Take the dwarves, who intermittently spring out of the earth to hurl a knife in your direction.
But surrounding these puzzles are elements that have weathered the decades less well. Often, you’re forced to make a tough decision about whether to drop a fistful of diamonds to make room for a more innocuous item that might prove to be a puzzle solution-knowing you’ll want to come back for the former eventually.Ĭonsidering its age, dating back to the dawn of digital game design, Colossal Cave’s puzzle logic is surprisingly robust-much of it extending naturally and pleasingly from the small pool of tools available to you. One treasure, a nugget of gold as large as a human head, is too heavy to take back up the stairs-which clues you into the idea that there might be ways to get back and forth across the map magically, using spellwords whispered to you in the darkness. You’ll get a handful of points for discovering shiny things, but a whole lot more for delivering them to the starting well house. Ultimately, your goal is to find treasure that will contribute to your point total, up to a maximum of 350. It’s a problem the point-and-click adventure genre still grapples with, but one that feels more stark than usual in immersive first-person. A metallic sheen makes it easier to distinguish usable objects from the backdrop, but it’s still jarring to adjust to the arbitrary distinction Cygnus draws between the important and the ignorable. Where a text description can cast a spotlight on a single magazine, guiding your gaze with clarity and purpose, this three-dimensional Cave is also home to countless decorative items-its opening area littered with old newspapers and discarded bottles which, unlike your designated vessel, can’t be picked up. Yet they share the screen with similar detritus that can’t be picked up. There are just a large handful of items like this in Colossal Cave-more than you can carry in your tight inventory at once, but few enough that you can find a specific purpose for each. In the most satisfying case, Cygnus provides you early on with a simple bottle of water-which can be poured away to replace the contents with oil that might ease a door’s rusty hinges, or refilled at an underground reservoir in order to compel a beanstalk to grow. This game was in many ways a blueprint for the point-and-click adventure genre as we still know it today, asking you to scour the environment for objects to place in your inventory, and then to find places where those objects might be applied to allow you further progress. The translation from text to 3D creates problems in the Cave’s most intimate moments too.
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