Colossal Cave is an interfacial quality-of-life overhaul of one of the most important games ever made, 47 years after its originsl release, and it's a pretty good update. It is however, not a complete reimagining, as some people surely wanted.

The first, most enormous, most obvious, and most necessary quality-of-life feature is that it isn't text-based. The player has free, traditionally modern WASD style movement in a fully rendered three dimensional world, and good god, what a relief it is. Colossal Cave Adventure always involved a lot of backtracking. The player's inventory is very limited, and figuring out how to get their treasures back to their home base and remembering where they left certain objects is part of the design. In the original, this meant reading room descriptions over and over to even figure out where you were, and then typing commands over and over to get home like you were playing Typing of the Dead. It is about a billion times less exhausting for a human brain to just visually recognize a space and the hold a button in a direction in which they intend to move. This alone makes this the version one ahould play if they want to actually enjoy this historically essential video game.

Aside from this, Colossal Cave features auto-mapping, a far more generous time limit (of you opt for it) a UI that condenses player actions down to a Look Mode and a Use Mode, and allows you to keep playing with a score reduction if you happen to die, for example to a lategame dwarf attack that simply rolls a die to decide if you live.

Judging Colossal Cave against a modern landscape of competitors is bluntly unfair. Colossal Cave is not a new video game. It is an infinitely more palattable resurrection of an ancient one. In that role, it performs just fine, and I had a genuinely good time with it.