You ever just look through your backlog, see a game, and know “it’s time”? That was me the last 2 days with Cave Story. It’s been one of those games that I knew I had to someday play because of how important it was to the current indie scene. I played the Switch version Cave Story+, I know about the freeware version but what can I say, I like gaming on my Switch.Main thought: God damn this game is so influential, playing through it you can easily see where it influenced several indie games decades later. Playing Undertale before this and then going back to this just makes you go “ohh that’s where certain idea may have came from.” It’s kind of mindblowing that this game is almost 2 decades old at this point, doing this stuff way before anyone else.The game’s structure still feels pretty unique to this day, it’s kind of a Metroidvania but also kind of level based structure. It’s missing a lot of the fully connected maps found in modern Metroidvanias but you don’t really miss that here. The progression is similar though, getting new weapons and abilities giving you more access to places but rarely are you going back to a certain spot with the “right” new equipment. It’s just constantly pushing you into the next area with the story being the driving point. Each area feels very distinct, all accompanied by fantastic music. It feels very “retro” but again Cave Story was doing this before retro style became a main stream indie thing.The game feel is great, movement and fighting all feel great. Once I got the machine gun upgrade and realized you could use the level’d up version to propel you up the game got so much better to move around. Not that it was bad before but flight almost feels overpowered lol. The boss battles in this game were rough, at the start very easy but it really does escalate. You really have to learn the boss patterns for the later fights and the final boss almost feels unfair.The story is also good, nothing too mind blowing but I enjoyed all the characters and writing. The Mimiga are adorable creatures and Balrog is entertaining every time he shows up. I only got the regular ending and just looked up the “true” ending on youtube afterwards. As much as I love obscure, hard to find endings, I am satisfied with the one I got. I do love that this game is one of the origin points of that in indie games though. When I look at a game like Animal Well, I can see where this game may have been a major influence for it.Now for one of the main reasons for this thread. Cave Story will be 20 years old this December. I want to know what do y’all think about it. Have you played it? Is it in all time great for you? Did you play it all those years ago or did you play one of the more recent re-releases? For an indie game to have this long of a history is really rare so I’m curious what people think about it after all this time.
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