Indie Game Review: Cave Story and Ports

Indie games are when a video games are made by one or a small group of people, to be downloaded or sold online for people play. Anyone can make a indie game, but to make a good indie game takes time and skill to complete. Today i’m here to review and give insight on the most acclaimed indie game of it’s time Cave Story.

Cave story was a freeware computer game made in 2004 by Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya. The game was inspired the Metroid Series. Being one of his childhood games that he loved to play. The project was started in 1999, and released in 2004 for the public to download for free. After a few years, and a huge success, being a lot of people downloaded it. The company Amaya and “PIxel” teamed up to port the game to the nintendo Wii and Nintendo Ds in 2010. In 2011, Cave story+ was released on the popular gaming service Steam, which was a remastered version of the original with new graphics and music, also with bonus content available to unlock within the game. The last Cave story to be made to date was Cave Story 3D, for the Nintendo 3DS, which completely redid the game to upgrade from the 2D graphics to “3D” with a 2D feel to it, which was released in 2013.

Within the Cave story game, everything stays the same throughout the 9 years of releases. WARNING there will be spoilers to the game, they will be kept to a minimum though. You are a robot with no name, and no memory, but the Cave Story Community has dubbed him “Quote”. You wake up in a cave only to escape and find yourself in village of rabbit people called Mimigas, you find the village is being killed off slowly from a mad doctor taking them and performing “inhumane” experiments to them. You are tasked to help the few “surface” people you find in the game stop The Doctor from completing research on Mimigas and using them to kill everyone on the surface.

You travel through different lands on the island to discover where and what the Doctor is doing and what you can do to stop him. Save the Mimigas, and also find out who you are and what your purpose was.

From the game itself, the actions you take, and what you do and don’t do will affect how you can end the game, you have the choice to save everyone, or let everyone die. There are a total of 6 different endings you can find and the ports after the Cave Story+ have lots of unlockable content based on how well you explore the game and what you accomplish.

Overall the game has wonderful charm with the pixel graphics for the older and original game, and the games after Cave Story+ is a nice touch to appeal to our new technology. The character development and story progression is wonderfully done. The gameplay and controls are to the point and feel right. Over all I would give Cave Story a 9.5/10 in my books. The replay value of the game is high, but the bonus content isn’t much and the game feels short after you are finished finding 3 or 4 of the 6 total endings. But is worth every minute of them as the endings vary in story, plot and effects of your choices.