[REVIEW] The Cave

Blaine Arcade

(PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii U, PC [REVIEWED])

The Cave seems like a product of ‘one of those nights.’  These are the nights where a bunch of friends get together, play or watch something cool, consume a percentage of their weight in sugar that is only appropriate for hummingbirds, and then spend the entire night talking about their own little ideas through the utilization of frantic hand-waving, waiting for your turn to speak, and phrases like ‘that has NEVER been done before!’  Everyone wakes up the morning after and realizes that the ideas which glistened under the moon now look rusty and flat under the harsh sunlight.  Plus, it would be so much work to actually make them.  It’s better to just give up and keep it a dream.

The creators of The Cave, Double Fine, seem to have plowed right through the loss of excitement long enough to create a finished product.  On the surface, they did a decent enough job.  The visuals are simple and occasionally pleasant, the controls are functional, and the brand of humor common to their other games is intact.  The problem here seems to be a lack of passion.  Being known for their creativity, Double Fine needs to be held to a higher standard than many other game companies (I personally think they peaked with the release of the adorable Stacking and its ‘hobo king’ DLC).

Their latest is a subterranean romp through the subconscious of seven characters who each have skeletons in the closet clothed with their dirty laundry.  It’s an adventure game, so you can look forward to plenty of item combination puzzles and traversal of familiar terrain.  This is where the game’s first issue shows up.  Each session starts with the choice of three characters for your party, with each one corresponding to a special area of the cave that only they can access.  Time for some math.  Seven divided by two… whoops.  there’s one left over.  So in order to play through the whole game, you’ll have to repeat the stories of two other characters.

The optional spelunkers did little to impress, either.  They’re all the kind of stereotypes you see in dime fiction or bad jokes: the knight, the scientist, the monk, the adventurer, the twins, the hillbilly, and the time traveler.  While I’ll admit the time traveler is a little unorthodox, the others don’t present much interest.  How hard is it to create a list of professions or characteristics that are underutilized in this medium?  Bouncer, pearl diver, beekeeper, bearded lady, singing telegram, rain dancer, and rodeo clown.  There — was that so hard?

Your party of three roams the cave in search of emotional catharsis for their various transgressions.  It plays relatively smoothly, but there is a lot of backtracking through flat corridors and awkward switching between characters spread all over the cave.  It’s a bit like making toast with cold butter: in principal, you should be able to split up and maximize your effect, but you just end up with a couple of cold lumps in three places.

The story disappoints as well.  Although you play as the characters, they don’t speak, interact with each other, or respond to events in the environment.  Their back stories are told mostly via still pictures you can find and collect.  The only personality comes form the stone walls of the cave itself, which is alive and narrating dryly.  There are binary good and bad endings for each character (don’t get me started on how overrated those are); the method by which you attain the good endings is neither rewarding or mechanically interesting; all you have to do is repeat an action three times instead of one.  For a game that should be built around ideas of guilt, responsibility, and compassion, this little triple-tap may be the biggest letdown of the game.  The passion just isn’t there.

The Cave is little more than an echo.  It’s the last faded waves of what was surely, at some point, a gasp of inspiration.  I cannot say The Cave is a bad game, because it isn’t.  However, when you find yourself talking to friends the day after completing the game and you open your mouth to mention it, you’ll realize nothing is coming out: no stories of awesome little secrets, no stunning character developments, and no gorgeous scenery.  This game might have earned a slightly better score from a new studio, but with the amount of talent I know Double Fine has, I must judge them a little more harshly.  You don’t need your lantern, there’s nothing great inside the darkness of The Cave.