The Cave

Looks great !

Hmm, codes doesn't work for me

Kaige_sl said:

Pretty interesting game so far, definitely has humor.

You switch between three different characters you choose from the group they showed, and use them as a team to navigate through it.

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Hints of Maniac Mansion?

I'm downloading this now from Steam. If there are any puzzles I hope they aren't too hard, I don't feel like thinking right now.

Decent game. I've played through it on every character now and seen all of their areas. I think the game has two faults though: One, you can't call all your characters to you, which results in having to run through areas repeatedly. Though, considering how certain areas work (particularly the twins and time traveler), it would likely result in getting stuck if it was in. It's not really as big of an issue as reviewers have make it out to be since there are a lot of places that will automatically regroup characters (usually in the places it'd be most annoying if it didn't), but it can get a little old to have to be running multiple characters through certain areas after a few play-throughs.

Which brings me to the second fault: The game is very repetitive. Each character has a unique area in The Cave, but that's less than half of a play-through. The rest of the cave is about 5 or 6 areas that you must do every time you play through the game. Since you have to do three play-throughs to see every character's unique area andfiveplay-throughs if you want to see every ending (each character has a good and bad ending), it gets really, really old. Even worse, which characters you have with you at the time changes these puzzles very little, if at all.

That said, I do still enjoy the game. It has a good sense of humor, the puzzles are fun, and the stories are entertaining to see play-out. I just wish the characters' abilities came more into play outside of their unique areas allowing the non-unique puzzles to have multiple ways of being solved, especially if having certain combinations of characters created new solutions.

Magic Numbers_sl said:

I'm downloading this now from Steam. If there are any puzzles I hope they aren't too hard, I don't feel like thinking right now.

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I'd say most of the puzzles are fairly intuitive. I've only gotten stuck about three times in all my play-throughs, but only one has really stumped me, and that was more due to a game mechanic not being exactly clear than the puzzle being difficult. I knew the solution, just not how to get it to work.

Doleo_sl said:

The reviews I've read said that the game's selling point is the multiple character story line and re-playability. Unfortunately, you have to run each character one by one to get through and area. Also after you beat the game, you have beat universal puzzle levels before you get to the character specific story line areas. Is this true? Is it a deal breaker?

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The Cave is basically a series of puzzles areas. There's usually a little bit of traveling between each puzzle area (which is how the course you take can vary depending on who you have in your party, since you'll come across obstacles only a certain character can get through). You don't have to run each character separately through these. The characters you are not controlling will remain stationary, however they will "catch up" when you reach a new puzzle area. The puzzle areas themselves occasionally feature this as well, but not commonly. However, since I was usually having to do a lot of retracing of my steps to solve a puzzles, the amount I had to run with each character wasn't really noticeable to me since it was either running with one character or another. Though, one puzzle - the minecart one - is a particularly bad offender as not only does it have you run two or three characters to each section of the puzzle, but requires you to run back to the bottom twice more to get dynamite. Since this is one of the earliest puzzles, I'm guessing this is why reviewers were harsher on it than is really a problem.

And yes, like I said, each run features several universal puzzles you must beat on each play-through. Whether or not it's a deal breaker for you depends on how much it's going to bother you. Once you do a puzzle and figure out the solution, you can get through these areas fast. Most of the universal puzzles are shorter than the character specific ones anyways, but again, the minecart puzzle is particularly bad in this regard.

Pretty slick game, though I'm only an hour or so in.

I used this code today to knock $3 off at GMG: GMG20-PJFEW-Y16HK