Cave Story+

t

absolute masterpiece. no other words needed.

Challenging action platformer. It is short and relatively linear, but it is story-focused and has replay value. I just wish that I could skip the cutscenes.

should be overwhelmingly positive

I am so mad at myself for not playing this game until now oml. It contains so many things that so strongly appeal to me in video games. Aesthetic is vibrant and adorable, gameplay loop is super approachable, fun but imperfect in its heavy experimentation, soundtrack is comprised of incredibly charming homemade chiptunes. Also the game is just 4 hours long. Also also the narrative is absolutely bizarre and revolves around cute lovable bunny characters getting enslaved and murdered. lol And the game is rly hard sometimes!! This is the creation of someone who clearly grew up on and loved video games of the 20th century, most of which famously upped their difficulty for the singular purpose to arbitrary extend your time with them. It needed to be worth the money you spent on it, after all. This game takes inspiration from this, despite lacking the original dubious nature of that design. You are forced to fight four (4) bosses in the endgame without dying!! There was no monetary reason to do this, the original version of the game was (and still is) free. The dev just did it for the love of the game lmao. It is simultaneously baffling but also kinda admirable. Big thumbs up!! Big love!! I love indie games!!!

Lots of backtracking, and instant deaths. I don't mind instant deaths, but the back to back fan jump section was really annoying with the sliding physics. There were also a couple sections that were just straight up unintuitive and required a walkthrough for me, for instance [spoiler] the Gum key part, where the door only unlocks after you backtrack and talk to the guy again.[/spoiler] [spoiler] and the blast door section where you have to shoot upwards at a particular tile repeatedly, I was stuck on this for half an hour, backtracking as you do in other parts of the game thinking I missed something... No you just have to keep shooting upwards.[/spoiler] Also for no reason the difficulty of the game goes absolutely crazy on the very last boss, as well as the level up to the ending boss. Again fine, but when 1 hp enemy hits downgrade the weapon and no xps drop it's just tedious as hell. The art is okay for an indie game, music is catchy. But I do not understand how this game is so beloved by so many people, I can only assume they used a walkthrough, or never actually played it.