![]() ![]() The game will draw you your own in-game map as you progress, which is helpful to a degree – though like a magical maze it’s designed to sometimes trick you and make you end up in the same spot you had just left. And while instant death that came out of nowhere was a lot more common back in the day, it’s a hard sell these days, especially because you get punished for it by a loss of score and a sometimes lengthy trek back through the caves.Īnd although the developers have taken special care to make sure that the maps made for the original (text) game still work for this version, you don’t have to go ahead and find one of those to play with. And while that might make you think “replay value”, here this can mostly be seen through random enemy encounters where it’s seemingly impossible to not take damage (and thus quickly die). As with many text adventures, you have to explore and experiment, and your total score will tell you how far you are towards discovering everything there is.īut where a lot of text adventures were fairly linear in their setup, Colossal Cave has a degree of randomization to it. That’s not easy though, because the game (like the original) does relatively little handholding. There are also treasures to be found, and getting out of the cave with these is ultimately what you’re going for. To newcomers, that leap might be a bit too great to comfortably handle.Ĭolossal Cave never really relied on storytelling in order to push the player forward – it’s meant to be a journey of discovery as you progress further into a massive cave system, solving puzzles along the way and getting past enemies looking to stop you. Reimagining something like that in a visual form is almost always going to be a challenge, and in the case of Colossal Cave it’s what makes it clear how game design was handled differently back in those days. Your imagination would fill in the blanks, and that was ultimately part of the magic – much like the appeal of a good book. The same is mostly true of the classic text adventure – which can be seen as videogame versions of a choose your own adventure book in a way, but without any illustrations. These were the very early days of floppy disks and networking computing, and even getting a game to play was a bit of a magical thing. ![]() Colossal Cave Adventure (formerly known as Adventure) was a hugely influential title after its launch in 1976, when it became one of the first video text adventures to gain traction – in a time where games weren’t easy to come by. Roberta Williams never made a secret of the fact that her love of the original game was a large driving force in her career and her decision to do this reimagining. For better and for worse, it’s a lot like we had imagined, and your enjoyment will likely depend on your familiarity with the era in which the original game appeared. We’d been eagerly anticipating the Colossal Cave reimagining by Roberta Williams, and have finally emerged from its cavern after exploring the game on both a PlayStation 5 and the Quest 2.Īlthough we had briefly seen Colossal Cave during last year’s trade show season, it was during our interview with Ken & Roberta Williams that we really started to get curious how the game would turn out.
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