The Cave 9+

Well I’ve played it through twice and have used 6 of the 7 characters. Will I play it through again, just to see the Monk’s tale? Frankly, no.

I’ll be honest - the graphics are good, the mood suitably gloomy and evocative. The puzzles are fun, and all achievable. The back stories are interesting - but only to a point. The endings to the stories were ok, but in some cases well telegraphed in the character’s puzzle, and in others … disappointing. The Adventurer, particularly so.

Two things, though, stood out for me as issues for replay-ability. One was that you were forced to do the linking levels again, including the “trinkets” starter level. OK, so the characters had different abilities, but really you were just getting through them quickly to pick up the paintings and move onto the next level. And there was absolutely no way of shutting a character up once they’d started talking (or at least not that I found). When you’ve already heard it once, you don’t want to hear it again.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, although less so the second time, and the price is good. I particularly liked the Adventurer and Time Traveller puzzles. It’s just that those niggles prevent me giving it a third time through and fifth star.

For the price I paid, this is an absolute steal. The graphics are evocative and suit the cartoon style well, the monk’s temple is particularly lovely in an abstract inkwash kind of style. The characters have more depth than I was expecting and the whole thing can get quite dark in mood. I’m not really a dedicated gamer, but this one had me hooked and it was fun to play it through again with different teams of characters. Minor criticisms - if you want to play all of the characters through, you have to do some levels three times, twice is ok, but the third time is just getting through it as quickly as possible. And, apart from the reward of seeing all the levels, there’s no real acknowledgement or additional level when you’ve finished all of them, which would have been good.

Old fashioned? Probably. Good fun? Certainly.

The game is really good value for money. Good user interface, awesome narrative and the characters are well thought out. Quite interactive and puzzling at the same time. Only problem I have is that it can at times be a little slow and laggy or freeze. I have a Retina MBP 13” 2.6ghz i5 which is more than capable of running the game. Also would be great if the developers supported the full retina display; you can notice pixelation. On the whole its a fun game with a few teething problems.