Double Fine's The Cave is absolutely brilliant

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Double Fine's The Cave is absolutely brilliant

(14 posts)

Started 4 months ago by Moonwalker1982
Latest reply from Cobra951

Moonwalker1982
Member

So i've received a review code yesterday for Double Fine's The Cave. I work for a gamesite and SEGA sent us a code. I knew this was gonna be a special game when they released that debut trailer, but i didn't know it would be this special. It's awesome.

You get to choose between seven unique characters with their own story. You choose three of them and then you go platforming and puzzling. You got a Monk, Twins, Time Traveller, Knight, Adventurer, Scientist and the Hillbilly. Say you choose a Hillbilly, Twins and Knight..you will get different locations, puzzles and storylines compared to when you select the other three. This gives awesome replay value and i was quite surprised about it.

The puzzles are fun as hell but can be quite tricky at times. But when i finally completed a set of tricky puzzles, boy did that feel rewarding. It's been a long long time since i enjoyed a platformer so much. The Cave's sense of humour is awesome and with that i mean the voice, the talking cave, lol. It also feels like quite the long game cause yesterday i played as three different characters and i got stuck, so stuck that i decided to check out the other characters and choose 'new game' but that unfortunetely overwrites your savegame, but so far i guess that's the only slight downer on a brilliant game. But at that time i already had spent a few hours with it and now i'm also a few hours into the game with the other characters. I'd say it's VERY worth of your 1200MS points. It also supports co-op 2-3 players.

Posted 4 months ago #
monkeygourmet
Member

Great!

Thanks for the info, will def buy, think I'm going for Wii U at the mo.

Or the Amstrad GX4000 version, if they bother to support it! :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_GX4000

Posted 4 months ago #
Henry
Member

Does that mean different combination of characters gives you different story?

Posted 4 months ago #
Moonwalker1982
Member

Well, the examples i gave are the ones i played with and that gave me different storylines,puzzles and locations. In the first one i had the Knight, and i got a part for the Knight there early on. And in my second run, i get special parts for the Time Traveller.

Posted 4 months ago #
Moonwalker1982
Member

I would try a different combination of characters to see if it gives me yet another storyline,puzzles and locations but it overwrites my save, don't want that :)

Posted 4 months ago #
Sadismek
Member

Aww, I envy you. I want to play it right now :P!

Posted 4 months ago #
polygem
Member

cool. thank you for the impression. game was on my list and hoped it would turn out to be good. sounds like it's even great. will get this asap.

Posted 4 months ago #
Moonwalker1982
Member

Trust me on this guys, this ain't no simple platformer. This one does new things, this one does awesome and original things. In my character group is a time traveller and thus i get some missions for that character. This time machine let's me travel between prehistoric, further one and very far away future, so to speak. You really have to do things in the prehistoric era with one character to help out a character in the future era and so on.

There are also brilliant little touches lik....for example you are exploring around with one character in the future area and you go to the location where the character in the prehistoric era is, you will see his/her skeletton there, hilarious. I love those touches.

Posted 4 months ago #
DSB
Member

I think the nicest thing you can say about The Cave is that it was a good idea, and that Ron Gilbert is still a very entertaining writer.

The platforming is awful, the level design is a disaster, and the puzzles are really just fetch quests.

It would've worked as an adventure game, but instead of changing frames, you have to manually run back and forth through those godawful levels.

The physics are halfassed and there's no actual challenge posed by the levels themselves, so you're really just a rat in a maze that keeps blocking itself off, and trapping you in the same section until you complete a series of mundane tasks.

The results are funny, but it feels like the jokes on you for actually bothering to get there.

It makes you carry shit from point A to point B like you aren't actually there to be entertained. You have to run to the same spot and back again three times just to blow up three piles of rocks blocking off the level at one point.

Is that really supposed to be fun? Why couldn't I just have three sticks of dynamite to begin with?

It really feels like the actual gameplay was made by people who have no fucking clue what they're doing.

Posted 3 months ago #
Gadzooks!
Member

Absolutely loving it.

It has some of that old tentacle/monkey island magic. I'm loving the level design, characters, scripts, puzzles, artwork, and well everything really.

I have no problem with the platforming. Not one case of frustration so far.

Posted 3 months ago #
YoungZer0
Member

Yep, pretty much agree with DSB here. The gameplay feels totally tedious and simply not fun.

Posted 3 months ago #
monkeygourmet
Member

Only thing that's slightly annoying me is shoddy framerate on the Wii U version?

How does it play on 360?

It really seems to go below 30fps on the Wii U for me, pretty poor onsidering other games run a lot smoother.

Games cool though.

Also, the Wii U version doesn't use the pad very well, there's no off screen play which this game would be perfect for.

Wish I'd tried the demo first or got it for the 360.

Posted 3 months ago #
DSB
Member

On PC it runs fine, but the movement just feels kinda rough. It's not the framerate, it's just off somehow.

I had the same experience with Stacking, and I'm starting to think that Costume Quest was really only fun because the gameplay was so limited. It looks to me like Double Fine really struggles with this stuff.

It's a shame. I really wanted it to be good.

Posted 3 months ago #
Cobra951
Member

It runs smoothly on the 360 most of the time. It will occasionally get jerky. Since the game is not a real platformer at all, but a classic adventure game with a platforming rather than point-and-click interface, the short performance hits don't affect playability at all. Challenges are all cerebral, not about timing or coordination. You can't really die by missing a jump, for example. The squashed character simply reappears close to where he was before the mishap.

Posted 3 months ago #

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