Just what carnivals needed: a complete deprivation of sunlight.
By: Casey Curran
Double Fine’s strength as a developer has always been their ability to create fun and quirky gameplay worlds in favor of the actual mechanics. This is the main reason that I felt they should focus on RPGs and adventure games that play to this strength in favor of more conventional games. The Cave is a good example of this, as despite its appearance as a 2D platformer, its gameplay feels more like a point-and-click adventure game; albeit one with a few questionable design decisions.
The Cave starts out by allowing the player to pick three out of seven playable characters: a knight, a hillbilly, a time traveler, a scientist, the twins, a monk and an adventurer. You can switch between these three using the D-Pad or play as all three using local co-op. The gameplay is mostly picking up items to use for puzzle solving, some of which are wonderfully creative and funny. Each character in use also has his or her own special area based on their own special ability.
However, the problem with this approach is that playing alone becomes very tedious. Almost every puzzle requires characters to work together and experiment with different items. Since there’s no way to make others follow you until reaching the next area and each character can only carry one item at a time, it means a lot of backtracking, to the point where half my time was spent going through the same areas. This makes the game take much longer and feel much slower than it normally does alone. To make matters worse, there is no online co-op, something it really could have used.
On the other hand, the game’s presentation and humor are fantastic the whole way through. The actual cave narrates the whole game and has a wonderfully dark sense of humor. The characters themselves meanwhile get their own photographs that can be collected throughout the game, which eventually show their backstory and two possible conclusions depending on whether they took the good or evil route in their lives. These all reminded me of the slideshows of people’s memories from Psychonauts, and it provided The Cave with same charm that game did.
On the downside, to see all of the back stories you will need to play through The Cave three times, one of which will only give you one more character. It’s a shame that the developers did not provide a way to just play through each character’s own level to unlock their backstory, as I had little motivation to replay the whole game despite wanting to try the new areas.
OVERALL (3.25/5)
Whether or not I can recommend The Cave to you depends on two questions:
- Do you love Double Fine’s humor?
- Would you be able to easily get some friends together to play through this?
If you answered yes to both of these, then The Cave is for you. If only one of these sounds tempting, wait for a price drop. Otherwise, don’t bother.
RotoRob GAMING 