Pros: Caveman games during the 16-bit era were strangely a genre, they were prevalent, I can't really explain why this was the case, but yeah... Caveman... games... Anyway, of all the caveman games on SNES that I played, I came away enjoying this little simple one called Congo's Caper the most. Made by the same team that made the Caveman Ninja/Joe & Mac series of games, this one is single player only, features a character that turns into a monkey when hit, and uses a basic club for an attack. It's a cute game, simple platformer where you collect gems, find little bonus rooms, get to the end of the stage and fight a boss. And it's also filled with cute dinosaurs and adorable little chibi graphics. I really, for some reason, gravitated towards this game. There's something to the gameplay mechanics too, like, if you hold the down button on a ramp, you'll start spinning around in a ball, Sonic style, and you'll start moving, spinning faster and faster, darting across the stage and even up walls, it's bizarre but also very fun! Yeah, weird cute little Caveman game that oddly appeals to me.

Cons: It's maybe a bit cumbersome? Is that the right word to use? Cumbersome? Maybe. You got a little club that you can whack bad guys with, and you have to stand pretty close to them to get the collision right. Level design is also kinda muddled, nothing offensive, but this isn't a triple-A SNES top of the line experience either. I think I'm being pretty generous to this one, most people would probably pass it right by, but I dunno, I like it.

What it means to me: I'm kind of into the whole caveman genre, personally. Joe & Mac was one of the first SNES games I ever played after all, but this one plays the best, or at least has the most interesting mechanics that kept me glued to the experience up to the end. I bought this game used at a resale shop in the early 00s, not expecting much, but hey, it won me over.

Joe & Mac's SNES port padded the boss-rush-esque original into a full-on platformer, and it became the series' direction for Data East's next two installments. Congo's Caper subdues the run-and-gun elements in favor for movement controls and level structure that's more comparable to SMB. Gone are the pudgy, dopey duo from 1 and new is a shonen-styled monkey boy: A sign of changing times and audiences, kicking out the comedic Neanderthals for a character that's both more appealing and projectable to its then target audience. Congo's sharp movements, high jumping and fashionable blue hair call Megaman to mind.

But the transition to SMB-style structure and gameplay brings a lack of focus. Stages are divided into worlds with sub-acts, each way shorter than what feels natural while also lacking an identity. Layouts constantly re-use assets between worlds, and the player's mechanics don't feel well-explored. One moment that best exemplifies these quirks is 3-4, an auto-scrolling pirate stage that moves the camera towards the starboard, only to reverse, go underwater and underneath the boat, only to drag you right back where you thought it would originally take you.

Among other issues, hitboxes are mapped horribly. Jenny already pointed out the final boss, but this applies on lesser levels to most other bosses and enemies too - sometimes in your favor (you can kill the world 1 t-rex by swing at the thin air in front of his belly), and other times not. This even feeds into platforming; there's a glitch where you sometimes can't jump while running down a slope, presumably because the game isn't registering that you're on the ground each tick. The high jump can be an inconvenience too, as its so high it drags your viewport away from the ground and you can't always tell where you'll land until it's too late. There's an entire gameplay gimmick with using your swing to stun cavemen and then launch them to break blocks, but it's used only in the first and fifth worlds for some reason. It all amounts to Congo feeling a lot lower-budget than J&M 1, despite the better performance and cleaner art.

Nothing you're missing out on if you don't play it but it's still perfectly safe and comfortable in spite of its issues. The frivolity of it all makes it a good play for low-energy sessions.

The original Joe & Mac, while not necessarily the most creative or entertaining of arcade 2D platformers, was certainly still a good, charming platformer from Data East, and it did have some elements going for it that not too many other games at the time had to offer. So, now that we had one successful title on our hands, Data East decided that they needed to turn Joe & Mac into a franchise, but the next title in the series would be… confusing to say the least. Most people would probably assume that the game known as Joe & Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics would be the official sequel to the original game, but before that, there was another title that was NOT called Joe & Mac 2, but it would still be the direct sequel to Joe & Mac, and it would be presented as a completely separate game known as Congo’s Caper. To make things even more confusing, in Japan, the game was titled Fighting Caveman 2: Rookie’s Adventure, which makes sense over there, considering Joe & Mac was also called Fighting Caveman, so why… I don’t know, video game titles make absolutely zero sense.

So, despite not featuring Joe & Mac whatsoever, and not even mentioning them by name at all, this is the follow-up to that game, as it plays almost identically, except with a new art style, characters, and what have you. But don’t worry, because in case you did play the game not knowing it was a follow-up, you probably would’ve figured it out immediately, because it plays pretty much EXACTLY like the original game, with not too many noticeable differences in the gameplay, settings, or even the plot. With all that being said though, I would consider this game to be SLIGHTLY better then the original Joe & Mac, making the gameplay feel more fluid and controllable, while still retaining the charm of the original… somewhat. Yes, it is still very basic, but it was still fun enough to play through, and it thankfully doesn’t have that many problems that would drive people away.

