Cave Story+

Back in 2004 when this was released as a free passion project, I can totally understand how it garnered so much praise and such a cult following. But with-in the context of playing it in 2025 and it being something I paid for, I can't recommend it. There are much, much better options out there and a lot of it's design choices show off both it's age and original budget of, I can only imagine, not very much. It's not all bad. I like the story, it's cute and actually has some depth to it, it managed to feel light whilst not becoming side fluff I couldn’t care about. I did want to know what was going to happen next. The soundtrack is also solid all the way through. That's pretty much where my solid praise runs out though. On the negative side, the movement is ridiculously floaty. It's not inconsistent, or unfair, but it feels bad and as much as I got used to it, I never managed to stop disliking it. A smooth and enjoyable platforming experience this is not. Furthermore, whilst there are a few examples of good level design, they came mostly towards the beginning of the game and by the mid point and increasingly towards the end, I found most levels pretty messy. A spam of two or three enemies if you’re lucky, sometimes just the same enemy over and over, a bunch of geometry seemingly just there to make hitting enemies that were slightly above or slightly below your line of fire irritating, because it certainly didn’t look appealing. Lots and lots of gatcha spike/lava traps after unsighted jumps, enemies hidden behind level objects. This wasn’t helped by the save system, which is old school save points, meaning the game is pretty much divided up into sections. If you die, go back to the start of that section and they got increasingly broad as the game went on. Couple that with the mess of enemies, the gatcha fail traps and trying to navigate all this whilst controlling a character that feels like they’ve been pumped with helium… it started to get a bit irritating. The sad thing is it wasn’t even that hard, I don’t think a single boss or section took me more than 5 attempts until the part I gave up on. I didn’t get majorly stuck anywhere, it was just so very unenjoyable to play. By the time I realized I was hating every second of it and gave up, I was on a section that involved killing a very dangerous enemy that would usually get one or two hits on me before it died, going into a boss fight that wasn’t too bad but wasn’t super easy and required a few minutes of concentration, then onto another boss fight I was still trying to work out, die, back to the enemy at the start again. It turns out I was very near the end of the game and there was one more boss phase and a final boss to go, all in the same section, with no save, a war of attrition with the deck stacked against the player, die, start it all again. I can appreciate difficulty in my games but in Cave Story it feels a bit artificial, it’s like the dev wanted to make it harder but had hit their limit design wise, perhaps coding wise. So they decided the only way to do it was more, just make them do more, for longer, not really new or different, just more. The major issue with this approach is the player ends up having to repeat a lot to get to the bit they failed on, which gets boring and irritating very fast and towards the end of the game there were at least four sections, including the one outlined above where the game basically descended into "you died, replay the last 5/6 minutes with out messing up to try again I guess". There is the blueprint for a timeless classic in here, but for me it never came to fruition. Too janky, too undercooked and too old school. Impressive for a free Metroidvania from 2004 but stacked up against the opposition now, in 2025, nah, not for me I'm afraid. I wish I’d spent my time on something else and would not recommend to a friend.