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A monumental game from the 70s faithfully re-imagined | Colossal Cave - Review

2K View2023-01-21

You’ve read it right, 70s. If you were somehow already a gamer in the 1970s, you might have played one of the most influential video games of all time in Colossal Cave Adventure. This newly released title is a remake of that classic text-based adventure.

3D graphics, modern gameplay, with big names attached to it, one being Roberta Williams — the Founder of Sierra, basically the mother of point-and-click adventure games. The original game is what basically inspired her to make adventure games, and now she’s the one remaking it, full circle… you can't go wrong right? Well, I’ll just let my review speak for itself.

Colossal Cave is indeed a faithful remake of that old classic. You are an adventurer trying to find and collect the many different treasures hidden within the Colossal Cave. The Colossal Cave is big and spacious, with many hidden passages and extensive mazes for you to explore and figure out. At the end of the playthrough, you are scored depending on the treasures you’ve found.

Every line of text from the original game has been directly translated into audio and visual form. Everything is now narrated and can finally be seen visually. The voice-over narration is done perfectly and something that you might have probably imagined if you’ve played the original. The environments are accurately modeled based on the original text descriptions.

Unfortunately, the archaic and primitive game design from almost 50 years ago hasn’t aged very well and it is clearly evident with the puzzle solving logic — Completely outside the realm of logic and reasonable thinking. Most of the solutions are frustratingly random in nature.

Instead of stimulating your mind, you just end up trying every action or item you have on every interactable entity in the environment. There is also an added random enemy encounter system that is a bit unnecessary but workable, and an auto-map style system to aid players in their exploration.

Graphics wise, instead of jumping from the 70s to 2023, Colossal Cave came up short and landed somewhere in the 2000s with its PS3 style graphics and bland lighting system in place. Passable, yes, but not quite the grand re-imagining one would expect, especially when you factor in the importance of the game and the people involved.

Colossal Cave stays true to its roots and it's a nice homage to one that started the genre, but 50 years is a bit too long of a time already to not reinvent and overhaul things. If there is a hard limit on how old a game should be before a faithful remake will seem like a bad idea instead of a good one, this is probably it.

If you’re an old timer who wants to relive that 70s gaming experience again with a powerful nostalgic trip, and have extra cash to burn with the game's aggressive pricing, It might be something worth looking into. Otherwise, steer clear.

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