A 47-year-old video game classic has been remade by 69-year-old Roberta Williams, in what may be the most retro game release ever.
If you know what Colossal Cave is, there are only two possibilities: you’re a video game history student who really knows what you’re doing, or you’re old. The game first became available in 1976 and assuming you would have had to be a college student to play it at the time, as home computers didn’t exist back then, you’d be in your mid-sixties by now. That’s fine, there should be video games for everyone, but it does mean that this remake has a very specific audience.
If you don’t know what Colossal Cave is, it’s impossible to underestimate its influence. Created at a time when the concept of video games barely existed, Colossal Cave allowed for a level of interactivity with the environment that, while rendered only through text, would form the basis for almost everything we take for granted in modern gaming – especially anything that is not just an action game.
Other than anything, Colossal Cave was the first text adventure, a genre whose only connection to the modern world is visual novels and indie titles like Road watchman. The original game has no graphics at all and your only interaction with the world is typing commands like ‘GO SOUTH’ or ‘TAKE LAMP’. The appeal of this remake is that it visually mimics all of that while keeping the gameplay exactly the same. It’s clearly made with a lot of love and respect, but how much it actually accomplishes is up for debate.
Not being a commercial product, the original game has gone through many iterations, from different people, and while few would have played it on a mainframe, when it was called Colossal Cave Adventure, you don’t need to own a bus pass to play later versions. like 1981’s Microsoft Adventure – the first video game they ever published. Or there is Atari 2600 game Adventurewhich was an unofficial attempt at a graphical version and almost equally influential in its own right.
To add to the remake’s retro credentials, it was developed by Roberta Williams, who retired especially for the occasion. She and her husband Ken were the founders of Sierra On-Line, famous for its pre-Lucasfilm graphic adventures. Roberta was the more prolific game designer of the two, working on the groundbreaking King’s Quest franchise and interactive movie Phantasmagoria.
The original Colossal Cave Adventure, understandably, had a huge influence on her career, which explains why she and her husband chose this as their comeback project at age 69. The remake allows for full 3D movement, as locations previously described only in economic but eloquent prose are now depicted with modern graphics. Or at least that’s the intention, in reality the images are at least 15 years away from anything that could be considered state of the art.
That’s understandable given the small niche the game is trying to address, and the equally small budget that comes with it, but the graphics being so uninteresting immediately take away most of the remake’s raison d’être.
It’s a shame, because the way the remake works shows such an obvious love for the original version(s) that it’s almost possible to forgive the way it looks. The text is all still there, only it is now read by an optional narrator. That’s a nice touch, but it just underscores how imaginative and fantastic the original descriptions were and how mundane and unimpressive their visuals are.
The florid descriptions of an underground volcano deep in the heart of the cave system should translate into something equivalent to the fiery ending of The Northman, or at least Return Of The King. Here, however, the lava effects look like a poor tech demo for a 2000s graphics card. It’s like reading the description in a lavish holiday brochure and instead seeing the stark reality of a rainy fortnight in Morcombe gets.
The visuals are just a matter of budget, but their limitations create other more tangible problems, most notably the fact that it’s very hard to spot interactive objects, especially since Colossal Cave Adventure never had many of them in the first place. While the text makes it a lot easier to tell, or at least guess, when there’s something you can use, the same locations in the remake are filled with background details that look like something you should be able to pick up but can’t can.
Other elements just haven’t aged well and are the sort of thing any modern sequel or equivalent would iron out. Instant and unavoidable death can come without warning from dwarves suddenly emerging from the ground, when even back then the mazes were considered frustrating and annoying and not made any better by the fact that you can at least see them now.
On the plus side, most of the puzzles stand up impressively. Adventure game logic has always been extremely difficult to get right, but Colossal Cave nailed it right away and has a lot to learn for modern games, who think that pulling a switch or following a clear set of instructions counts as a puzzle . The subtle wayfinding in the text is particularly clever and consulting the narrator, after an initial visual exploration has gone blank, is the only time the mix of prose and graphics in the remake makes mechanical sense.
Inevitably, delving into the history of Colossal Cave Adventure and Roberta Williams is far more interesting than playing the remake. The source code of the original is hereso rather than waste time with this flawed reinvention, we suggest spending a nice afternoon researching one of gaming’s most influential titles and letting the world of Colossal Cave remain in your imagination.
Summary of the Colossal Cave review
In brief: A misguided attempt to recreate one of the oldest and most influential gaming classics, let down by outdated visuals and prehistoric gameplay elements.
Advantages: The ancient text is still a marvel of economy and subtle signage, and the puzzles are usually very good. It’s nice to know the Williams is still going.
Cons: The whole concept just doesn’t work with such bad graphics, especially considering how hard it is to select interactive objects. Annoying dwarves and mazes. Very expensive.
rating: 4/10
Formats: PC (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and Meta Quest 2
Price: £33.50
Publisher: Cygnus Entertainment
Developer: Cygnus Entertainment
Release date: January 19, 2023 (Xbox One and PS4 TBD)
Age rating: 7
E-mail [email protected]leave a comment below, and follow us on twitter
LAKE : Fire Emblem Engage review – better than Three Houses
LAKE : One Piece Odyssey Review – Happy Birthday
LAKE : Terror Of Hemasaurus Nintendo Switch Review – 21st Century Rampage
Follow Metro Gaming Twitter and email us [email protected]
Use our to submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without having to send an email Submit Stuff page here.
For more stories like this, check out our Gaming page.
