Colossal Cave by Cygnus Entertainment is a redux of what is widely considered the first text-based adventure game designed by Will Crowther and Don Woods in the late seventies. Cygnus is run by Roberta and Ken Williams, most famously the creators of the King’s Quest series of games by Sierra On-Line. It is available now for Mac, Oculus Quest, Meta Quest, Meta Quest 2, PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S.

Over the years, Roberta has publicly stated that the Colossal Cave Adventure was a massive inspiration to her, so it’s no surprise they would revisit it. But in 2023, should you really bother to play a game from so deep in gaming’s past? Let’s find out!

Ok, I Won’t Keep You Waiting; Colossal Cave is…

Fine. It’s fine. So the answer is yes, but with some severe caveats. First, the sound and graphics are acceptable. Most of the areas appear to be based on actual caves, which is in keeping with the original, but the colors are fairly dull. The few people and creatures you meet are a bit crude. They may have been going for stylized, but they didn’t hit that goal. I don’t think it is ugly, though. Just fine in an indie game like this is perfectly acceptable.

The descriptions in the narrative also don’t often match up with what you can see. You are given a lantern, and the game makes it clear it will run out. So you’re incentivized to try and conserve it. At many points in the cave, it appeared light enough to see by ambient sources, but when I turned off the lantern it plunged me into pitch darkness regardless.

The sound, too, is sparse. Some rooms have music, but most just have a vague ambiance, and sound effects are only serviceable. I could understand that if the intent was to capture the authentic lonely feeling of spelunking. But when an over-dramatic pirate steps from the shadows to steal my stuff and then vanishes in a puff of smoke, any subtleness to the experience is a bit undercut.

Arrrr…It’s drivin’ me nuts!

Story-wise, There Is Just Nothing Here

You wander into the area of the cave and stumble on a well-house, then find a cave. There are some dwarves and other fantasy creatures strewn about, but no exploration of what they are doing in the cave or their relationship with each other. It’s threadbare to the point that in my first draft, I barely mentioned it. I don’t necessarily have a problem with this, and I’ll explain why in a bit. But if you are coming to an adventure game expecting a compelling story, which would be a generally fair expectation from the genre, you will not find it here.

So far, I’ve probably not painted you an amazing picture of the game. But I’ve not yet discussed the gameplay, which is, of course, the main event here. Its Colossal Cave‘s biggest strength and also its biggest weakness.

Let Me Give Some Examples

There is a section of the cave you have to randomly choose a route to escape. Your inventory is tiny and has to be carefully managed. Throughout the cave, some exits just don’t work the first or fifth time you try to use them. Enemies can randomly appear and kill you at any time with no way for you to prevent it (though the chances of you dying are small, they always have a chance). The pirate I mentioned before is required to complete the game, but they only show up randomly after five minutes have passed in game. To be clear, these are not bugs but design decisions from the original game. So why keep all the quirks?

Helpfully, there is a tv with a mini-documentary right at the start. The goal was to treat the original game as a historical document. Roberta Williams explicitly mentions this in interviews about the game. They sought access to the original designers’ source code and notes to reproduce it faithfully. So everything that doesn’t work about Colossal Cave must be understood in that context. Sure, the vibe’s a gormless pastiche of fantasy tropes. Of course your goal (spoilers: stack shiny stuff in a well house) is never explained to you. Naturally, you have no idea who you are or how you came to be near the cave.

It’s all just a holdover from the original game, intended to preserve it with just a fresh coat of paint and some quality of life improvements like auto-mapping. But there is one thing the game doesn’t preserve. One decision that the Williams’ felt had to be overwritten. 

Why, it’s Roberta Williams diegetically inserted into this game! Seamless!

I Don’t Tell You What That Decision Is In This Section, But Bare With Me.

One of the first games I remember playing was King’s Quest III: To Heir is Human. Those early King’s Quest games especially owe much to Colossal Cave Adventure. You have an inventory of items you pick up in the world that you use to solve problems, there is a world of interconnected areas to explore, and you use a text parser to interact with all of it.

