Colossal Cave
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Critic Reviews for Colossal Cave
Only for nostalgists and those who love getting lost on spelunking holidays.
A misguided attempt to recreate one of gaming's oldest and most influential classics, that's let down by outdated visuals and prehistoric gameplay elements.
Colossal Cave isn’t for everyone, but it’s like a slow and meticulously designed theme park ride, all built around an old text adventure game, making for a fascinating experience. Whether you play it or not is probably more up to your personal sensibilities, but Colossal Cave remains an immersive excavation that’s more than worth the trip, even with all the old screws and rusty bolts binding the two periods of game history together.
Colossal Cave is a love letter to the 1976 original which fans will enjoy, but newcomers will likely be confused, intimidated, and frustrated by its design.
Colossal Cave is a fascinating game, and this modern remake brings the wonder of a text adventure to life in full 3D. It's streamlined with a few updates, while still keeping the spirit of the original. The game has more than a few issues, but is well worth playing for a magical adventure.
Perhaps Colossal Cave’s unthinking fealty to the original, and its seeming dismissal of so many of the innovations that might have improved it, could be forgiven if it featured any puzzles or mechanics that would be tough to replicate in a modern design context. But no such innovations are apparent, and new touches like the first-person camera create new problems like making it easy to miss important items in the cave. Colossal Cave, then, can hardly be called a “modernization,” because it would have felt antiquated even if it came out 20 years ago.
Colossal Cave managed to capture the true essence that made the original game so captivating and engaging. The fantastic use of immersive sound makes you feel like you're really on a humorous cave-spelunking adventure.
Colossal Cave is a good adventure game that will appeal more to those with some nostalgia for classics and classic sensibilities. The limited inventory system and the slightly obtuse puzzles might not gel if you've only been exposed to modern adventure games. That said, the sense of exploration is still strong, and the point system gives the game some replayability, which is something rarely seen in the genre. The reimagining of the original game works well, and genre fans who are keen to see where it all began should pick this up.
