Cave Story

Here's a game that sat under my radar for a very long time, because I confused it with another game. Cave Story (洞窟物語 Dōkutsu Monogatari) is a freeware indie hit that has now been ported to multiple platforms and has enjoyed critical acclaim from the internet community at large. The project of one man, Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya, who spent five years developing this game on his own in his spare time. Cave Story+ is now on Steam, and a graphically enhanced version has been released on the 3DS. Other ports have been produced to run this on opensource portables, XBOX, and a PSP version (which I played).

Promotional art by Zanpan

Cave Story has been called a Metroid style platformer game, and I think that description is a little off. The way I played the game made it feel more like a run and gun game like Metal Slug, or something similar, combined with a game that looks and feels like those old 386 id/Apogee platformers... like Commander Keen. Lots of enemies, explosions, and sound effects everywhere. Combine some interesting story elements, creative level design, multiple endings, challenging enemies, and Cave Story becomes incredibly fun to play.

Art

This game received commercial release on the Nintendo 3DS, so I'm basing art design from that edition of the game. Once again I'm left scratching my head wondering who made the decision to release terrible box art for the North American version. The Japanese box is beautiful to look at, shows all the awesome characters of the game, and has a dynamic sense of movement because of the way the main characters are drawn. The bright red colors of the main characters contrast with the muted blues and grays of the background characters and scenery. Great art. Great design.

Japanese box art. Art by Zanpan

The North American art looks like a high school art student drew a crappy anime-ish cartoon with a blah background, with uninspiring color choices. Seriously, why does the games industry keep letting this happen?! I'm glad that I can print my own cover to hide this monstrosity, and that others have created alternated designs. I'm also glad that game publishers are giving their customers choice about the box art, because I believe it is very important not only to sales, but to how players percieve game quality without actually playing the game. Would this make me look at the back of the box for more information? Nope. All I'm asking for is a little art continuity between East and West.

Ugly North American art by crappy high school art student

Music

So much credit has to go to Daisuke Amaya for creating every aspect of this game. The music for the game also reflects the retro styling of older games... but in a way that isn't repetitive  Each zone, room, and event has it's own soundtrack. The songs themselves are incredibly catchy in their original form, and were remixed by Danny Baranowsky  (whose soundtracks include Canabalt, Super Meat Boy, Fathom, Gravity Hook, and others) for the 3DS port of the game. Even remixed, the main themes are still recognizable, and as far as game music/soundtracks go, this one stand out.

Development

Daisuke Amaya wanted to make a game in his spare time knowing that by avoiding three dimensional models and programming, he could make everything by himself. His philosophy for game design eschewed tutorials for simple accomplishment driven game play to make the players feel like they learned and figured things out on their own. Items were designed to be different in order to allow players to discover different methods on what worked best throughout the game and how to use them.

Results

I don't know why I didn't pick this game up a long time ago. I didn't really see it until I saw the 3DS cover art, and art and other stuff for that port's launch. I thought "Where have I seen this? It looks... so familiar..." I confused it with Spelunky and thought that it was another impossible platformer... like it's predecessor Spelunker. Spelunky is a fun game, but it is difficult in a rogue-like-see-how-far-you-get-before-you-die kind of way. Not the case with Cave Story. All the fun is in shooting enemies, collecting different guns, and solving the mysterious plot. The story drags you in as more characters are introduced.

Promotional artwork by Zanpan

Coincidentally a Cave Story+ port comes to the 3DS eShop tomorrow with expanded levels, enhanced features from the PC/Mac version. For $10 this is the version to play the original game with other options like graphical updates and difficulty features.

Someone made a toaster animation for the character Balrog that I thought was awesome.

I think the appeal of this game is simple design, and interesting story decisions from the creator. The main character is simple in a Mario sort of way, not overly complicated. The assortment of NPC's are each given their own unique look. Introduced characters have a personality of their own through brief dialog, which makes the game feel like an old favorite 8 or 16-bit game.

Promotional artwork by Zanpan

There are twists and turns for these characters as the game progresses, giving the player more information about the amnesiac robot they command as well as the strange environment that surrounds him.

The game allows for some amount of exploration from the start. You can enter rooms, talk to characters, and shoot enemies. Then the story begins and you are sucked into helping these rabbit like Mimiga creatures who are being kidnapped. Turns out they become monsters when exposed to a certain red flower, and you are the only robot capable enough of rescuing them from an evil doctor and his henchmen. As the story unfolds you discover that you are a robotic soldier that appeared on this island to exterminate the Mimiga long ago, but for whatever reason you have lost your memory.

One thing I noticed early on is that if you miss an item or talking to someone that triggers an event, you can spend endless hours walking all over the place wondering what you missed. That's true of most retro games though, so I can't fault it for that. The only difficulty faces were a few of the boss fights, only because they managed to vary their attack and didn't stick to any particular pattern. The battle against Misery was difficult for me, until I finally decided what weapon to use. Then the subsequent boss fights against the Doctor and the Island Core were even worse. Beating four bosses in a row reminded me of the difficulty I faced when playing the Mega Man games in  Dr. Wiley's Castle. Coincidence? In a way Cave Story is kinda like Mega Man... but with a better story.

In the end I managed to get to the Normal Ending. There are three endings to this game, and the Best Ending requires following an hidden sequence of events as you play through the game. It opens up a completely new dungeon area after the last boss, and some other items are available. Looking back, there were doors, and areas that I wasn't able to get to. I want to play through the game again and see the best ending, but I was perfectly satisfied with the normal ending my first play through. I want to play the 3DS remake or the Steam Cave Story+ version now.

The end credits were great... perfect for a game like this. They remind me of the end credits to Super Mario World, revisiting all the areas and enemies and characters. It's something that's so different from modern games that come out these days, it totally surprised me.

Victory!

Statistics

Deaths: 52 Continues: 52 Saves: 26 Time: Approx 7 hours Levels: 5