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.