Cavernus is a rogue-lite exploration platformer, and nothing that it advertises or hopes to achieve is horrible in any way.
Unfortunately, it's 2018.
If you're looking for the next horrible game to add to your "Cringiest Picks of 20XX" to all two of your YouTube subscribers, you won't find it here. Cavernus is in no way at the same level of "awful" as some of the other titles here - I have not encountered many bugs, the controls remain consistent throughout, and no features in the game have caused me an immense amount of frustration. As someone who never faults a game for being "boring", I'll let the (intentional) repetitiveness of the game slide as well.
Cavernus fails in its execution, but not in the way that a hand-drawn mobile platformer would: it's more like a "you got a 59% on your quiz" type of failing rather than a "you picked E for every answer and shoved it in the ScanTron"-type of thing. With such a small scale, the game finds itself simultaneously too empty, too zoomed-in, and too fast-paced. A larger viewscape coupled with more nooks and crannies to explore would do the game well. Now, while the project advertises itself as including "twitch gameplay", this is not entirely true, as the way that this is gone about deals with very fast movement from the player's hand and not much else. The character's mobility and jump speed is preposterous, and when coupled with the screen's visibility, leads to instant disaster while falling down into a molten abyss, or a deadbolted standstill when using the climbing axe.
The difficulty of the game stems from two intertwined roots. The more innocuous of these is the controls. While key mapping is allowed, full-scale mapping is not offered, and one may only change their movement keys and action key, which hardly makes a difference. The entirety of my deaths, save for two while figuring out the mechanics of the game, resulted in me pressing Q instead of 1 or 2, dropping my held item and leaving me with but a split second to figure out what was happening. A good game of this caliber should provide a challenge to test a player's capabilities and gradually improve them with time, and relying on poor controls and a moment of "oh wait, wrong thing" to do so hardly brings that to the table. Imagine Diner Dash, but with no time limit, the world's most patient customers, and the only thing threatening to ruin your game being you accidentally picking up a bowl of fancy rat poison, occasionally placed right next to the rest of the completed meals. Other, more subtle (yet surely unintentional) ways the game may attempt to trick you into death is through the pause menu, which, rather than starting you on the first option every time, will scroll up or down depending on how many times you press the respective keys in-game. That is, keeping your selector over "SAVE" won't do you much, and the next time you pause, you may find it on "QUIT", "RESTART", or "LOAD" depending on how many times you've jumped.
The other instance is a result of poor game design rather than control oversights. As an exploration-based platformer, the concept of "find the exit in a large maze" is not a problem in and of itself. However, combined with the previously-mentioned issues of the scope of the game, the sometimes-ridiculous-mobility of the protagonist, and - here's the kicker - a lack of guiding force towards the exit, this quickly becomes an issue. As I have mentioned, all but two of my deaths while playing this game were a result of the fated Q key. One of these other two came from me falling into the lava pit at the end, not expecting it after two levels of descending as far down as I could and happening to end up in the area with the exit. The entirety of your gameplay will result in you scouring the bottom depths for the exit - enough of a pattern so that the fun of exploration is taken from you, but not coherent enough that you will know where to go. If you enjoy dropping down blindly into nothingness and then wall-jumping your way back up [repeat x1-8 as needed], this will surely be the time of your life.
What hurts Cavernus above all else is that, as an exploration game, nothing begs to be explored. The strange hollowness of the land sprinkles its items and hazards with wild abandon, but there isn't anything that can be spawned that you can't buy right off the bat at the start of every section. Your mission becomes a case of "find the exit, which is in one of six or so places that you know how to get to", and it becomes a matter of slowly descending rather than a more intricate maze. No incentives or other rewards are given for straying from the pattern, and the path to the exit doesn't become any more or less of a challenge compared to the rest of the map. By the end of it all, you feel that you're playing an elaborate game of pinball, except there are no lights, no bumpers, and there are six different zones at the end with flippers at each of them, except for one, which sends you back to the launch zone. ... Okay, that was a bad metaphor. Alright, how about a pachinko machine without money?
With all of the bad games on Steam or otherwise, it seems rude to place Cavernus along with them. Its intentions are earnest, and as a particularly cheap and small-scale game, there is little it can do to warrant any anger or frustration at it - the only way you'll find yourself finished with it is after an hour or so of gameplay, finalized with a noncommital shrug. For everything it gives, the standard for free or cheap games simply can't bow as low as Cavernus stands anymore. There are better options, both on Steam and around various sites, that match the scope of Cavernus while beating it out in their enjoyment factor.
Cavernus is on the right track, but it's not quite there. While there isn't much hope for this game, I do hold a lot of hope for its creators. I have encountered no bugs during my playthrough (though, granted, I wasn't trying to break the game looking for them), the controls were tight and consistent (though speedy and floaty), and the game nails a lot of what minimalist games could and should be. Cavernus clearly knows what it's shooting for, and if the studio that brought it to us can work out the fine details of their next project, I'm sure they'll come out with something that gives cheap titles a good name.
