There Was A Caveman

I have a soft spot for the one-person passion project, the kind where the seams show but the intent shines through. There Was A Caveman is exactly that kind of thing, and I want to be honest about both sides of that coin before you click anything. The premise is charming in a primitive, wordless way. The last surviving caveman sets out across a dinosaur-overrun world, clubbing his way through six distinct zones, each split into several checkpoint sections. The pixel art is genuinely colorful and the environments shift from dark cave interiors to open forests to stranger, more surreal spaces. The movement kit is small but sensible: a club attack, a double jump, a forward dash, and a small arsenal of throwables including rocks, bones, and javelins that stick to walls and can serve as improvised platforms. That last idea is quietly clever, the kind of mechanical wrinkle that suggests the developer had real ambitions beyond generic score-chasing. But the game's relationship with difficulty is its biggest problem, and it is a significant one. The challenge here is less about reading enemy patterns and more about raw memorization. Hazards and enemies appear faster than reaction time typically allows, meaning your first several deaths in any new section are essentially mandatory tuition fees for learning what comes next. The invincibility window after taking a hit is extremely short, which means a single enemy can chain-damage you into an instant restart. Skulls collected from defeated enemies are halved on death, making the mid-level shop more of a cruel tease than a genuine resource. Critics and players alike have noted that the difficulty often feels unfair rather than demanding, which is a meaningful distinction for anyone drawn to hard platformers expecting the taut, learnable tension of something like classic Ghouls n Ghosts or Shovel Knight, both of which clearly influenced the developer. The soundtrack is the other persistent complaint, and it is a fair one. The chiptune compositions are thin even by lo-fi standards, and in a two-to-three hour game with few distractions, the audio loop wears out its welcome quickly. The boss fights, one per level, bring a brief reprieve in structure: pattern-based encounters with clear attack windows that feel closer to what the game could have been throughout. There is also a pterodactyl riding section that shows up exactly once and is over before you've settled into it, a flash of variety that makes you wish the pacing had more of that energy. Where I find myself advocating for it, quietly, is in the craft of its construction. This was built by a single developer, Nauris Amatnieks, with real attention to its pixel presentation and enough mechanical ideas scattered through the levels that the skeleton of a better game is visible inside it. Steam user sentiment lands in mixed-to-mostly-positive territory, and I think that read is accurate. The people who enjoy it tend to be players who approach it as a short, undemanding arcade run rather than a precision platformer. If you have that mindset, and you can accept the economy being essentially broken by design, there is a scrappy two-hour session here worth something.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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