Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)

“You are standing at the end of an alley in front of a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows from the building and down a ravine.”

These are the opening phrases of the seminal 1976 text game. Adventure in a colossal cave. Originally created by Will Crowther and developed by Don Woods, it ran on a mainframe computer connected to a teleprinter. The events of the game were communicated by verbatim printed text In real dead tree paper. Your mission is to find your way to a cave, find a variety of treasures hidden inside (a nugget of gold, an egg-sized emerald, that sort of thing) and bring them back to the building initially brick.

At the start of this modern update, these opening lines are read aloud in a slightly singsong English voice with an appropriate air of plot. With a naturalistic 3D environment and dual-stick first-person controls, you really feel like you’re at the end of this legendary road past the small brick building, the stream flowing through the ravine. The immediacy of the implied question still sparkles like an excitedly flashing text message: “So, what are you going to do now?” The drive for pure exploration and discovery while being transported to a pivotal moment in gaming history, combined with the freedom of a modern control scheme, gave us goosebumps. That was before we started playing, which we’ll talk about later.

Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)

In 1976, video games were barely established, let alone genres and conventions or anything resembling modern environments or controls. Yet while the clearest descendants of text-based adventures are visual novels, point-and-click adventures, and independent interactive fiction, Colossal Cave’s core compulsive cycle of exploration and discovery can be felt in myriad classics. modern. When you play Colossal Cave now, the historic path to games as sophisticated as Breath of the Wild is unmistakable. There’s always the potential for something new and unseen just around the corner, and if you’re thwarted by a bad decision or misfortune, there’s always the addictive potential to try again.

If you want more background on the game’s story to pique your interest, consider the design team behind this graphical reimagining: Roberta and Ken Williams. The Williams were responsible for the early and highly influential point-and-click adventure games, founding Sierra On-Line in 1979 (then called On-Line Systems) and producing beloved series like Kings Quest and gabriel knight. To tie it all together, Roberta Williams herself said that Sierra On-Line would never have existed if she hadn’t played Colossal Cave Adventure over 40 years ago. So it’s only fitting that Colossal Cave is what prompted her to come out of retirement.

While none of these should be ignored, the bad news is that this retro treasure is tragically stuck in the past. This modernization is not a jazzy take on Colossal Cave, using a different art form to deconstruct, play with, and explore the intricacies of the original. It’s more of a rap version of Colossal Cave made to appeal to young people by people who have only heard of rap music. “Modern” graphics son relatively modern – because they are graphics – but they look like something from two console generations ago. The movement also feels cold and clinical, like floating a camera through an abstract space, without entering a cave complex. Colossal Cave has nothing to do with a modern game. If there weren’t the pieces of the story, it would be inexcusable, almost unbelievable, poor.

Colossal Cave Review - Screenshot 3 of 4

Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)

It’s even more damning when the game is presented with a focus on the game design expertise of Roberta and Ken Williams and “all the bells and whistles of modern gaming” they brought to it. The overriding, overriding design decision was clearly to adhere with absolute faith to the adventure of the original text. Chance and deliberate, sly player frustration abound. Randomizing which of ten exits actually gets you out of a room may have been a fun sleight of hand in the 1970s, but these days it’s just bullying, especially considering that the output is re-randomized on each attempt. It’s also a reckless decision to present the player with only two clear options: keep rolling a 10-sided die or quit the game. If we hadn’t had to write a review, we might have chosen the latter. (By the way, this room is called Witt’s End. Crowther and the Williams are laughing at us!)

A sensible concession to the modern world is the presence of a map, which the player should originally have drawn himself. This provides some relief, although the way the connections between spaces are rendered sometimes belies randomness or arbitrary locks. Unfortunately, this is also true in the 3D world. There are loading screens between different parts of the caves, and in at least one instance we came straight out of a room, stopped in front of a black screen, then appeared a few steps into a room, seemingly without be mounted. In a game that openly seeks to confuse you with its devious design, that’s just plain unfair. Another time we slipped through a crack in the wall, then when we tried to come back, the narrator informed us, “You can’t find the crack you just came out of.” We could see it with our own eyes!

Colossal Cave Review - Screenshot 4 of 4

Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)

Other small inconveniences include the use of stairs. Don’t try to step on it, you might fall and have to start the game over. You have to use the cursor to select the ladder, but not too far, which makes the careful progression up the ladder unnecessarily stressful. Another irritation is the constant presence of the cursor. In addition to always interrupting the view of the cave, it does not distinguish between points of interest. Pressing “A” on some scenery fragments generates useful, sometimes critical, descriptive text, while selecting most scenery will only repeat the general description of the area. It discouraged us from engaging in storytelling at all, negating the fundamental decision to recreate the original text with absolute purity.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but Colossal Cave never needed a thousand words. On the other hand, a word can write a thousand images: in our head, we can imagine a colossal cave, but here we only see a huge hole.

conclusion

Like its own mysterious underground complex, Colossal Cave is dark and hostile, deceptively hiding rare but valuable treasure. If it weren’t for the compelling source material, it would be incredibly bad. However, the source material are fascinating, and this new version is a way to interact with it. If, for this reason, you’re willing to ignore both the outdated design elements you’d expect and the poor design decisions and sloppy implementation you wouldn’t, there might be something wrong with that. enjoy here. We certainly wouldn’t judge anyone who discovered a fun egg-sized emerald in Colossal Cave, but we can’t seriously recommend it either.

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