The Mysterious Cave

“Your goal is to navigate through the forest, solve puzzles, interact with characters, and ultimately discover the truth about your identity,” claims the blurb for The Mysterious Cave, and none of that is technically untrue. You do navigate through a forest – though the map is only four locations connected by a linear road, so this is less compelling than you’d think (there is some nice art, though, par for course for an Adventuron game). As to the next bits, they plurals are a bit misleading, since it’s more the case that you solve one puzzle and interact with one character: the only objects that are implemented are a tree and the mushroom growing on it, and the only character is a nameless guardian barring your way into the eponymous cave who monologues that he’s hungry when you examine him, and the only way of interacting with him is to solve the one puzzle, which is giving him the as-it-turns-out-poisoned mushroom to knock him out (I suppose “don’t eat the obviously sketchy mushroom” might qualify as an additional half-puzzle). And once you go past him and enter the eponymous cave, the game does say you now remember who you are – but it ends before it deigns to let the player in on the secret.

So much for truth in advertising, but bar the admittedly-lovely pixel illustrations, it’s very hard to find anything here to catch a player’s interest; the gameplay, as discussed above, is about as minimal as a work of IF can attain, there’s almost no flavor text to speak of, and despite how stripped down it is there are still some noticeable bugs (the game starts with an Adventuron setup error message, there are typos in the first location’s description, and the guardian keeps saying he’s hungry even after he’s unconscious – maybe he’s talking in his sleep?) As an exercise to learn a new authoring system, I can see the value here, and the presentation really is nicely done, so I’d be happy to play a full game from the author, but the solution to the enigma of the cave is that it’s just a glorified tech demo.