Colossal Cave
released on Jan 19, 2023
Colossal Cave is an exciting point & click adventure into a mysterious cavern - a re-imagining of the celebrated text adventure by Will Crowther & Don Woods. Acclaimed game designer Roberta Williams brings you her vision of the game that inspired her to create her own legendary games.
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While a direct translation to 3D of a game that just with the title “Colossal Cave Adventure” is an evident good idea, the too literally attached attempt to homage the original weighs down the experience.
As expected, the huge cave is wonderfully modeled, just as the hazy original text suggested, to maintain an overwhelming first impression. In the lack of confidence of pure exploration, also known as pure adventure, the original ended up being turned into a long term strategy game where to plan out your movements according to illogical trial and error procedures discovered in previous playthroughs. An abandonment of genuine geographical/magical discovery for a more bland, gamey repetition exercise.
This remake not only maintains the exact same problem, but adds a couple of its own when the senseless non-geographical elements need to be translated. Moments that still felt genuine in the original like the pirate or the dwarves appearing out of nowhere didn't need an explanation because of the turn based text narration abstraction itself. This, now in a literal 3D representation, means that these same characters appear and disappear out of magical smoke as you get paralyzed waiting for them to mess with you. This also applies to some of the puzzles. It happens in the puzzles that retained some sense, like being unable to carry the gold nugget to an upper floor, here being contradicted by the floors being separated explicitly with samey stairs in which some arbitrarily allow you to carry the gold and some others not. And it happens in the puzzles that didn’t make that much sense, the spatially impossible labyrinths may get a pass because of the inevitable omissions of text narration nature, but here it is just an unacceptable same looking room where the obvious loading screens magic trick just comes off as cheap.
Since there are obvious downsides to the literal transformation of the blandest parts in the original game, it would be nice to embrace the spatial twists and its own 3D geographical nature in all its glory without additives. What a coincidence that the “adventure” part was dropped from the title.
As expected, the huge cave is wonderfully modeled, just as the hazy original text suggested, to maintain an overwhelming first impression. In the lack of confidence of pure exploration, also known as pure adventure, the original ended up being turned into a long term strategy game where to plan out your movements according to illogical trial and error procedures discovered in previous playthroughs. An abandonment of genuine geographical/magical discovery for a more bland, gamey repetition exercise.
This remake not only maintains the exact same problem, but adds a couple of its own when the senseless non-geographical elements need to be translated. Moments that still felt genuine in the original like the pirate or the dwarves appearing out of nowhere didn't need an explanation because of the turn based text narration abstraction itself. This, now in a literal 3D representation, means that these same characters appear and disappear out of magical smoke as you get paralyzed waiting for them to mess with you. This also applies to some of the puzzles. It happens in the puzzles that retained some sense, like being unable to carry the gold nugget to an upper floor, here being contradicted by the floors being separated explicitly with samey stairs in which some arbitrarily allow you to carry the gold and some others not. And it happens in the puzzles that didn’t make that much sense, the spatially impossible labyrinths may get a pass because of the inevitable omissions of text narration nature, but here it is just an unacceptable same looking room where the obvious loading screens magic trick just comes off as cheap.
Since there are obvious downsides to the literal transformation of the blandest parts in the original game, it would be nice to embrace the spatial twists and its own 3D geographical nature in all its glory without additives. What a coincidence that the “adventure” part was dropped from the title.
(NOTE: I played this on PS5, not sure why that's not an option here)
Basically an extremely faithful fan remake of a game from 1977, done by two designers who, though legendary, haven't made a game in twenty-five years. So you might say it's a little old school.
