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While the old-school legacy of a Roberta Williams adventure brings flavor to the experience, the end product is lackluster
Not really a remake or a reboot, and more of a reskinning of a classic adventure peppered with a few elements to encourage repeated runs, Colossal Cave is a bit of an odd bird. For gamers that have a history with the golden age of point-and-click adventures that weren’t in the LucasArts lineage, Roberta Williams and Sierra On-Line should be familiar names, and for good reason. It seems she’s now sort of come back to the scene, with Colossal Cave representing an attempt to adapt an old-school text-based adventure into something more akin to a modern first-person adventure. The result is a bit underwhelming, to be blunt, and while I really do appreciate the text-based roots being on display in the descriptions of the environments and things you’ll encounter I’d say everything else feels woefully dated and even odd. You’ll be spending a lot of time exploring underground and a fair amount of that time you’ll end up being a bit lost, perhaps expected, but I also found it hard to differentiate objects I wanted from random garbage strewn about in them. Encounters with other creatures are definitely on the odd and awkward side, and just in general artistically the game feels not just a bit dated but even a bit cheap in its overall designs. It does try to encourage multiple runs with a scoring system (which is pretty cool and unique), but with the exception of die-hard fans who’ll latch on to the classic feel and are willing to overlook its shortcomings this is an adventure that’s hard to be excited about.
Justin Nation, Score:Fair [6.6]