Cave Story+

First things first: This port of the game is an absolute disaster on a technical level. I made it about 30 minutes in before the constant crashing made it impossible to make progress. As other reviews point out: Just download doukutsu-rs. So did I, which is why the 1h playtime here on Steam is not accurate. For reference I stopped playing at the section where the eggs had hatched. I played with original textures and original soundtrack. The technical issues taken care of, I still did not enjoy this game at all, and in my opinion there is no reason to play this game in 2026 and beyond except maybe for some historical perspective. The game is impressive for being a solo developer indie release years ahead of even the earliest western indie success stories like Braid. Two decades and tens of thousands of retro inspired platformers and metroidvanias later however, every single aspect of this game is at best "fine". The game is not ugly by any means, but still the art style is very basic for today's standards. The soundtrack is never annoying but sounds fairly uninspired to me. The platforming meanwhile I indeed find to be more on the bad side of things. You move fairly slowly, it's very floaty and unnecessarily slippery, which doesn't feel great during the platofrming sections and was just very annoying during some boss fights. The game refuses to let the player know which entities, all of which could be background items, can be interacted with and to place save points in actually useful locations. The reason I gave up on the game, apart from not enjoying it from the start, was that it placed a boss fight at the end of a long corridor section, which after the second traversal was simply an annoyance to slowly clear at full health, just to get back to the boss fight, of which I had yet to figure out the gimmicks. The boss fights aren't any fun to play to begin with, since every signel one of them eventually just gets cheesed with a spammable weapon like the fire or the sword, leading to the only strategy being to hug the boss and let them melt away. The weapon upgrade system felt really unnecessary as well. When taking damage, the currently equipped weapon loses its upgrade level. So while I am already enduring the penalty of my health bar depleting, I am also having my weapons taken away, effectively. These two mechanics sort of negatively synergise. I don't get it. Things just spioral out of control very quickly in boss fights due to this. As for the story, didn't seem to be much to it. Every character gets only a handful of lines, so nothing to get me invested in any of them. Main character is mute and generic of course. So yeah, be careful about all the oither reviews, they seem to be 80% nostalgia driven. If you have no nostalgia for this game, then it is incredibly easy these days to find a much better game for less money.