The Cave

Every run opens on a character select screen where you take three of seven, and that one choice quietly decides most of what the next four or five hours look like. Each of those oddballs owns a chunk of the cave built for them and nobody else, so the Hillbilly's stretch and the Time Traveler's stretch are content you either see this time or do not see at all. Roll in with the Knight, the Monk and the Scientist and you get one game. Come back with the Twins and the Adventurer and a large slice of the map is new. That structure is the smartest thing here, and it is also the source of every complaint people have about it. Mechanically this sits between a point-and-click adventure and a light 2D platformer. You walk, climb ropes, pull levers, and carry exactly one object at a time per character, which is the constraint everything else bends around. Swapping between your three is instant, and most puzzles are really logistics problems: get person A to hold the thing while person B stands on the switch while person C squeezes through the gap only they can reach. The special abilities do a lot of work in the character-specific areas. The Monk moves objects at a distance, the Time Traveler slips through solid walls, the Hillbilly ignores drowning entirely, the Scientist talks to machines. In their own sections those powers are the puzzle. Everywhere else they are mostly a shortcut, which is a little deflating once you notice it. The writing is the reason to keep going. The cave itself narrates, in a dry, faintly contemptuous voice that keeps commenting on your party's life choices, and the murals you uncover along the way fill in why each character came down here in the first place. Those little biographies are darker than the cartoon art suggests, and the endings you get depend on choices the game never flags as choices. It is bleak comedy delivered with a straight face, and it lands more often than it misses. If you have a taste for adventure games that treat their protagonists as guilty until proven guilty, this is very much aimed at you. What drags is the walking. Because puzzles need three bodies in three places, you spend a real percentage of your playtime shuttling characters one at a time across ground you have already cleared, and there is no clever tool to shorten that. Then, when you restart to see the other four characters, you replay the shared sections at the front and back with puzzles you have already solved and cannot skip. That is the gap between the 87 percent Steam score and the middling Metacritic average in one sentence: people who love it are grading the ideas and the jokes, and the reviewers who cooled on it were grading the third trip back down the same rope. The controls are also a bit floaty for a game that occasionally asks for a precise jump, though it rarely punishes you hard for missing. Co-op changes the math more than you would expect. Give each character to a different player, locally on a couch or over Remote Play Together, and the shuttling problem largely evaporates because everyone is moving at once and talking through the solution out loud. Full controller support is solid, split screen works, and puzzle-solving out loud with two friends is the version of this I would recommend first. Solo, it is a good short adventure with a great voice and some tedium bolted to it. Play it in two sittings with different parties rather than trying to see everything in one marathon, and be ready to poke at scenery for a while when a solution is not obvious, because the logic is fair but it does not hold your hand. Go in for the writing and the character-specific set pieces, budget your patience for the backtracking, and you will come out happy.

Alex · Scout Team

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