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By Michael Lowell
May 1, 2010
Cave Story
PC, Wii (reviewed on PC)
Developed: Studio Pixel
Published: Nicalis (Wii)
Released: December 20, 2004
Note A: I typically tackle commercial gaming. This prevents me from giving a shit about the free-to-play Farmville. But the five-year plan of Studio Pixel has proven popular enough to merit a Wii release, so let’s talk Cave Story.
Note B: This review contains potential spoilers.
Let’s blaspheme for a moment: Cave Story is the Heavy Rain of indie game development.
I hope that doesn’t sound crazy. See, the Playstation 3 adventure title was lemon fresh in a dead genre. It boasted an intriguing gameplay system and featured no obvious flaws. But since game reviewers weren’t doing their job, they walked past a laughable “mature storyline” and a paper-thin exploration aspect to declare Heavy Rain a possible game-of-the-year candidate.
Cave Story’s a similar beast. It does a hell of a lot right. The music and graphics are infectious. The story is surprisingly deep. The physics and controls are perfect. And if you’ve ignored the evolution of video games since Metroid became the blueprint for Studio Pixel’s one-man opus, you’d think this is one hell of a video game. But contrary to popular opinion, one man busting his ass to create Pretend Metroid is no ticket to the Pantheon.
“You’re biased!”, “You want indie devs to fail!”, whatever. I grew up on a Nintendo. That system broke a lot of barriers while doing a lot wrong. And Cave Story’s failing is in embracing the blueprint without embracing the evolution thereof.
Studio Pixel had no qualms about getting Metroid in its baby’s eye. But Metroid worked because it could present the illusion of non-linear gameplay without having to manage story elements. So when players broke Super Metroid and started wiping bosses in non-sequential order, the game’s storyline wasn’t broken by any on-rails dialogue. When you tie a script into a non-linear game and words don’t evolve with player decisions? You end up with the Metroidvania model, i.e. Pretend Metroid. This model is notorious for its linearity. And unless Pretend Metroid finds room for Deus Ex-style plot mechanics, it’s going to waltz into mediocrity very soon.
Cave Story’s plot in a nutshell. Or maybe not.
With the exception of the late-game, Cave Story is an on-rails experience mimicking what you saw in Castlevania: Order of Ecclessia. And it’s not good. Interaction with Cave Story’s denizens is like pulling levers. You’re getting canned messages that don’t react to the player’s current situation. And since there’s no way for the player to be intuitive about his next travel decision, the game devolves into a fetch quest clusterfuck. Fetch quests sucked in 1988 and forcing me to round up adorable puppies doesn’t make it suck less in 2010.
Go to hell.
And when you combine it with Cave Story’s phony approach to replay value, your open-world approach becomes totally bunk. I want to strangle every developer who inflates the length of his title and calls it “deep gameplay”. Pixel is one of them. His game features a number of sidequests deliberately designed to masquerade as a second playthrough.
Example: In your pursuit of a weapon, you’ll find a man’s dwelling. His chest yields your starter weapon. Later in the game, you earn the option to trade it for a Machine Gun. But you wouldn’t know to decline the offer and then return to the man in order to obtain the game’s most powerful weapon. Guess you’ll have to do that on your second playthrough. Think that’s bad? Wait until Pixel uses the same mechanic to prevent you from having any shot at the “good ending”!
In the face of these issues, we’re left with a shining high point: The weapon system. It’s ingenious: Kill stuff, collect the triangles they drop, weapons level up. Get hit, weapons level down. It’s an excellent premise designed to prevent aggressive players from becoming reckless. The problem with this? The game designed to embrace 1988 is way too easy.
With the exception of some bosses and the “let’s shred the pace of the endgame” route through Hell, it’s easy to blow through Cave Story by doing your best LeBron James impression, driving the paint and destroying opposition with no regard for your own health. And since most bosses are straight-forward affairs, the same theory applies, only with various weapon combinations. Cave Story’s lack of difficulty never allows the intriguing weapon system to fulfill its potential. “Yea but try beatign the game with ur startig three hit pointz!” And for every feat of skill involving a short-handed Cave Story playthrough, I can find you a Super Metroid video with a Ridley ass-kicking minus protection from the scalding heat.
The indie game community is welcome to claim they’re relevant. There’s no shortage of games proving small development teams can still create excellent titles. But strip away the one-man achievement of developing and famousing Cave Story. After you do that, you’re left with something that could have been a hell of a lot better. And I’m not handing out any bonus points for effort.
P.S.: Do not listen to the internet. Your first run through Cave Story can be finished in six to eight hours. Twelve hours is a number constantly invading the tubes. Perhaps the biggest surprise in Cave Story was discovering a large group of people who are even worse at platformers than I am.
2 out of 5
(Games rated two-out-of-five will appeal to their target audience. But against the body of work produced in this forty-year-old medium? Against that copy of Beyond Good and Evil sitting on the rack for eight bucks? Yeah, it has issues.)