If I were to play devil’s advocate, I could argue that a game about greed and plunder maybe should have an exorbitant price. Colossal Cave Adventure was always an open-source project, and slamming the remake with the insane price tag feels inappropriate at best. That’s really weird and wrong, especially since there aren’t any royalties to be paid. My last gripe with the game is the price of forty bucks. Except for high resolution and VR support, Colossal Cave visuals would have been meh even in the Xbox 360 era. “The Majestic frozen river shining like a cascade of diamonds” looks like a beef tongue made of ice connecting a flat roof and unremarkable floor. Sometimes, the discrepancy between the colorful portrayal offered by the narrator and the plain ugliness in front of you is almost comical. Like the student project made in Unity, it has basic utilitarian gfx, simple models, and even simpler environments. What is the commercial reason for trying to stay true to their expectations? Some Things Should Have Stayed BuriedĬolossal Cave as reimagined by Roberta Williams looks obsolete. Come to think of it, I really doubt that fans of the original represent any significant gaming demographic nowadays. As I previously said, the game is trying to exist in both the past and the present, satisfying neither audience. All of it is true to the source material, but most of it should have been forgotten. There are many such nebulous solutions, forcing you to do flat experimentation instead of thinking. How do you dismiss the huge snake baring your way into the tomb of the ancient king? Simple, just release the tiny bird you previously caught (by “using” a wicker cage on it). Regular puzzles aren’t much better either. Nowadays, they are nothing more than weird and repelling relic, like chewing tobacco. They probably were necessary for saving RAM in ancient computers, representing a resource-saving way to generate content. Modron maze in Planescape: Torment comes to mind, the single stain in an otherwise sublime gaming experience. I really can’t remember the last time I experienced the insanity of navigating dozens upon dozens of identical rooms, using pen and paper to catch my bearings. Those labyrinthine sections are the single most infuriating element of the game. If we substract mazes, the cave system is not THAT colossal. You’ll respawn at the surface, sans some points, fuming. For example, a random dwarf will occasionally pop up and throw an axe or knife at you, killing you instantly if RNG decides it. Max obtainable score is 350, but some events outside of your control can negatively affect it. There’s no story in the usual sense, no objective more complex or noble than basic plunder. Instead of typing „Go North” or “Take Keys”, you interact with the game world using a mouse and keyboard or gamepad. Venturing the complex subterranean system full of wonder, dangers, and wondrous dangers, you get points for liberating various riches and hauling them to the surface. The core objective of Colossal Cave is the score. This weird redundancy is pretty harmless, but the inventory space limited to seven slots, an abundance of complex mazes consisting of identical rooms, harebrained puzzles, instant deaths, and other design elements abandoned in the eighties, aren’t. They kept the colorful descriptions of every room, introducing the narrator to talk about the things you are seeing with your own eyes. To minimize that, Roberta and her team tried to preserve most of its ancient elements, ignoring the obsolescence factor. The core problem in molding half a century-old text-based adventure into modern 3D form is the inevitable loss of charms during translation. It was a noble idea that failed in some significant respects.
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