I finished Cave Story just minutes before I sat down to write this, so the impressions I’ll be sharing are fresh, but not entirely settled.
First and foremost, I feel like I just blew up a lot of shit. At the end, you have to fight Misery, The Doctor, The Doctor after the red crystal takes over his body, and then the Core after the Doctor, um Red Crystal Doctor, um, a bunch of red bubbles possess the Core AND Misery AND Sue.
Basically, you just shoot a lot.
And, weirdly, it didn’t feel like the toughest fight of the game. I had a much harder time with the Dragon Sisters on my second trip through the Egg Corridor (after the big collapse). Of course, that’s not a complaint. I am, in all honesty, ready to be done. I’m happy with the game, and the experience as a whole, but I’m ready to move on to something else, too.
I don’t have a lot new to say about the narrative — I think it’s a compliment to Cave Story that most of the narrative value is embedded throughout the game rather than coming in one big burst at the end. Destroying and escaping from the floating island felt like a culmination rather than a revelation, although there are a few good additional bits if you watch the credits. Sue, for example, gets turned back to a human, but it doesn’t stick.
The most powerful moment for me was actually the quick flash to Curly Brace, still inactive and locked in the core.
In fact, saving Curly Brace is the one thing that could drag me through the game a second time, although I think there’s a good argument to be made for not going back to save her. While it’s almost assumed that a good game is one that’s designed for replay value — BioWare is famous for this, and actually puts messages on loading screens encouraging the player to start a second playthrough and make different choices — Heavy Rain director David Cage has stated in interviews that he hopes that players make a single trip through his game.
These competing desires are expressions of different theories of game narrative experience, both, interestingly, hinging on design architectures which attempt to make player choices matter. BioWare is, in effect, saying “we put a lot in this game, and you owe it to yourself to see the various outcomes your choices can lead to. See how characters react differently, find all the easter eggs, do everything.” The evidence, in this case, that choices matter comes from experiencing different outcomes, and the implied argument is that if a player is only going to play a game once, then they may as well go buy a game with a more linear, game-directed storyline. (Like maybe Final Fantasy XIII. To which I say, “Touché, BioWare. Touché.”)
Heavy Rain, while seeming to be similarly focused on crating meaningful player choices, actually takes an entirely different approach as to what it means for a choice to matter. Instead of encouraging the player to go back and find out what could have happened differently, the game instead focuses on creating a more seamless experience.1 In fact, without a second playthrough (or some digging online), it’s not entirely clear at the end of the game what exactly could or should have gone differently, and one of the things I admire about the game is the way that players who reach wildly different endings can leave the game with the impression that they achieved the “best” ending.
All of which is to say, while part of me wants to save Curly Brace, her loss was the most affecting narrative moment in Cave Story for me, and I’m not totally sure I want to defeat that.
So what do you say, Daniel and Kevin? Will you be playing again? Or was the first trip enough (or more than enough)?
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1. I use the phrase “more seamless” rather than “seamless” intentionally. There’s a whole column (at least) in Heavy Rain‘s seams and joins, but I’m supposed to be talking about Cave Story, so I’ll leave it there for now.
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Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.