Colossal Cave Adventure is a text adventure game developed by avid spelunker Will Crowther in 1976. A year later, programmer Don Woods discovered the game on a computer at Stanford University, and with Crowther’s blessing, released an expanded version with fantasy elements added to wild popularity (relative to the internet and gaming landscape of the times, at least).
The aim of the game is simple. Navigate your way through the cave collecting objects and juggling your tiny inventory in order to solve all of the puzzles and recover all of the treasure, each successful step of which grants the player points up to a maximum total of 350.
It’s arguably one of the most important and influential video games ever, and yet its place in history is rarely acknowledged.
Legendary adventure game designers Roberta and Ken Williams have now come out of retirement on a mission to raise the game up from obscurity with a first-person 3D adaptation slavishly devoted to Woods’s version.
Did I have fun playing Colossal Cave these past few weeks? No, not really. I did love my time with it, though, regardless.
The development of this remake marks the duo’s game development journey coming full circle, as it was Roberta’s obsession with Woods’s build that was directly responsible for leading the pair to redirect their fledgling company away from business software and over to video games, kicking off Sierra Entertainment and its incredible legacy.
I interviewed the couple about the game at PAX West back in September, and they told me in no uncertain terms that honouring Crowther and Woods’s design was of paramount importance to them. They weren’t overly concerned with how a modern audience would handle it either, nor did they expect the project to be a particularly big money-maker. Colossal Cave exists for them specifically as a passion project and as an effort to preserve history.
I didn’t grow up on text adventures and have had only limited exposure to them over the years. I’m also a person who has absolutely howling ADHD-related frustration issues. After about three weeks spent being lost in seemingly inescapable mazes, being murdered by surprise knife-throwing dwarves, and walking through doors that just take you back to the very room you were trying to walk out of except for when they sometimes don’t, I gave in and consulted a guide. The game’s environment navigation and puzzle solutions are more than obtuse, they’re positively eldritch and revolve almost entirely around trial and error with little to no sense of logic at play. There’s an in-game ‘Help’ button, but annoyingly it only shows the control layout and doesn’t provide actual assistance with any of the obstacles at hand. A little over a week out from launch, I actually received a follow-up email on behalf of the developer with a U.S. phone number I could call for assistance in navigating my way through the game, which did charm me as being a very retro throwback in and of itself but also felt like a clear as day sign that I wasn’t the only review key recipient struggling to push through it.
Mercifully some modern concessions have been implemented beyond the scope of the original. A compass is ever present, and the game presents players with the option of having a detailed in-game map that gets filled out as you explore, with a further option allowing players to let the map persist at the start of a new game instead of it being wiped on each new run. Players can toggle between running and walking on the fly, and the speed of their movement can be tailored in the options menu. Players can also save and exit at any time. The game warns that doing so will dock your score but it doesn’t actually seem to do so in practice, so I’m not sure if that’s just a bug that will change come launch.
The path to collecting all 15 treasures isn’t a linear one; there are any number of ways a player can navigate through the game. I suspect that a certain segment of the audience will find a lot of competitive joy in devising the best-optimised methods of speed running through it as it’s a game kind of inherently built around the concept of ‘runs’ even in its original text form.
Colossal Cave is a small game from a small team with a small budget, so none of its aesthetics are going to blow your socks off, and that’s entirely fine. The game runs extremely smoothly with very low system requirements, and the presentation is charming and impressively atmospheric. Music and voice cues are fittingly cute, but both get immediately cut off any time the player opens their inventory or pauses, which is a minor, though constant, annoyance.
I expect a lot of people will be intensely turned off by the game’s unforgivingly old-fashioned sensibilities very quickly. Maybe it’s the game development graduate in me, but I found playing it to be like getting an education in a foundational game design work that I was largely ignorant of, and that experience was refreshingly engaging to me. The game is a coda to Ken and Roberta’s remarkable achievements in games, and a celebration of all the couple have accomplished in their 50 years of marriage, and as such, the game’s very existence has a deeply romantic undertone to it also that sat delightfully ever present in my mind.
Thank God Kotaku’s reviews don’t feature scores because, frankly, I have no idea how I’d score this.
It’s painfully archaic to play, but I’m enormously glad that it exists. It’s an important and fascinating piece that celebrates a forgotten bedrock of an industry that is so quick to bury its history. It’s a deeply respectful and sincere love letter 40 years in the making to a little game that inspired one couple’s enormously influential body of work. If they and their new studio Cygnus Entertainment never make another game, then it’d be a sad day for video games, but if this is the work that they decide to retire on for good, then Colossal Cave is the absolute most perfect and beautiful bow that could be put upon their astonishing careers.
Colossal Cave is available from January 20th on PC and Mac, Meta Quest, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
This review is based on the PC version via a Steam code kindly supplied by Cygnus Entertainment.
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