets looked over extensively by the developer and publisher prior to release. With smaller indie games being distributed through digital channels, you often get the feeling that those checks aren’t quite as rigorous. Media hype has also become an issue with indie games because despite what some developers will tell you, most of them are much more about providing simple enjoyment rather than blowing you away. The Cave is the latest example of the mixed world of indie gaming.
The past several months have been filled with lots of exciting talk about The Cave. An increasingly common way to try and generate hype is to start throwing around the names of individuals working on the game. Often this method has merit and we have written about specific, talented individuals in the past. Other times this leaves you feeling shortchanged. The Cave is the baby of Ron Gilbert who apparently has been dreaming up this game for the past 20 years. I had never heard of Ron Gilbert before but his name was getting dropped around so much that I figured he must be some rare talent that I’ve never heard of. His ‘fame’ comes from previous work on some old LucasArts games. The Cave begins by having you pick a band of three characters to take down into the aforementioned cave. It is a platformer which requires puzzles to be solved to complete the levels.
Sadly, The Cave is a pretty mediocre game. The biggest problem is the complete lack of any sort of narrative. There was so much talk prior to release about how this cave would draw people in and how interesting it would be. That’s not the case. Upon completion of the game I was still left wondering what the point of it all was and why the three characters I chose went down into the cave to begin with. There is some occasional narration by the anthropomorphic cave but most of it just seems like filler. The puzzle elements are a bit of a mixed bag. They largely involve finding items that you can pick up and figuring out where to put them or how to use them to get through the level. A lot of the time things are pretty straightforward but sometimes you are required to make connections between very loosely affiliated items.
There are some technical problems with the game as well. The controls are not very smooth or precise. There were times when I was trying to move a character to a very specific place and found myself having a hard time getting there. I would ever-so-slightly tap left and my character would move too far left. Then I would ever-so-slightly tap right and my character would move too far to the right. There are also issues with your characters getting stuck. Sometimes you are able to use a different character to move something out of the way and thus free the stuck character. Other times you are stuck for good with your only recourse being to reload the game.
Things aren’t all bad with The Cave. For the most part the game flows pretty smoothly. Level design is quite good with lots of varying themes. This definitely helps keep things feeling fresh. There were also a handful of moments which were pretty funny to the point that I found myself audibly laughing. In theory there is some replay value due to certain levels only being available based on which characters are in your party. This means you could conceivably play the game a second time with different characters to see a few new levels. The problem with that notion is The Cave just isn’t enticing enough to want to play again.
70/100