Cave of Wonders

Cave of Blunders, sorry Wonders was written by Campbell Wild as a demonstration game for his new text adventure creation system Adrift in 1999. As an advertisement, it does for the creation of text adventures what the Titanic did for the sales of holidays on cruise ships.

There are many bugs both lurking and stinging you in the face here. An underwater section can be drained yet reappears as undrained thanks to no conditional flags being set. A bottle can be filled once but never again, despite there being ample quantities of filler left lying around. One section of the game disappears if you enter it and perform a certain action, for no apparent reason. The description of the area is replaced by the letter "x." Hmmmm. Taking a particular object requires "pluck" and does not recognise "pick" or "take" yet another similar object does not respond to "pluck." You get the general idea.

All this is a shame as without the huge amount of bugs (the game can still be finished but it is a pain) a nice medium sized treasure hunt would exist here. The puzzles are often clever and quite tough and there are several ways to soft lock the game if you make a wrong choice.

There are a few static NPCs and one wonderfully dreadful pun which would be quite happy in Quondam.

The two word parser will give you a real battle of "guess the verb" although many objects can be referred to. Very few synonyms are allowed so exact wording is required. The maximum score is 1000 points although I only managed to attain 970 but still found the treasure-filled cave, the object of my quest. The room descriptions are perfunctorily adequate without being memorable. The parser is too picky and very few alternative verbs are catered for which of course creates frustration. As if writing a set sized newspaper column three or four sentences cover most descriptions so it falls far short of a mystical atmosphere; utilitarian reference book rather than mystical novel. There are also plenty of ways to lock yourself out of victory and quite a few illogicalities too. The actual puzzles themselves are the reason to play the game; discovering multiple means of transportation and deciphering maps are done rather cleverly.

All in all if you would like to see what the Adrift environment has to offer try a Larry Horsman game instead.

This game is an old school treasure hunt written by Campbell Wild, the creator of Adrift. If you expect a lot of verbose, beautiful prose you will be disappointed, as this is primarily a game, not a story. But it is a game with a lot of good puzzles which are (usually) well implemented. I think the main problem of this game is, that it is extremely easy to put the game in an "unwinnable" state and you won't know it until much later. I started over and over again, because I just wanted to beat it, but in the end I had enough of restarting when I reached 620 points out of 1000. Even for 1999 (the publication year), this game is more cruel than most games (for comparison Winter Wonderland (IFComp 1999 winner) could not be put in an "unwinnable" state). With a bit more thought this could have been a really good game. No testers are mentioned, which kind of explains it. Even the technically best authors need testers to find the bugs and design flaws in their games.

Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 7/10)
ADRIFT 3.8 parser is nothing special but in most cases it wasn't a problem. A few times, I thought I was encountering a guess-the-verb situation but I simply tried an alternative solution which was not accounted for. So this isn't really a parser issue but a design issue.

Atmosphere (Rating: 6/10)
The descriptions are sufficiently detailed for a puzzler like this, but could be improved.

Cruelty (Rating: Cruel)
As mentioned above, it is far too easy to end up in an "unwinnable" situation without knowing it. Many contemporary games did not have this problem in 1999.

Puzzles (Rating: 8/10)
The puzzles are pretty good, with a bit of humour thrown in.

Overall (Rating: 6/10)
I enjoyed it quite a lot for a while, but in the end the constant need to restart or load a very old save became too frustrating.

This is the second of Campbell Wild's games I've played, the first being The Haunted House.

My general impression is that Cave of Wonders is an improvement and a much better game. Once again it is still in the classic style of briefer location descriptions and simpler game play. But, unlike Haunted House more of the scenery items can be examined. It is basically a treasure hunt with most of the objects that are needed scattered around or fairly easy to find.

The characters you come across during the game are little more than scenery with limited conversation and only one purpose.

I didn't run into any real GTV during play. The only real problem I have is with the plot and some of the solutions to the puzzles. (Spoiler - click to show)For example, to get into the graveyard you need to be wearing a flower. Why is never explained, or at least not to me. On the other hand to get into a garden you have to crash through the wall with a vehicle. Now that puzzle I liked. So, a bit hit and miss with many of the puzzles poorly clued or not clued at all.

If you like the more traditional adventure game then Cave of Wonders is worth playing. It entertained me for a couple of plays.