• Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS

Treasure! TREASURE!

  • Kylaila
  • 07/06/2015 07:27 AM
  • 1338 views
Cave Dungeon R is .. about exploring a little cave RTP style.
It has a little bit of humour, ridiculous characters, easy battles and a good dose of exploration making it deserve its name.

You take a break from playing videogames to go explore a cave because your extremely timid friend told you he had found in it a chest full of gold, only guarded by a demon. The hero cast is a mushy bunch, without any real reason to do what they do, but they give way to great adventures.

Seeing how overconfident your main character is, you just have to take up the chance!


You can't tell me what to do!

This is a mixed bag, but there is a lot of great flair to explore.
The main enemy you will encounter are slimes .. boring enough, but at the very least they have their own sense of possession and actually want to defend their treasure chests.
You will find a variety of friendly and not so friendly monsters, as well as the lair of the great one.
While the characters are not particularily charming themselves, I did like the dungeon world that was created.

The battles are on touch encounters and fairly easy. You will be healed up right after and the lack of healing items is a refreshing change.
Nevertheless, it suffers from balance issues and is far too easy. Button-mashing is what it comes down to, but it is also a mere means of exploration.

You will not be able to use magic much in boss battles, aside perhaps from the weak healing spell, because it simply deals about the same damage as a normal attack does. Even on the magical blessed blond dude.
The only damage spell to use is the area-spell you can learn on slimes, useless for the later bosses.
The spells are learned via rare spell books, so you will try choose wisely. It is too bad they do not matter too much, and due to the fact that you recover mana, you will almost never run out of it, either, even if you keep spamming your spells.

I really enjoyed the cave and its inhabitants. The dialogue is very simple, and in comparison to another game from the same creator, much cleaner and very fitting. There are some awkward phrasings every now and then, but they are barely noticeable.
It plays a little with both the adventure tropes (chests being free to take), and with the way monsters are supposed to work, and the way you may or may not earn money, which makes for a charming influence.
You can sell the few items you can leave behind for gold to buy upgrades.

It is a shame, however, that at some point of the game you cannot return to the other parts of the cave and will likely miss something of the content.
However, it also prohibits you from exploiting a bug. One chest can be interacted with time and time again, so you will be able to get endless weapons and would be able to get endless upgrades.



100% better than my old ones.


I also did enjoy the maze, as you had plenty of space to move and avoid the creature while going for the switches.
What could be improved upon is how the maze is introduced in the first place - you simply stumble into it and start running. A build-up would have made it much more engaging and interesting.
For now it remains a change of pace in the game.

Similar to the maze, the ending part seems fairly rushed in contrast to the rest of the exploration. The last decision (other than how you will proceed through the cave) is right after the maze and I actually stumbled into the event before I could save and had to redo that part to get all endings.

The endings are more of a humorous note, and one can only wonder what happens if you pursue the ultimate treasure.
Really, you have no idea what exactly happens during one ending, but you can make a few guesses.

The other ones are straightforward, and amusing.

I feel the game did a nice job of a little bit of exploration, but I can also see many parts to be polished up and given more time to develop.
The hero cast is rather bland, the slimes are bland, and while the encounters in the cave are amusing, they are also very brief.

Still, I can recommend this one for all monsterliking adventurers.

Posts

Pages: 1
Thanks for the review!

I learned many things when I made this, I won't go back to try and polish it, but I will try to apply some things to future games (More personality to the characters, try to stop rushing things (the maze and the final boss were done at the last day of the event), try to make better dungeons giving them more personality, try to make better dialogues, etc.)

Thanks again!
You're welcome! Looking forward to it.
Pages: 1