Double Fine - 2013 - PC/X360/PS3/WiiU
The Cave is a puzzle/adventure game by Double Fine Productions, the game company founded by Tim Schafer, one of the lead developers of Monkey Island and Psychonauts. This game was directed by Ron Gilbert, who also had a hand in Monkey Island. I mention those games only because the writing and jokes and general silliness is the same in The Cave, so if you enjoyed the humor in those games, this is more of the same. By the way, if you haven’t played Psychonauts, check it out. It’s probably a bit dated now, but that game is criminally overlooked for how good it is.
Anyway, back to The Cave. At the beginning of the game, the game asks you to pick three of seven characters to take into The Cave to explore it. Each of the characters has a different power or ability that is used in the puzzle solving sections. For instance, “The adventurer” character has a grappling hook that allows her to swing from platform to platform wherever there’s a place to hook her grapple. You can switch between your characters at any time and puzzle solving usually involves controlling them asymmetrically i.e. having one character stand on a switch to open a door for another.
The layout and size of the rooms in this game seem unnecessarily large and solving puzzles requires a lot of walking back and forth between long hallways or large rooms for seemingly no reason. If memory serves, there are 4 generic puzzle solving “levels” in the game and 3 character specific levels. So if you take The Adventurer, The Knight, and The Monk into The Cave, there’ll be a Adventurer level, a Knight level and a Monk level in addition to 4 generic levels. That means, in order to see all of the endings and solve all of the puzzles, you have to replay the game 3 times because there are 7 characters and only 3 can be taken in The Cave at a time.
Summary:
One playthrough of this game was plenty for me. The jokes and silliness were on point and what I would expect from Schafer/Gilbert writing. But the quality of the puzzles and overall “funness” of the game fell a bit short of Monkey Island/Psychonauts standards.
Anyway, back to The Cave. At the beginning of the game, the game asks you to pick three of seven characters to take into The Cave to explore it. Each of the characters has a different power or ability that is used in the puzzle solving sections. For instance, “The adventurer” character has a grappling hook that allows her to swing from platform to platform wherever there’s a place to hook her grapple. You can switch between your characters at any time and puzzle solving usually involves controlling them asymmetrically i.e. having one character stand on a switch to open a door for another.
The layout and size of the rooms in this game seem unnecessarily large and solving puzzles requires a lot of walking back and forth between long hallways or large rooms for seemingly no reason. If memory serves, there are 4 generic puzzle solving “levels” in the game and 3 character specific levels. So if you take The Adventurer, The Knight, and The Monk into The Cave, there’ll be a Adventurer level, a Knight level and a Monk level in addition to 4 generic levels. That means, in order to see all of the endings and solve all of the puzzles, you have to replay the game 3 times because there are 7 characters and only 3 can be taken in The Cave at a time.
Summary:
One playthrough of this game was plenty for me. The jokes and silliness were on point and what I would expect from Schafer/Gilbert writing. But the quality of the puzzles and overall “funness” of the game fell a bit short of Monkey Island/Psychonauts standards.
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