The story is, once again, “guy saves girl”, except now it is just one girl instead of multiple, so I guess that somehow makes the plot different, the graphics are incredibly generic for SNES standards, but they are bright and colorful enough to where I didn’t hate looking at it, the music is very cheerful, bouncy, and fun to listen to, so it does its job well, even if the tracks themselves aren’t all that memorable either, the control is a little better than the original game, with it being generally the same, with the same awkward higher jump function, but HEY… there’s a run button now, so it is automatically better, and the gameplay is basically just if you took the original Joe & Mac, made it better… and that’s about it.

The game is your average 2D platformer, where you take control of Congo, go through plenty of different prehistoric levels through plenty of prehistoric environments, take out many different baddies that you will run into on your journey, gather plenty of gems and powerups along the way, while sometimes activating a slot machine to give you bonuses (I dunno), and take on familiar, yet new and formidable boss battles. What we have here is basically just more Joe & Mac, but with some of it removed, while other elements are added. For example, those multiple weapons that you could get and try out in the original game? Yeah, they are gone, but here, you can gather these pink orbs that, when you collect enough, gives you more speed and allows you to hit faster, while also making you glow, which is… fine, I guess. It’s not necessarily a preferable change, and it lacks variety, but I still found myself having enough fun with it.

If it wasn’t already connected with Joe & Mac, you could easily see this game as your typical shovelware SNES platformer. It really doesn’t do anything to make itself stand out from other titles on the system, and I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that it was one of those shovelware SNES platformers, because it REALLY feels like it. It is still fun, and I had a good enough time with it, but that is just because I am a big fan of old-school platformers in general. Not to mention, if you were afraid that this change of characters would result in the feel of Joe & Mac being stripped away too, well fear not, because aside from a few differences, it pretty much plays exactly like Joe & Mac, but in this case, I would say it is better then the original, despite not being as charming.

If I were to give some complaints about the game, it would be that it is pretty damn easy. Yes, the levels themselves can be pretty tricky, and there are certainly plenty of instances where you can die, but this game gives you gems and lives like they are fucking candy, to the point where you can easily max out your life count by the end of the game. That’s saying a lot, considering your life cap is at 99. Also, this may have just been a problem for me, but I did encounter a game-breaking glitch that made me restart the entire game. In one of the haunted levels of the game, whenever I would touch one of those lightbulb things, the game would just automatically reset itself, and no matter how much I reloaded that save state, it ALWAYS did this. This may not sound like that much of a big deal, but considering you HAVE to pass by one of these bulbs in order to beat the level they are in, I was pretty much caught in a dead game. Thankfully, when I got back to that level after replaying through the entire game, it didn’t do this anymore, so it may have just been a one-time thing, but the fact that a bug like that exists is still pretty bad, and is worth mentioning.

Overall, despite the gameplay not being changed around that much, the life whoring, and the game-breaking bug, Congo’s Caper was still a pretty enjoyable time, and I would definitely consider it an improvement over the original Joe & Mac, despite not seeming like there is much more to it that would be worth playing. I would recommend it for those who were fans of the original game, as well as fans of the series in general, but for everyone else, there are definitely better platformers out there. But hey, at least now that we got through this game, the confusion with the titles will probably stop now, right? Oh, who am i kidding, it’ll never stop.

Game #320

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Congo's Caper. If you subscribe to numbers, it's like the most 6/10 or 7/10 game that ever was, but I like the cut of its jib. It's competent and fun, but to most people, there's really nothing exceptional about it. It's a quick playthrough, mostly reasonable aside from a couple of bosses and weird tricks thrown in, the music doesn't particularly stand out, it has some hit detection that's so out of wack that it feels like it was left in there as a prank, and a lot of its ideas and themes are relatively tame or taken straight out of its precedessor, Joe & Mac. The cavemen brothers and their adventures, while not memed upon relentlessly the way Bubsy is nowadays, don't have a ton of people really going to bat for them. I think they're considered good enough games (right?) and the first one even got a remake last year, but you aren't exactly getting YouTube videos about how they're "the best 2D platformers you haven't played" recommended in your feed or whatever either, you know? I've always had a pretty big soft spot for the Joe & Mac series as a whole, having played through them multiple times growing up even when Mario and Sonic were at my disposal, but I never did manage to finish Congo's Caper until now.

I think I might know why that is now. Congo's Caper has a more bizarre difficulty curve than I realized and one heck of an early game filter! Everything's pretty tame at first; you move, you smack guys with your club, hitting them into blocks can break them, and you can jump normally or extra high if you want. There's also a run button that's surprisingly not required during any of the game's chase sequences, but is required during its incredibly cruel Mega Man-esque "blocks that vanish and reappear" sequence. For the first few levels, the game provides a pretty gentle introduction that works well as a way to get used to all the basics. The way health works is probably the most interesting mechanic of the game and is something you'll probably rub up against a short way into the game. You lose a life after two hits, but getting hit once changes you from a blue-haired caveboy to a monkey, which in turn restricts the range of your attacks because of your tiny baby monkey arms. The smaller size should be something you can leverage to your advantage, but the game's, let's say, iffy hitboxes prevent that from working as you'd expect. It's interesting to have a mechanical punishment here and not just a cosmetic one like being reduced to your boxers in Ghosts 'n Goblins, so it's an idea I certainly respect. If you start losing in Congo's Caper, you can lose hard, but if you start winning, the game suddenly becomes very generous.

