Indie Games: Cave Story

I wasn’t too sure if I wanted to call this section ‘Indie Games’ Or ‘Recession Busting Games’ – but I suppose to two sort of go hand in hand (in a way).

You can download it for free on PC, and an updated version is due to come out in WiiWare due out for release in the near future.

Cave Story (or Doukutsu Monogatari); If you haven’t already played it you more than likely at least know about it. It is a game created by Daisuke Amaya who created every part of this game during his free time over a period of five years.

You control a robot named Quote, who has woken up and is suffering from amnesia. You stumble on an underground village inhabitied by creatures named Mimiga. You soon become involved in their plight (and the game’s main storyline) when one of the resident Mimiga’s is kidnapped after being mistaken for a character named Sue.

The controls are very fluid. ‘Z’ is to Jump, ‘X’ is to fire your weapon, ‘A’ and ‘S’ to scroll through your weapon inventory, Left and Right to move, Up to look up and Down to look down or interact with an item or talk to a character. Your character can fire left, right and up when he is static and left, right up and down as he is jumping (which is nice to have that option in a 2D shooter!) and the longer you hold down the jump button, the higher he jumps. It allows you to have a lot of freedom whilst navigating through the maps.

It also has an RPG element to it, in that when you kill enemies with a weapon, they drop weapon energy. Your weapon energy bar fills up the more you collect and goes up to three levels. However, when you get injured, your weapon energy depletes, and you can find yourself back at level 1 if you don’t watch yourself.

The graphics are very reminiscient of early 90s 2D platformers. This, along with the beautifully scored midi music, gives the game a very strong nostalgia feel.

The game will have you playing for a good few hours (I’ve been playing close to four hours and not even got half way through it yet) and there are a lot of bonuses and secrets you can find if you let yourself explore the levels a bit more.

You can find the download for it (in it’s original Japanese language) and the English patch Here.
The game is free, and is definitely worth checking out if you are looking for a game to keep you occupied over the weekend!

Tags: cave story, independant, indie