When it comes to indie games, there is one game that always pops up in my mind and that game is Cave Story. This is one of the first indie games I ever played and with how long this game has been released, it’s still able to retain its gameplay value. In this post, I will be talking about Cave story for a bit.
Cave Story is a metroidvania platform game that was developed by Daisuke Amaya and released in the year 2004. It is currently available for Windows, MacOS, Linux and Nintendo Switch. There are also ports available for the Nintendo 3DS and Wii.
I had played this game when I was a child and I found it to be pretty cool. At the time, I would play this game a lot and even completed the story several times. Now that I look back at it, I don’t know why I did that. Skipping to 2022, I recently redownloaded it to play it again and the game is still pretty great.
In Cave Story, you play as a robot named Quote who wakes up in a mysterious cave, completely unaware of everything that is happening or has happened. In the game, you are able to jump across platforms and defeat enemies with a variety of weapons like a rocket launcher, a fireball launcher, and that default weapon that you’ll use for 90 percent of the game. It is also possible to level up weapons (with the max level being 3) by defeating enemies and collecting the weapon energy collectibles that they drop. As expected, higher leveled weapons do more damage but levels get leveled down when you receive damage.
Also, on the topic of weapons in the game, some of them have special perks. For instance, there’s a machine gun that when you level it up to the max level and fire it downwards, you get propelled by it (Kind of like performing a rocket jump with it) and there’s also a weapon that allows you to shoot through walls with it.
While the platforming aspect isn’t exactly my favorite, it does get slightly better later on in the game when you get a booster which allows you to fly for some time when you press the jump button in midair. It is also possible to upgrade the booster by performing a specific action in the game. When it is upgraded, apart from being much faster than its previous form, it allows you to fly towards the direction you are moving towards.
Spoiler alert – the upgraded booster sucks and I really hate it.
Story wise, the game isn’t so bad. It is pretty interesting. In the beginning, you get dumped in a random cave with no knowledge of who your character is or what is going on. But as you progress, the story slowly reveals itself. One thing that I like about the story is that the game doesn’t give you the full gist immediately, and it also doesn’t make it so obscure that you have to watch a 5-hour video on YouTube discussing about theories of the game’s story.
On another note about the story, it has three different endings which are the bad, normal, and good endings. Getting to the bad and normal endings are not much of a problem, they are actually pretty straightforward to achieve. But to get to the good ending, you will have to do some certain side quests. Once you get on the route of the good ending, it introduces a few levels that are far more difficult compared to the other levels in the game. Also, remember that upgraded booster that I said I hate, it becomes very necessary to use it in those levels since they contain a lot of difficult parkour sections that will require you to use the booster precisely. Not going to lie, it is really fun – not.
In 2011, an enhanced version of Cave Story called Cave Story+ published by Nicalis was released. This version of the game featured enhanced visuals, and a new and remastered version of the original soundtrack. It also added challenges to the game which gives a different experience to the game. It is not required to complete the story before you can play challenges though.
In conclusion, I feel that Cave Story is one of those games that the saying “Old but gold” applies to. Even though this game is 18 years old now (yikes), it is still able to stand its ground as an interesting game in the platformer/metroidvania genre. Even with how old the game is, it still feels like something that was released recently and I would still consider this to be one of the best platforming games that I’ve played till this day.
And with all of that, thanks for reading this