Shortly after the first few stages, you encounter a T-Rex boss just like Joe & Mac. It's no big deal and before long you end up inside of it, clubbing your way through its body. At the end of the road, though, is one seriously nasty boss: the devil-looking guy that kidnaps Congo's girlfriend and kicks off the events of the game. It's cool that they pull a fake climax so soon and the imminent difficulty fits the storytelling, but man is this guy just too much for such an early appearance! His attacks are super quick, the narrow arena makes it nearly impossible to avoid any of his attacks, and his health bar is absolutely gigantic, taking way too many hits to defeat (a problem all the bosses have, unfortunately). Only being able to take two hits makes this hard enough, but fighting this guy safely in your monkey form feels practically impossible. So what's a gamer looking to game to do about all this?

If you search around each level, you can find red orbs that'll bring you back to your human form. That's great, but if you can collect three of them as a human, you get rewarded with a "super" form that serves as a tremendous buff. Not only does it allow you to take three hits before going back to normal (making it an impressive five hits before you die!), you also get expanded attack range and an incredibly high jump that's so high it can actually be detrimental in certain environments. If you can keep this form going, something that's not too hard to do as long as you're thorough and careful, the game becomes significantly easier. Any orbs you collect at full health in this form give you extra lives, so you can stockpile a huge amount really easily! This mechanic serves as the part that gives Congo's Caper a proper skill ceiling to hit and reasons to master its gameplay. The game loves to surprise you with sudden peaks like this one boss, so you're meant to use the easier levels to stockpile as much as you can to prepare for these moments. Get to the boss as your super form and while it's still not easy, you at least have the tools to immediately meet him in the air and interrupt his attacks while also tanking some hits as needed.

I'm pretty sure younger me never made it past this guy (it took several tries even now!), which is a shame because this is where Congo's Caper gets more interesting with its level designs. For the next four areas, which are ruled over by a pirate, a tech guy, a sorcerer, and a ninja, you get to choose which order you tackle them in. The order doesn't matter at all, but you at least get to have some control over the rest of the difficulty curve. The ninja's levels feature tight spaces and platforming challenges. The pirate levels focus on water navigation, including an interesting endurance challenge where you have to avoid lightning strikes in a rising and sinking body of water by watching for the signs of where the strikes will hit next, kinda similar to what Donkey Kong Country 3 would do later. The tech guy's levels revolve around avoiding lava and choosing from multiple tiered paths to decide what the best course of action is like some kinda wise guy. The sorcerer's levels are perhaps the most interesting of all, featuring a gimmick where killed enemies come back as ghosts that harass you, encouraging you to avoid violence wherever possible. While it's never groundbreaking stuff, Congo's Caper comes alive once you get past that needlessly painful introduction. This is a solid set of ideas that keeps the level varied while also playing into the identities of the characters involved with them. Granted, the game does have a very frustrating final boss that basically requires you to harness the game's bad hitboxes as an advantage to use against it, but until then, it's smooth sailing!

I think I like Congo's Caper precisely because of how transparent it is. You know right away what you're getting and even if what you're getting is rocky at times, it's still exactly what you're looking for if you're interested in a platform that's a step or two removed from the obvious mainstream stuff. Platformers of this vintage go down real easy as something to do in between all these huge modern games and I found it really refreshing to finally see everything it had to offer and learn how to play it effectively. I dunno what it is about "B/C-tier" 2D platformers of the 90s, but I can always count on them to be a good time even if they're not the absolute peak of the craft. It's all too common that you see games like this dismissed as "not as good as Mario" or "just another Mario clone", but I think that's a disservice to other 2D platformers. Even if you don't think they're as good as Mario, they're doing something different and that's very important for the growth and expansion of any genre!

I don't think Congo's Caper is gonna overtake most Mario games (I do like it better than the first New Super Mario Bros., though...), but I really enjoy its take on the genre and with the prehistoric kings of the genre, Bonk and Adventure Island, being entirely absent from Nintendo Switch Online, Congo's Caper is doing us all a solid by filling in for them in the meantime. Cavemen were a real thing in video games at one point, I'll have you know! "Charm" is a nebulous thing to define and can often feel like an easy way to lavish praise on something, but we're only human and sometimes something just works for you. There's no shame in admitting that even if you don't have the words to elegantly express why. I'm trying my best here, but I dunno if "elegant" is the word I'd use to describe my little ramble here! I really like the way this game looks, I like how it's almost perfectly paced, I appreciate how it puts a spin on the usual power-up system, and I enjoy its cast of goofy little characters. Congo's Caper just works for me, you dig?