The original was played on computers before they even had monitors. You typed shit in and it printed out what was happening. It was a text adventure, more or less the first one, and Roberta and Ken Williams have taken that and added graphics, and that's about it. Well, there is an (optional) automapping feature, which, given that this is a game essentially designed to be confusing, is much appreciated, as well as a nice inventory screen. But this is still very much gaming from a different era. The goal is to head into the huge, complicated, light-inventory-puzzle-filled cave and find all the treasures, and get them back to the start. You're timed and scored and can only carry a few things at a time, and you can also die or totally screw your game in a number of ways, so really the game is about playing it over and over and developing routes to get the best score possible. There's not a whole ton in the way of secrets or easter eggs to explore for, just rooms, items, easy puzzles, and confusion at randomized elements and impossible-geometry mazes. There is a simple, droll charm to the silly mishmash of fantasy environments and especially the narration, which is genial and not at all taking itself seriously. Playing this, you can almost in real time visualize Roberta doing the same once upon a time and getting inspiration for KING'S QUEST from it - so much of that game is in here. And for a big KQ fan like myself who never played COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE, the tone is so close that you can almost squint your eyes and imagine this as a new entry in that other series if you want.
The Williamses played the original game in the late '70s and said, hey, what if this had graphics? And then they invented a genre that now contains over a thousand games. Today, they started remaking their old, beloved inpiration as a COVID hobby and eventually got it released. Is it good? Is it fun? I dunno. It is literally a text adventure from the 1970s with graphics. They didn't change the layout of the areas, the script, the rules, anything. And the graphics and gameplay are what you would expect from an extremely low-budget game. But that's fine. It works fine and it is what it is. It's an interesting experiment, if nothing else - grafting a fully-explorable 3D world onto the bones of a text-parser game, with a look command and a narrator and all that. Is there even one other game like that? MYST kind of killed this potential subgenre before it even existed, probably.
I imagine that this could be a really cool experience for someone who loves the original as much as they do, and its fun to see a designer reckon with and celebrate her inspiration so directly. But it's short, fun, plain, and straightforward. Maybe this is one for the kid to play early. KQ was for me, and it's probably the reason I'm on this site, so!
Basically an extremely faithful fan remake of a game from 1977, done by two designers who, though legendary, haven't made a game in twenty-five years. So you might say it's a little old school.
The original was played on computers before they even had monitors. You typed shit in and it printed out what was happening. It was a text adventure, more or less the first one, and Roberta and Ken Williams have taken that and added graphics, and that's about it. Well, there is an (optional) automapping feature, which, given that this is a game essentially designed to be confusing, is much appreciated, as well as a nice inventory screen. But this is still very much gaming from a different era. The goal is to head into the huge, complicated, light-inventory-puzzle-filled cave and find all the treasures, and get them back to the start. You're timed and scored and can only carry a few things at a time, and you can also die or totally screw your game in a number of ways, so really the game is about playing it over and over and developing routes to get the best score possible. There's not a whole ton in the way of secrets or easter eggs to explore for, just rooms, items, easy puzzles, and confusion at randomized elements and impossible-geometry mazes. There is a simple, droll charm to the silly mishmash of fantasy environments and especially the narration, which is genial and not at all taking itself seriously. Playing this, you can almost in real time visualize Roberta doing the same once upon a time and getting inspiration for KING'S QUEST from it - so much of that game is in here. And for a big KQ fan like myself who never played COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE, the tone is so close that you can almost squint your eyes and imagine this as a new entry in that other series if you want.
The Williamses played the original game in the late '70s and said, hey, what if this had graphics? And then they invented a genre that now contains over a thousand games. Today, they started remaking their old, beloved inpiration as a COVID hobby and eventually got it released. Is it good? Is it fun? I dunno. It is literally a text adventure from the 1970s with graphics. They didn't change the layout of the areas, the script, the rules, anything. And the graphics and gameplay are what you would expect from an extremely low-budget game. But that's fine. It works fine and it is what it is. It's an interesting experiment, if nothing else - grafting a fully-explorable 3D world onto the bones of a text-parser game, with a look command and a narrator and all that. Is there even one other game like that? MYST kind of killed this potential subgenre before it even existed, probably.
I imagine that this could be a really cool experience for someone who loves the original as much as they do, and its fun to see a designer reckon with and celebrate her inspiration so directly. But it's short, fun, plain, and straightforward. Maybe this is one for the kid to play early. KQ was for me, and it's probably the reason I'm on this site, so!