Just okay

There’s a lot to like about this game. Great audio and graphics, unique and interesting story, humor and some good puzzles.

Unfortunately, there are enough flaws that keep me from giving it more than three stars.

First and foremost is the lack of any instruction in gameplay whatsoever. Not even the basic controls are explained! I learned to control my characters by trial and error, and had to look in the settings to find out what other controls I was missing. There was also no instruction in the special powers of each character. While some were had a fairly obvious function, others had me completely mystified. What, for example, is the knight’s halo-and-wings power all about, I wondered, and what’s that shimmer the twins leave behind supposed to do?

When it came to those special powers, most of them actually ended up being almost completely worthless. In several cases, the special power is only useful one time in the entire game. It would have been a lot more fun if there were more little bonus areas to find that required specific skills to access, or puzzles that had multiple solutions and could be solved using different combinations of skills. Anything to make the differences between characters more than just a different avatar for most of the game!

Further, the puzzles were not always good. Sometimes they were far too simple. For example, the concept of dragging a block from here to there so you can jump to the ledge is a great early puzzle to learn the mechanics of the game… but to repeat it other times, even near the end of the game, for no apparent reason is just tedious and time-wasting. Sometimes the puzzle solutions just didn’t make any sense, resulting in me looking up a solution online and wondering how the heck I was supposed to figure it out. I ruined a couple puzzles for myself because of that, looking them up too quickly following several frustrated attempts to solve previous puzzles.

Worst of all was the fact that sometimes puzzles required actions that were never needed previously and never repeated after. The case that springs to mind was a puzzle requiring that you switch characters while holding the action key. Nowhere else before that was there any indication that this might be an important user interface concept, and nowhere afterward was this action needed again. Completely nonsensical, with no rational way of coming up with the solution!

On top of all that, there’s really no replay value. Yes, you have to replay it several times to get to experience all the characters’ special areas… but note the use of the phrase “have to.” Replaying existing areas isn’t much fun, it’s just something you do (if you’re so inclined) to see areas that you hadn’t been able to see the first or second time through.

Thomasareed about The Cave