If you’ve never played a game with a parser, imagine ChatGPT but willing to admit when it doesn’t know something. You’d type what you wanted your character to do. Assuming it was something the developers anticipated, your character would do it. So long as you didn’t try and slip a no-no word in, that is.

It’s a straightforward programming language that you use to interact with the game. For each area, the game has a list of things you can interact with (nouns). It also has a list of what you can do (verbs). So, for example, when you type “pick up” (the verb) “bread” (the noun), the game checks its verbs and sees pick up. It then checks the nouns in the area; if there is bread there, it puts it in your inventory. A more complex parser might accept grab, take, or snatch for the verb and baguette, roll, or, if feeling generous, a lovely marble rye for the noun. If you put a word it didn’t have in its list, you’d get an “I don’t understand that.”

Sierra released about twenty parser games before moving on to point-and-click, which remains the standard in the few adventure games still being released today. The first King’s Quest to make the switch was King’s Quest 5, which was very controversial among gigantic nerds, including a nine-year-old me. 

Oddly applicable to nine-year-old me as well.

Let’s Bring It All Back To Colossal Cave!

I mean, I will, but first, I want to explain why I was so upset. I played the rest of the King’s Quest games and many other adventure games that used the point-and-click system. While many of them were great, they were never the same. Revival games like Telltale’s episodic Monkey Island revival or Broken Age didn’t even live up to the games they were inspired by, much less reproducing the parser experience. 

There is nothing like having a world in front of you and the ability to type in whatever you want and see it happen. My early experiences with text-based games are a significant portion of why I became a writer. They invited me to imagine how I thought the story could continue. All games are an illusion, and at the end of the day, adventure games like Colossal Cave or King’s Quest have very strictly defined solutions. But no other type of game, save Morrowind, has ever come close to making me believe I could do almost anything if I could just think of how to say it.

So when I saw this new version of Colossal Cave, I was very excited to pick it up and try it out. Then to my disappointment, I found it was point-and-click. You move through the cave in first person and can click on things with either an eye for a description or a hand to pick it up. It works, but it’s even simpler than Telltale’s games.

Adding visuals has meant they’ve had to choose: Add new details that they will have to then write new descriptions and record narration for, or leave the areas bare except for what was in the original game. While I didn’t play the original, I think they mostly opted for the latter. There are many conspicuous details in rooms that the eye just doesn’t even let you click on.

This guy gets it.

A Piecemeal Preservation

So all this leaves us with the question that only the Williams’ can answer. If all of the clunky, nearly fifty-year-old decisions from the original had to be kept, why not the parser? Why are the only updates to the game the graphics, the music, and the control scheme? Music and graphics are things the original lacked utterly, so adding them on is just an enhancement. But changing the control scheme completely alters how you interact with the game. It robs the experience of authenticity for no real benefit.

This could only be a game that would pull new fans into the genre with significant structural changes. You could make that game, and I’d even be excited to try it out, but this is not that game. What this game does best is present a piece of gaming history. They trusted the original designers with everything but the foundation of how you interact with the game’s world. And to me, that is a huge mistake.

This is why I carry a real bird with me at all times.

Colossal Cave…clusions. Caveclusions. 

I enjoyed this game and would recommend it to adventure game fans, especially for anyone who, like me, never played the original. But I wish they had either gone all in with the preservation and just added the audio-visual updates or gone for it and revamped the whole thing. Instead, we are left with a half-measure that does not live up to the fans’ hopes nor presents something new players will want to engage with.

That said, I still hope to see more from the Williams. I remain a massive fan of their work and will always be grateful for their impact on me as a child. 

Thanks so much for reading! If you enjoyed this write-up, please check out my review of Miasma Chronicles! Or if for some inexplicable reason, you want to check out something I didn’t write, you can check out this piece on the Overwatch event for Pride month!