Review: Cave Story

In the midst of all these new fully three-dimensional, high quality texture, life-like shading, high-definition video games, sometimes it can be hard to look back at what a lot of us grew up on. We’ve played it all before, been there, beat that or even got tired of playing and looked up the spoilers on Wikipedia. (She dies, your best friend is your enemy, the boss isn’t really dead, you really are dead, you saw yourself when you were dead and because of it you created a pime taradox and ended up living, etc.)

It’s never new, but come on, old school games are always a nice break from this new fang-dangled stuff. But then what do you do when you actually want something new, but retains that old-school charm? Well my friend, we have the internet and free independent games to play, not just 5 minute flash games. Here, let me Google that for you.

Look at that, you just found one of my most favorite indie games on your first try. Cave Story was made by a Japanese 8-bit genius known simply as Pixel. Yes I do in fact love his name. While he has made a few other games, he is most well known for Cave Story. When I first played Cave Story I was a little confused by the controls because using a keyboard as a make-shift game pad isn’t something I’m used to. Thankfully I had an Xbox controller turned USB game pad handy, but by the time I realized I could use it I was pretty comfortable at how smooth the controls were with the keyboard. The whole game feels and sounds like something you would play on the NES and that’s part of its beauty. Because it’s not on any system it is something you haven’t played before but at the same time it feels familiar because of Pixel’s inspiration from other 8-bit games.

The story follows Quote as he slowly finds out that he is on a floating island inhabited by human-like rabbits called Mimigas. Quote battles against minions either created or awoken by a person known as The Doctor, or one of his lackeys Balrog and Misery. Most of the characters you run into typically want a way to escape from the island so that the Doctor doesn’t turn them into monster slaves to do his biding. I’m going to be honest and say this is basically a platformer/shoot’em up. You’ll spend most of your time traveling to different parts of the island through teleporters in order to find various items and rescuing people from either their own troubles or problems given to them by the Doctor. Once you get past the beginning, you’ll have your basic gun, the Polar Star (a unique name, or so I think) which you can trade later for other guns, or hold onto for an upgrade. Oh, and for those who CRAVE shooting rockets in every game ever, there’s a rocket launcher that shoots 3 rockets at once.

The pixel-y places you visit look amazing. Even though you’ll see the same enemy a few times, maybe even re-colored, the scenery makes it okay. The different areas of the island tend to be pretty large and fun to explore looking for life tanks, treasure chests and hidden paths. The time span is about 6 to 8 hours depending on how you play and how skilled you are at the game. Of course by today’s standards this isn’t a very long play time, but for the experience you get and the hidden ending and secrets there’s no reason to not reply the game at least once. Though most will have an easy time playing through, there is a boss or two that are utter nuisances to beat. The physics are easy to grasp, and once you advance in the game, or make the right gun trades eventually you’ll be able to blow right through the maps, until you come across a small puzzle or just a challenging area to work through, but there is never any slow down time.

Now, if you research a bit you’ll realize that it has actually been around for about 5 years now. While a lot of people may have not heard of it, a lot of people played it and loved it unlike any other game due to how unique it is compared to other games made anymore. Around the end of April, or beginning of May, Cave Story is going to be made available for Nintendo’s WiiWare along with the promise of nicer looking graphics, updated music and some expanded content.

Some people say that because Pixel made it as a freeware game, it should be left free and it is, but the version that’s going to be released is being updated by another company under Pixel’s supervision. The original version will always remain free, but I feel that by buying the re-make you’ll be showing your support for Pixel even though his intent was to share something he loves with everyone else without any strings attached. That being said, this review will be updated along with the game whenever I manage to get a copy of it, which will hopefully be on the same day as the release if I’m lucky.

If you want to keep up with how the updated version is coming along check out Cavestory.com which has a few downloads, images and a bunch of goodies in the blog about the transition to WiiWare.

Gameplay: 9

Story: 8

Visuals: 9

Sound: 8.5

Replay Value: 8.5

Overall Score: 9