Cave Story (Nintendo 3DS) Review

Metroid is undeniably the inspiration for Cave Story - the cave backgrounds would be at home in the NES classic, the shooting and enemy movement patterns are similar to it, and even the "item acquisition" jingle is a playful take on Metroid's tune. However, for all the dues Cave Story pays to Samus Aran, it is in fact its own game.

Anyone familiar with Metroid Fusion, the 2002 adventure for the Game Boy Advance, will already be prepared for Cave Story. Fusion was a much more linear take on the Metroid formula. Rather than freeform exploration with zero direction, Fusion explicitly told the player where they needed to go. Cave Story is similar as nobody will be at a loss for where to go next, although sometimes there may be a need to consult a computer or an inventory object to learn the objective.

The journey to the goal is always going to be charming; from pixel art to music, Cave Story nails the retro aesthetic. It reaches back to the past, adhering to strict sprite design and chiptune limitations. That's not a negative point, unless, of course, your games need to have max polys with max textures and max bloom with maxxed out particle physics and 128 player online death-matches! If that is the case, then avoid this game. If not, then Cave Story is a remarkable homage to the days when sprites were built pixel-by-pixel, animation was done frame-by-frame, and chiptunes layered note-by-note in a synthesizer programme, until they were just right.

It would be an easy mistake to consider Cave Story "simple." Everything about the artistic design harkens to a simpler time, after all, yet it would be wrong to call the gameplay basic. Weapon levels have to be managed with chips dropped by enemies and are de-levelled when the player takes damage, there are numerous branching story paths, the full tree of which is only unlocked with multiple play-throughs, there are secret levels and multiple endings and hidden upgrades all over the map, there are boss encounters that will test your skills as a gamer, and so on. This is a game that asks gamers to play again and again, a task that is a joy to perform.