There Was a Cave Man

 

There is a video series done by Egoraptor in which he talks about the transition from original property to sequel, and what it means in game design, and so on. Although I've read egoraptor is a bit of a loon, I agree with almost everything he says, and the one episode talks about the tutorial level for Megaman X, and how it is amazingly well done. How it explains the body of the game's mechanics in a fluid, easy to adapt to manner.

One of the things that stands out when you play 'hard indie' games is the design process seems to really fail to grasp previously demonstrated good game design. Megaman X came out like, twenty two years ago, but you still rarely see good tutorial levels even to this day. Game design constantly struggles to articulate to the player how the game works, and the most mind-blowing thing is the predilection toward killing the player.

I mean, I get it. You heard you want to make the game hard, so the game is hard by killing the player. Checkbox, little animated check going in it. Grats. The problem is, man oh man, getting killed in the tutorial while you're trying to figure out the damn controls is just so obnoxious. If you're dying, shockingly, you're not really learning. You're re-loading.

There Was a Cave Man has such a tutorial level. The controls and scheme aren't bad - actually, I really like them - but getting down the rhythm of the dash and double jump takes more than the 0.13 seconds the game gives you before it starts trying to murder you. I really don't get the appeal of this sort of thing.

I mean as I write this, Fallout 4 just came out, and 1.2 million people on steam were playing it last night. Does Fallout 4 give you, I don't know, more than ten seconds to get a handle on things? Sure, Fallout 4 has no doubt a host of problems and I doubt I'm buying it til, I don't know, 2018 or something. But there's something for a product being immensely more complicated and yet far more willing to be approachable. Game difficulty was built around artificially extending the longevity of a product, not necessarily enjoyment in and of itself.


You might read that introduction and think, well, I must totally hate There Was a Cave Man and the answer is ... No. Actually, while I wouldn't say it's a great game by any stretch of the imagination, it's a pretty solid take on the whole platforming ideal. It isn't exactly Shovel Knight level iterative work, but it is based on many of the game principles and does work them well.

There was a Caveman is a platformer of some very good assets and some very bad assets. First and foremost, the game is retro-pixel style of the 8-bit era, but it isn't hopelessly shackled to that. The animations are cute, and the levels are very detailed. Snow falls, butterflies take flight when you run by, there are vast scrolling backgrounds and birds flapping around. It sort of looks like 8-bit artwork through the lens of the detail level you'd see on the SNES or Amiga or whatever. That's pretty weird when you think about it, given the contradiction, but it works just fine for me and I enjoyed exploring the levels as I went for the little visual tricks.

The game has A LOT of visual variety against its length, it doesn't repeat itself over and over, and you don't fight the same enemies that often by any means. Some of them occur less times than you can count on one hand. Basically it has exactly the amount of content to fill its levels and then doesn't drag anything along repeatedly. Matched with the visuals being pleasant, the game - while iterative in terms of gameplay - is creative enough to be enjoyed. The only thing I'm disappointed with visually speaking is the game doesn't always make a distinction between spikes that instant kill you and spikes that just take off a chip if your health.

There are a lot of the usual platformer stuff, forcing you to move along one direction on a boat or away from an avalanche, or race upward away from a wall of jellyfish. In this regard, the game does feel like something you'd played before, but then I suppose all platforming is victim to that.

On the other hand, while the general audio is good, the music in some parts is downright dreadful and when you're struggling with a section the music just bores a hole in your skull. I get the impression the game is the product of maybe one dude, and he put all his effort into the art assets. He did a fantastic job there, but either he needs to find friends who know how to do music or needs to buy some better music or whatever. I rarely recommend you mute the music in games but ... Yeah here you should mute this music.

Beyond the assets, the level design is ... Decent enough. I feel like I'm playing bits and pieces of other games, carefully put together, but the feeling of deja vu just never quite goes away. None of it looks bad, mind you, and maybe some of it is new. The game has one incredibly strange flaw: There is a currency and upgrade system, but none of it is permanent. Currency halves whenever you die, and any loot you gain vanishes as well. I think the health upgrades only drop one upgrade at a time, but you get so few it was hard for me to even notice. Basically there's no point to the upgrade system, since you die pretty often in this game until you've gotten good at the levels... Once you're good at it, of course, then why do you need the upgrade system? It has minimal impact, especially the health upgrades, since you do die if you fall off things and often get juggled if you end up taking damage.

In addition, as I mentioned, the cave man possesses the power to dash on the ground and mid-air, and double jump. The double jump is something you really need to get the dynamics down on, because it's a bit weird. Double jump resets your trajectory, and if you flub it you often end up jumping much less than your thought you were going to. You can also use it to change directions and some other stuff, and he does a little cute animation where he whirls his club to gain momentum. Both the dash and the double-jump are things you need to get down, but the game doesn't really give you much time to get them to the point of reliable. Combat in the game is pretty secondary to having those movement abilities down, so it would be nice if the game eased you into them a little bit.

So is There Was a Cave Man worth grabbing? Well, like I said, it is essentially built around other ideas and has a bit of a rough starting - the game's difficulty curve is more or less a wave length til the last area - but it is pretty good once you get the game down. It isn't especially long, though I admit I found the last level too grindy to really bother with, but that's still a good two hours of gameplay.

I think it's generally a worthwhile title, but it is just an above average platformer of which there are no small number of. As such, it's something you have to want to play, not necessarily something I think you really need to pick up. Apparently it is in an indiegala bundle this week, so I imagine it'll be doing the bundle rounds for a while.