Colossal Cave

Only for nostalgists and those who love getting lost on spelunking holidays.

Colossal Cave isn’t for everyone, but it’s like a slow and meticulously designed theme park ride, all built around an old text adventure game, making for a fascinating experience. Whether you play it or not is probably more up to your personal sensibilities, but Colossal Cave remains an immersive excavation that’s more than worth the trip, even with all the old screws and rusty bolts binding the two periods of game history together.

Like its own mysterious underground complex, Colossal Cave is obscure and unfriendly, trickily hiding some scarce but valuable treasure. If it wasn't for the fascinating source material, it would be jaw-droppingly bad. However, the source material is fascinating, and this remake is one way to engage with it. If, for that reason, you are willing to overlook both the outdated design elements you would expect and the bad design decisions and sloppy implementation you wouldn't, there could be something here to enjoy. We certainly wouldn't judge anyone who discovered an egg-sized emerald of fun in Colossal Cave, but neither can we seriously recommend it.

I enjoyed this game and would recommend it to adventure game fans, especially for anyone who, like me, never played the original. But I wish they had either gone all in with the preservation and just added the audio-visual updates or gone for it and revamped the whole thing. Instead, we are left with a half-measure that does not live up to the fans’ hopes nor presents something new players will want to engage with. That said, I still hope to see more from the Williams. I remain a massive fan of their work and will always be grateful for their impact on me as a child.

Colossal Cave was a classic text adventure, but whether this reimagined take is "the adventure you've longed for" might boil down to your tolerance for dated elements. So much has changed in the decades since the original title, and the developer and Roberta Williams were household names in the gaming community. Going through the passages of this non-linear adventure can still be a mysterious, secret-filled romp. But it's likely best tackled with a good dose of nostalgia.

Colossal Cave relies heavily on the nostalgia and brand awareness of the original. It is a game that is very difficult to play without this remake. Unfortunately, the transition to 3D makes the game less accessible and in many cases even more frustrating. Listing the lyrics will be a trip back to the past for fans of the original, but it quickly becomes very irritating, especially in the menu. A VR update is planned for this year, based on the PC VR version. But after the few hours with this game in "normal" 3D and the fact that the PC VR version solves few of the problems, this is a game I won't be playing in PS VR 2.

The core structure feels a tad dated while the reimagined game play elements don’t quite go far enough to match modern day standards. Below the eccentricities of Colossal Cave is an adventure packed with character and charm that’s still worth taking however. Even for newcomers.

While the old-school legacy of a Roberta Williams adventure brings flavor to the experience, the end product is lackluster

Revisiting Colossal Cave is a peculiar, uncanny experience. I understand Roberta Williams’ desire to bring it back to life, even if I’m not convinced the format she’s chosen to present it in does justice to the original’s pioneering spirit or the grip it managed to hold on the imaginations of those who played it. But perhaps that was always an impossible task.

A misguided attempt to recreate one of gaming's oldest and most influential classics, that's let down by outdated visuals and prehistoric gameplay elements.