Review - CAVE
Thanks to a stunning lack of sound, narrative and visibility you blindly lead a boy and girl through the titular cave in a sort of uneasy, yet tolerable, shuffle.
Swiftly forced into separate areas of the cave the boyish boy (good at jumping) and girlish girl (rubbish at crawling, ok at smoking) initially help each other out, pushing buttons and opening doors. You think, “how lovely, it’s that endearing Ico hand holding mechanic sort of thing”, you think “Gee, bet there scared like that all alone, I can’t wait until they meet up again and have a good old innocent giggle about spelunking each other. What a pleasant and emotionally satisfying resolution that reunion will be”.
But as the game progress’, and they’re separated further and further away, and you start thinking “I’m not really hitting the ‘change gender’ button much anymore”, and you suddenly faced with their repeated deaths and restart resurrections at the points of some malicious spikes, and one long, dark, bleak, abyss like jump follows another, and the discovery of abandoned trinkets prompts odd, private reflections about each others relationship, and the complete lack of anything really at all happening creeps up on you - you begin to start thinking: “maybe this isn’t just some jolly old fucking stroll in the dark”.
And then, AND THEN, it ends, and it isn’t. And quite frankly an astonishingly well built up sense of subtle, poised suspense is suddenly and brutally replaced with a confused, pitying clamor for some light and warmth and something that doesn’t make you dread existing.
But then again actually, that’s not necessarily point.
The thing there’s an undercurrent of exquisitely interwoven, almost Hemingway-esque subtext of hormones that permeates everything from how the game treats each gender’s deaths to the suggestion that there’s rather more to the level design than simply forcing some inconvenient jumps. It’s not trying to tell a story, it isn’t some dreadfully obvious allegory and equally it isn’t some dreadful and vague pretentious intellectual wank. It’s just a nice idea, modestly presented with confidence and sophistication.
In so far as enlightening the game with the sort mature, intelligent text that is so infuriatingly absent from games whilst simultaneously creating something fun and exciting to play, the sum total experience of Cave signals it out as sort of mini-masterpiece, which if you haven’t gathered by now, means YOU SHOULD FUCKING GO PLAY IT ALREADY!!!!!
Cave is by Peter Lu. You can download it for free from the game’s site. You may want to do this… now.
