Tiny Cave

Tiny Cave review

Although you probably already knew that.

What Is It, Though?
Tiny Cave is a very short choose-your-own-adventure game made in Twine. Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. The game is published directly to HTML, which means you can play it within your browser. It is created by Healy, who has also provided the source code for this branching story. I used to read Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books when I was in primary school, so the concept of branching stories is not new to me. I am not experienced in interactive fiction as a genre of PC gaming, though, so I may be somewhat inept if this has any depth to it. To my knowledge it is a very short game and fairly simple, so it should be nice. It is inspired by a Twine challenge where you can only say 15 passages and 1,000 words, so it's going to be very short indeed. I wonder if Healy is going to be able to tell a story with such few words. Unlike many Choose-Your-Own-Adventures, or CYOAs, Tiny Cave has no bad endings. Good, because I didn't like the concept of bad endings, anyway. She mentions it will be a good game for kids due to its simplicity. The first CYOA book was entitled The Cave of Time. Tiny Cave's title is based off this fact. It branches widely. So, here I go! Into the Tiny Cave.



Well, that was quick. I only have a few comments, because the game was very short - literally, about 1 minute long. The User Interface is simple yet effective. Simple text, black lines on white. Very clean. You have been hiking in the woods for a while. You come upon a cave. You have 2 choices: "Go in" or "Get out". The choices seem somewhat arbitrary. These arbitrary choices lead to more arbitrary choices, and those choices lead to an end. I would have liked for there to have been pictures for every part of the story. The story is very short, perhaps even too short. The time limit that was created for the contest leaves this game too short to be enjoyed.

The story
The story was charming and random, and it would entertain kids. Nothing much of consequence happened, but the storytelling was not too offending. There were no grammar or spelling mistakes that I could recall. Perhaps a journey to find meaning in this game would be fruitless. But I would have liked the story to have been longer and have a satisfactory ending.

Conclusion
What this game consists of is 3 paths, with a couple of branched stories. The game can be experienced within 1 minute. Due to the short length, I'm not sure I'd even qualify it as a game, more like an invention.

That's my review of Tiny Cave, a game that's inconsequentially small and has very little going for it. I give it a D grade and a 1 star out of 5.

Thanks for reading.