Clearly, the game won't be for everybody. And once you settle into that rhythm, there is a nostalgic pleasure in it.Ĭan I recommend it? I don't know if I can, and I haven't played anywhere near enough for this to be a review. Try things and then try again: it's the old-school way. There are just clues scattered around, maps, and your mind. It's your first impression, and, well, blow the image up and see what you think.īut I also find it fascinating, because which other game today will trap you in a maze and offer no explanation of what you have to do to get out? There's nothing here, no conciliation to any of the hand-holding we've come to expect in games. That house in the bottom-right is the first thing you see before you go spelunking. When you put it next to a game like Edith Finch, there's no comparison. Colossal Cave 3D looks old, moves old, behaves old. Even the graphics, which are new, look that dated. Not in the sense they've created the kind of game we expect in 2023, but because they've created something that feels like it comes from the '90s. Perhaps they can come back and pick up where they'd left off. The brazenness! But that's them - that's the spirit that made them so successful with Sierra On-Line. The prospect of her returning to adventure games, then, was exciting to me.īut how could she make a modern adventure game if she hadn't played one for 25 years - wouldn't her designs be incredibly out of date? What worried me more was hearing the Williams say they weren't aware of anything made in those intervening years that they felt intimidated by - they still thought they could do better. I know all of this because I did a podcast with Ken and Roberta recently, and what really stood out was talking to Roberta and hearing about how fearless she'd been in the face of a very male-orientated industry, and in an industry where so much of what she wanted to do, hadn't been done. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. And that game, you've probably guessed it, is this one, Colossal Cave 3D. And one day, she couldn't take it any more, and was lured into making sure it was done properly, which meant her taking over the project and game. Then, though, came lockdown, and it was in lockdown that Ken got bored and started tinkering around making a game, and Roberta couldn't help but see it over his shoulder. They got into boating instead and became explorers. They didn't even so much as pick up a game in the decades since. And then, maybe because of it, Ken and Roberta completely walked away from games - and I do mean completely. Ken was super-stressed so Roberta convinced him to back out of the company, and a buyout was followed by fraud investigations - nothing to do with the Williams - and the whole thing collapsed. And it all began for them with Colossal Cave - Roberta played it and never looked back. Ken ran the business, Roberta made the games. It revolves around Ken and Roberta Williams, who created Sierra On-Line back in the 80s and were the OG video game mega-company before the familiar names of today came along. Do you see what I mean?īut there's a good reason for this! There's a whole backstory to the game you have to know about. It's as though Colossal Cave, for all it wants to be new, can't shake off the past. It's like seeing the kind of 3D world we know so well these days but being held back from exploring it with the fluidity we're used to. There's no jumping, no crouching, and the game locks you in place when you encounter someone while they run through a short animation of some kind. You can't even open a door until you switch to the hand icon and 'use' it, and the same is true of ladders. There's an inventory and you use things on other things. Colossal Cave behaves like a stop-start kind of adventure game, a point-and-click. "You are in a large cave," for instance.īut there's also something about the way it works. So as you walk around the new 3D world, an eye icon and narrator also give you the old cues you no longer really need. Also apparently coming to Meta Quest 2, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch but I can't see any sign of it on those storefronts there yetĮxcept, the text guidance is still here too, only it's now narrated. Availability: Releases later today - 19th Jan - on PC ( Steam).The caves you once explored in your imagination are now rendered around you. Here's a game that originally came out in 1976, and was played entirely in text - printed on paper, in some cases - and it's been remade in 3D. I don't know whether to be turned off by the new Colossal Cave or charmed by it.
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