Cache Grabbers is a chill first-person cartography puzzle game. Navigate through 30 levels in a strange environment, using only your compass, metal detector and shovel to find and grab the cache — and maybe even a way to escape.
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Y'all ever done Geocaching? Its this game where people bury a little box with; well it can be anything but usually they all have a piece of paper where everyone who's found the cache writes down their name. The way to find them is usually through the Geocaching website there will be some directions/coordinates and maybe a small riddle of some sort to get the final location or padlock combination to open it.
I have fond memories of doing some Geocaching with a friend around the time I gave up smoking and was just looking for ways to get my mind off the cigarettes. Geocaching worked well for that cause its a task you can do but which also incorporates a walk/hike near where I live.
Cache Grabbers is a game about Caching/Cartography, but less with an emphasis on coordinates and riddles and more in the pure map based experience. Its quite a unique approach : essentially You use these towers on the map to triangulate the position of new towers and revealing more of the blank map. You can unlock these towers by either physically going to them, or if they are unreachable, by drawing a straight line to them from two different spots , the wrinkle in this being these two spots must contain flags, which only appear near unlocked towers or places where two towers are visible and youve drawn a straight line from both, thus "unlocking" a flag in that location. Essentially the meat and potatoes is using existing towers youve unlocked to unlock new ones. Once you have enough towers you reveal more of the map by planting new flags near the "Cache area" a sort of vague golf green where the cache is buried. Once you have enough flags planted in said area you can take out your metal detector and find the cache.
The gameplay is honestly really straightforward and at times it feels like other than a few later levels the game is afraid to do anything really meaty with its unique mechanics. Its all quite well tutorialized and I never needed any help for anything, and I appreciate how there are multiple ways of solving the various maps. Even better, I appreciate how after finding out you could walk on walls, I found ways to solve levels with that, and seemingly the game acknowledges this hidden mechanic through its various "secret" text logs there are to find in each level. That being said the game is 30 levels long and gets a bit samey at times because again, it never quite reaches its full potential in really pushing its mechanics, which is a bit of a shame but I suppose I also appreciate it's low stakes qualities in aid of a more chilled out tone.
I really like the aesthetic of the game. I can see how someone else could hate it but the low poly environments with Dark Blue trees and green -> yellow -> red soil spectrum based on height (this of course mimicking how topographic maps are usually displayed). This might be insane but I wish I could eat the blue low poly shrubs.
The music is fine but I have two main complaints : 1 is that there is nowhere near enough, there is like 2 tracks and by the end I muted it and put on my spotify playlist. 2 This is also a slight insane complaint but there is one note or sound or whatever in one of the songs which sounds really similar to a silly sound that Hbomberguy does in his famous/infamous Fallout 3 review where he's complaining about contemporary reviewers focusing so much on the VATS system at around the 1:23 minute mark.
There is also the matter of the storyline which is essentially just the usual meta bullshit wherein the structure of the game is literalized and acknowledged as creepy i.e being made to these tasks without escape or consent. But its really lame, and the secret text logs make the mistake of thinking that acknowledging that something is written pretentiously somehow absolves it of being pretentious. Overall though I enjoyed Cache Grabbers, its rather unique charm managing to overcome whatever flaws I found with it for the most part.
I have fond memories of doing some Geocaching with a friend around the time I gave up smoking and was just looking for ways to get my mind off the cigarettes. Geocaching worked well for that cause its a task you can do but which also incorporates a walk/hike near where I live.
Cache Grabbers is a game about Caching/Cartography, but less with an emphasis on coordinates and riddles and more in the pure map based experience. Its quite a unique approach : essentially You use these towers on the map to triangulate the position of new towers and revealing more of the blank map. You can unlock these towers by either physically going to them, or if they are unreachable, by drawing a straight line to them from two different spots , the wrinkle in this being these two spots must contain flags, which only appear near unlocked towers or places where two towers are visible and youve drawn a straight line from both, thus "unlocking" a flag in that location. Essentially the meat and potatoes is using existing towers youve unlocked to unlock new ones. Once you have enough towers you reveal more of the map by planting new flags near the "Cache area" a sort of vague golf green where the cache is buried. Once you have enough flags planted in said area you can take out your metal detector and find the cache.
The gameplay is honestly really straightforward and at times it feels like other than a few later levels the game is afraid to do anything really meaty with its unique mechanics. Its all quite well tutorialized and I never needed any help for anything, and I appreciate how there are multiple ways of solving the various maps. Even better, I appreciate how after finding out you could walk on walls, I found ways to solve levels with that, and seemingly the game acknowledges this hidden mechanic through its various "secret" text logs there are to find in each level. That being said the game is 30 levels long and gets a bit samey at times because again, it never quite reaches its full potential in really pushing its mechanics, which is a bit of a shame but I suppose I also appreciate it's low stakes qualities in aid of a more chilled out tone.
I really like the aesthetic of the game. I can see how someone else could hate it but the low poly environments with Dark Blue trees and green -> yellow -> red soil spectrum based on height (this of course mimicking how topographic maps are usually displayed). This might be insane but I wish I could eat the blue low poly shrubs.
The music is fine but I have two main complaints : 1 is that there is nowhere near enough, there is like 2 tracks and by the end I muted it and put on my spotify playlist. 2 This is also a slight insane complaint but there is one note or sound or whatever in one of the songs which sounds really similar to a silly sound that Hbomberguy does in his famous/infamous Fallout 3 review where he's complaining about contemporary reviewers focusing so much on the VATS system at around the 1:23 minute mark.
There is also the matter of the storyline which is essentially just the usual meta bullshit wherein the structure of the game is literalized and acknowledged as creepy i.e being made to these tasks without escape or consent. But its really lame, and the secret text logs make the mistake of thinking that acknowledging that something is written pretentiously somehow absolves it of being pretentious. Overall though I enjoyed Cache Grabbers, its rather unique charm managing to overcome whatever flaws I found with it for the most part.