From the creative mind of a guy (not just any guy though, Ron Gilbert, of Monkey Island fame) and an award-winning studio (Double Fine Productions, Brütal Legend) comes The Cave! This Xbox Live Arcade puzzle-adventure game was released on the 23rd January; can it test your mind whilst keeping you thoroughly entertained?
The Cave greets you from the moment the start button is pressed, yes “The Cave” is no longer an it, he clearly has a mind of his own with insight that you’d clearly expect from a man of his many years in this world. A fine balance between craziness and soothing tones, The Cave has a hint of Adam West and a dash of Patrick Stewart in his voice (actually portrayed by Stephen Stanton) keeps you intrigued as you are introduced to a number of characters.
Seven to be exact, all seeking an adventure of some form, none of whom have names and are merely named based on their personalities/ key part of who they are or their profession. We have The Monk, The Knight, The Scientist, The Adventurer, The Twins, The Time-Traveller and The Hillbilly. Each of them must face a trial within the depths of The Cave in order to fill their possibly inner-emptiness.
This is where I think the game made the first bold move of the game, after a brief monologue you are left with all seven characters and a blocked off entrance to The Cave, immediately it’s thrown you in at the deep end. As I’ve mentioned it’s a puzzle game and I must add that for each playthrough you can only use three of these people at a time, so not only do you have the dilemma of how to get inside(it’s boarded up) but also choosing which three to begin with. Get your thinking cap on as this is the easy part!
Once you’ve chosen the trio and breached initial Cave entrance, its then time to convince the gift shop worker to actually allow you into the body of The Cave after hours. This was a little tricky for me as at this point as for some reason I expected to go get the worker what he wanted by simply exploring and then the trials would begin. But no this is basically a carbon copy of the style of puzzles you’ll face and the way in which you should tackle these, luckily it’s a generic puzzle so to speak and although certain characters might speed these up it’s not vital who you have.
Now I don’t want to spoil the story too much, nor do I want to give away puzzle solutions however what I can say is each character you pick ends up have their own unique trial within The Cave (along with generic ones that can be done using any 3), which is only triggered and subsequently completed by such character. This is because they all have a special power, for example the Knight has invincibility so at some point there will be a place where he can survive something that none of the other could. You’ll find out these powers with a press of the button or via the start menu, they are important especially when finding the collectable paintings but I’ll come back to them.
These themed trials are the most fun, I’ll take the Hillbilly as an example (see picture above), his is based entirely around a carnival themed area where you must collect enough tickets to progress. Solving various scenarios around here will earn you one of them, what I like most about this and all the areas is that almost everything that can be picked up or used is an integral part of your adventure. Some may involve picking up a tool to fix a broken apparatus or combing two items to create a more useful item. There can be a scenario of simply guessing the right colour for a spin of the wheel, took me a while but the clues are all there for how it might work. The amount of time I spent on themed and generic puzzles/trial simply scouting the accessible routes and items was possibly longer than the solutions themselves, then you figure out how it all ties in to help you either open up more routes or to complete the trial.
Along the way they’ve added collectable Cave paintings that link in which each of the characters to tell a story of their life which is interested to get a little look into their backgrounds. Now these can be easy to find or sneakily hidden and I reckon that’s a great call as it hopefully encourages people to take notice of the surroundings instead of just doing what has to be done and moving on.
One thing that I didn’t like so much and began to grind on me was having to move each of the three characters across each area as there is a lot of “point A to point B to point A to point C to point A” at times. Few times it would auto-spawn the three together but more often than not you’d have to drag them one at a time. Luckily if you have two friends that can pop round you can take one each, for me that would improve the experience tenfold. I have to give them credit for that addition, now I just need to find two friends.
Overall it’s much better than I expected and although it looks quite a dark game from the outside, it’s more dark humour than anything too sinister. Although I haven’t mentioned much on the adventure side, you must navigate climbing ladders/ropes, jumping across gaps as you scale various levels of The Cave. The puzzles are pure logic looking back but the variety of each area, more so the character themed ones are enjoyable and geared up well to suit the special abilities. With seven characters in total there’s at least 3 unique playthroughs to keep you entertained. So if you wish to follow the adventurers on a journey both in mind and body then get purchasing on Xbox Live now. (1200MSP – Direct Link HERE)
