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The Cave: Ron Gilbert's Double Fine Game (A Tim Schafer Production) (Not Double Fine Adventure)

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I just found out that the bucket can be used in the twins level, I doesn't help that much, but it's something... The recorder seems to disappear after the zoo level so I can't use instead of the parrot.

 

I still have to get the Knight's bad ending, so I might use him for the "No death" playthough. 

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What's this about The Monk "solo grab the treasure"? And I wasn't sure if the Monk's TK worked on the Knight's level? I thought it didn't for some reason.\

 

Well if you use the time traveler you bypass the key, but you still need the knight down there to distract, but the monk can just telekinesis the key and then telekinesis the treasure all on his own.

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The Mine -- I don't think you can skip any of this -- most annoying!

 

It's not a full skip, but you can use the Twins to do the bit with the up-and-down lifts with only two characters instead of all three. It can save a minute or two.

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I have everyone carry a stick or dynamite, blow up the closest one and have that character pick up the shovel so you don't have to return for dynamite after each puzzle.

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I don't feel like digging through the entire thread to see if this was addressed so I would much rather just resurrect it! How the hell does the camera in this game work? Is it just always unconditionally bound to P1? How is this actually meant to be played? Is it supposed to be MP or SP? That's how I wanted to play it so I fired it up with my girlfriend. However most of the puzzles required us to split from the same screen causing one of us to just have to sit idle... Should I be doing this with 3 people for the most bestest time? 

 

I really want to like this game. I think it's a fun take on the general adventure genre to put it in 2.5D, and I think the atmosphere is fantastic. I just REALLY don't like the camera / character focus design choices. Keeping the characters together is also a really serious pain. Thoughts, suggestions? I was thinking about trying it out 3 player tomorrow night. I was wondering if it's even worth it or if I should just play through it SP.  

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Did anyone notice the gigantic painting of the Scientist's level in the latest DFA video? I really want to see all the level artwork in one big go like that!

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Wow, just got to this game finally and what a disappointment. What is this game?

 

I'm sure Ron Gilbert and company did not set out to design an easy adventure with the slowest traversal methods I've ever seen but it's nothing but that. I always loved that Secret of Monkey Island had multiple screens at the end saying things like, "A long walk, a brief row, and a short hike later..." in order to save you time on needless backtracking for simple tasks, but I guess The Cave wanted the opposite design philosophy and just instead decided to pad out the game by wasting a bunch of time. I'm kind of annoyed that I finished that painfully slow playthrough only to be rewarded with a few more pretty stills of the back story. Could they have at least played some music while looking at them so it would feel way less anticlimactic?

 

I don't even know if I liked the puzzle design because I was just playing through a haze of slow walking, bad jumping mechanics, meticulous ladder climbing, and waiting 10 seconds to respawn every time I died (and usually at some arbitrary point way too far back). Didn't bring the character you need to solve the puzzle? Well that's fine, please switch to the one you need and spend a few minutes traversing all the way back to the same area in order to press one button.

 

Also multiplayer is a mess. My soon to be wife wanted to play it with me, but instead it had even more added tedium because of the terrible camera. You just (politely try to) switch the camera so you can do what you want while the other player waits on you. It might as well be that shitty 2 players take turns style of Super Mario Bros. They don't even zoom the camera out to fit both of you on screen even when you are somewhat near eachother. The multiplayer mechanic really should have been a time saver to allow characters to simultaneously traverse and finish tasks at the same time, but instead it's yet another waste of time. Ugh. So she gave up on me with that and we played Ratchet and Clank All 4 One instead and had a blast. She would have gotten bored anyway had The Cave even fixed its multiplayer.

 

I guess the only positives I can give the game is that it was of course gorgeous and sometimes the writing was funny. Otherwise I don't know why we are supposed to care about a talking cave in the end other than that he is either sarcastic or tries to nudge you not to be selfish/greedy/malicious at the end of the game. I suppose he wanted the best for the characters but I don't know if that mattered or if I even care.


EDIT: I pretty much just repeated what everyone else said the last four pages. Ignore this drivel if you want.

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This game is a perfect example of why I could never be a critic. While I was playing this game I didn't think twice about weird camera things or trying to control three characters... And I ended up playing it a LOT.

(It was the XBox 360 version). I got all the achievements (including No Death runs) for me and two of my friends. (We played a few rounds together, but eventually once I got all the achievements on my account I'd just play on their accounts while they were at work to get them the achievements they needed...)

I must have played through that game well over 30 times. Not once did thoughts of slow walking or weird cameras enter my mind. I was enamoured with the funny dialogue and beautiful scenery, with my every attempt to find out how to break the game every way I could. (Fun fact: The very first time through, I played as the Monk, and stole the hot dog in the Zoo area, thus breaking that section of the game. Then, the second time through none of us knew what to do because we couldn't just take the hot dog that time...)

 

This game devoured my life for about a week or two. I could recite all the narration from memory (a skill that has since faded). I could blast through the entire thing without thinking twice about it. And even now, after I've done absolutely everything in the game, after I've seen and experienced everything it holds... I still get this feeling every once in a while, a feeling pulling me back, telling me to go play it again.

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I mean I wish I could feel that way and I was initially very excited for this game, but I had way more fun with Ron Gilbert's other recent games like Deathspank, Word Spiral, or Big, Big Castle. I still need to get to Scurvy Scallawags,

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(Fun fact: The very first time through, I played as the Monk, and stole the hot dog in the Zoo area, thus breaking that section of the game. Then, the second time through none of us knew what to do because we couldn't just take the hot dog that time...)

I'm just going to pop in for this one point here--did the game actually break? We tried to support as many of these character-specific shortcuts as possible. Hopefully you were still able to progress; that was the intention.

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The game never breaks because the sausage "exploit", how many of us have carried a sausage from the beginning just to skip this section? I know I do. On many playthroughs I try to carry objects from one section to another I know I will use later.

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Whoops, by "break" I just meant breaking the intention of that section - no longer having to do all the finding the battery and charging it and recording the beast, etc. but just skipping all of that by grabbing the hot dog. It didnt actually break or impede progress.

It just became a big problem the second time through with other characters because we had just assumed that was how you were supposed to complete that section. It led to some long discussion about whether or not parts of the game were impossible without a certain character. Eventually we got it, though.

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