Colossal Cave (2023)

Played the VR version on the Meta Quest 2.

Colossal Cave was an interesting one; I'd never played the text based Colossal Cave, it being before my time, but as an adventure game super fan I was well familiar with its tropes and influence on the genre. I was also very familiar with its reputation for immense difficulty.

I think, though, because of my many years of experience playing the games that descended from this one, it's difficulty didn't really live up to the expectations. I'd been trained by years and years of games taking similar ideas and making them more accessible, so, when I was presented with the original product, it seemed almost quaint.

This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy myself -- I played this simultaneously with my elderly father, and we had a great time chatting back and forth giving suggestions on how to solve puzzles. I thought the VR experience was pretty good, and I definitely felt "presence" such that there were some situations that both startled me and amazed me.

But I can't help but feel that the game is more of a historical piece than anything that would light the world on fire today. But I think that's exactly what it's trying to be, and if so, it was a great success.

Colossal Cave is simultaneously old-school hard but also kinda easy? I think it's because, as an adventure game superfan, I've played every future iteration of these puzzles before.

I played this in parallel with my Dad, and things that were very intuitive to me like dropping items on the floor to navigate the maze where every room is the same and using the eggs to pay the troll because you can use the magic words to get the eggs again were so instantly intuitive to me as to feel "obvious", but seemed revelatory to him when I told him.

Some time ago, the Williams announced they were coming back by remaking Colossal Cave Adventure, the game that pushed them to start making games and become such important pioneers. It was gonna be a modern game, with a point and click interface, 3D graphics and VR. But still, it was also gonna be a game from - respectfully - two seventy years old who had just spent twenty years of early retirement roaming around the world in their boat. I love them, I admire them, I adore so many games from them, but I certainly didn’t expect them to make something like Half-Life: Alyx but reskinned as Adventure. And they made what was to be expected: a light remake, that tries to be extremely faithful in spirit, design, mechanics and structure to a game from 1974, while adding a graphical interface and a minimal dose of modern options. That’s why I think you should play this game with the same mindset you would have when actually playing a game from 30 or 40 years ago: patience, willness to discover and to practice some “archeology”. It may sound bizarre but it really gave me the same feeling I get when I play a text adventure from those years. And that’s the idea: Colossal Cave is for nostalgic people that dream of the original game, that want to go back the Sierra On-Line era, that want to try a slightly more modern but still faithful version of Adventure, or maybe for gamers that are curious about the past but whant a less demanding interface when they play a very demanding game. If that’s your approach, and I honestly think it’s the only one that makes sense, you can have fun with it, as I did.

I have to say a couple of things about the VR support, though. On one hand, obviously, it makes the game more immersive, but that’s to be expected. I’m happy I played it on Quest 2 for that reason alone. But the VR is really badly implemented. I can understand the choice of sticking to the point and click interface and avoiding traditional VR interaction because they didn’t want to “break” the original game design. But there’s some quality of life stuff that should be better. Particularly, navigation is really clunky and there’s no teleport option, which probably makes Colossal Cave unplayable for anybody who suffers from motion sickness. I don’t and I still had to take a breath here and there. That’s not good.