A spelunk to the past.
I don’t know whether to be turned off by the new Colossal Cave or charmed by it.
The caves you once explored in your imagination are now rendered around you.
Colossal Cave
Except, the text guidance is still here too, only it’s now narrated.
“You are in a large cave,” for instance.
But there’s also something about the way it works.
Colossal Cave behaves like a stop-start kind of adventure game, a point-and-click.
There’s an inventory and you use things on other things.
But there’s a good reason for this!
There’s a whole backstory to the game you have to know about.
Ken ran the business, Roberta made the games.
And it all began for them with Colossal Cave - Roberta played it and never looked back.
That empire, though, fell apart.
They didn’t even so much as pick up a game in the decades since.
They got into boating instead and became explorers.
And that game, you’ve probably guessed it, is this one, Colossal Cave 3D.
She had to pave the way.
And her King’s Quest series did.
The prospect of her returning to adventure games, then, was exciting to me.
But that’s them - that’s the spirit that made them so successful with Sierra On-Line.
Perhaps they can come back and pick up where they’d left off.
In a way, they have.
Even the graphics, which are new, look that dated.
Colossal Cave 3D looks old, moves old, behaves old.
When you put it next to a game like Edith Finch, there’s no comparison.
There’s nothing here, no conciliation to any of the hand-holding we’ve come to expect in games.
There are just clues scattered around, maps, and your mind.
Try things and then take another crack: it’s the old-school way.
And once you settle into that rhythm, there is a nostalgic pleasure in it.
Can I recommend it?
Clearly, the game won’t be for everybody.
But if anything I’ve said twangs a chord of interest in you, maybe that’s enough.
Think of it as a curio.
It’s even in VR, if that’s your thing.
