Will Crowther and Don Woods’s text-based 1970s adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure, in which players explore a treasure-filled cave system, has played a seminal role in shaping the history of video games, popularizing the concept of combining narrative storytelling with puzzle-solving mechanics. The game’s influence is still felt today, in everything from the current roguelike boom to the various offshoots of Dark Souls.
Perhaps Colossal Cave Adventure’s most direct influence, though, has been on King’s Quest creator Roberta Williams. The graphical and mechanical innovations that she and her husband, Ken Williams, pioneered at Sierra On-Line are rooted in their shared affinity for Colossal Cave Adventure. Which makes it more than a little apt that, after having shaped the adventure genre as we know it, they’ve emerged from retirement to reimagine the game that inspired them.
The result, Colossal Cave, is a 3D remake that finds players navigating environments from a first-person perspective while an omnipresent narrator provides item and location descriptions as necessary. But if the visual elements are meant to be the main hook of this remake, they’re hardly persuasive. The game looks nothing short of archaic, rendered in an ugly style that’s dated yet too sharply detailed to tap into the mystique of the lo-fi indie game movement.
As in the original, Colossal Cave tasks you with locating subterranean treasures and depositing them in a shack near the cave entrance. With points awarded or deducted according to your actions, you must accomplish that task with no map markers or quest logs or tagalong children to blurt out puzzle solutions. The lone modern concession is a map that fills in as you go and remains filled in between playthroughs, though purists can opt to forego it entirely or wipe the map clean for each new run. Otherwise, you’re left to your own devices down there, figuring out the function of items you find like a black rod and an empty bird cage.
The idea is to experiment and discover, and time has been shockingly kind to such a game design ideal. Beneath the hideous art, Colossal Cave’s lack of guidance allows it to retain some genuinely entrancing moments of exploration and problem-solving. But the game’s puzzles quickly reveal how very limited they are. The unflattering visual makeover ends up creating the expectation of a mechanical update to actions like shooing a snake out of your path, but there’s only one solution, and you’ll likely figure it out through trial and error with your limited inventory space rather than by logic or reasoning. While Colossal Cave now resembles many of the reactive and open-ended first-person adventures that came out in the decades since the original, underneath it remains obstinately committed to early, rudimentary game design.
The game will likely require multiple “runs” to complete, but where other run-based games break up monotony through progress rewards and randomization, this one just kicks you back to the start. You’re technically acquiring more knowledge on each attempt that will make you more efficient for the next, but there are no sly shortcuts to learn like in Outer Wilds. You also can’t even use the handy “teleport” spells until you find and examine them again.
Perhaps Colossal Cave’s unthinking fealty to the original, and its seeming dismissal of so many of the innovations that might have improved it, could be forgiven if it featured any puzzles or mechanics that would be tough to replicate in a modern design context. But no such innovations are apparent, and new touches like the first-person camera create new problems like making it easy to miss important items in the cave. Colossal Cave, then, can hardly be called a “modernization,” because it would have felt antiquated even if it came out 20 years ago.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Stride PR.
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Wait, this is THE Colossal Cave? Like, Sierra game? And the original creators are behind it? I swear, all the promo stuff on Steam looks like some really bad asset flip.
I disagree with your assessment. I’m absolutely loving this game. The art is not ‘hideous.’
The ambience and especially the voice narration are wonderful. I think the puzzles are pretty standard faire for a classic adventure game. My daughter and I are having a lot of fun playing this together, and I recommend it to anyone.
Your critique of the art is absolutely off base. And the game is designed to be played as though you were playing the original version some thing you seem to miss just because it’s not hyper realistic like today’s modern games does not make this art hideous at all shame on you for making such a statement