Game

Game

Game

Game

After like 18 hours, I’ve FINALLY mastered Cave Noire for the Gameboy. This is a 1991 Konami roguelike for the gameboy that is STUNNINGLY ahead of its time. Like, holy shit. This should have blown minds in 1991. If this was released today, EXACTLY the same, with no changes, on itch.io, people’d be pretty into it I think.

The premise is simple. You’re a member of the adventurer’s guild. Go adventure. You have 4 dungeons to choose from, and they each have 10 levels to complete. You’ve got “Kill a certain number of monsters”, “collect a certain amount of gold, which spawns on the ground and takes up no inventory”, “save a certain number of fairies, which spawn in cages and use keys, which take up inventory slots”, and “collect a certain amount of “orbs”, which do nothing and take up inventory slots”. Orb quests are VERY hard. Each victory means that you can go to the next level in that dungeon, and the number of things you collect/murder increases.

And… that’s it! Go splorin’! The game is a turn-based roguelike kinda deal, things move when you move, and there are like 15-20 enemies that all have their own unique movement patterns that you need to learn, and you NEED to learn them, because you kinda suck in this game. Combat is your LAST resort, you should really only do it if you ABSOLUTELY need to, and even then against the weakest enemies, like fire bubbles or spiders.

To help you are some items you can pick up! You can carry up to 8. You’ve got things like swords and shields to increase your stats, very handy, but also a wide range of spells, like fireball, which is an AMAZING get out of jail free card cause it kills 70% of things in one hit. Or Cloak, which makes enemies ignore you for a bit. Or flight, which teleports you around. Lots of learning to do, but there’s not THAT much to learn. It’s not overly complex, but it’s very hard and unforgiving.

Very often I’d find myself walking into another room, and there’s an enemy in that room. And the way combat works in this game, is if you move into a square, your turn ends, and if an enemy is next to you, it’ll beat you up. And you can just straight up fucking die walking into rooms. It’s mean.

But other all, this game is pretty sick. If I was a Japanese businessman in 1991, this’d be the PERFECT thing to play on the train. I can get a few runs in before getting to my soul crushing job. Today, it’s mostly a fascinating novelty, there’s better roguelikes to play, though prolly not on the Gameboy. It is, however, EXTREMELY ahead of its time. Nothing like this would really exist for ages except on computers, and even then, this hits a lot of the modern conventions. IT EVEN HAS A GENDER TOGGLE. WHAT THE FUCK?!

Also important to note, A LOT of people told me this game inspired Void Stranger. I can’t back that up with a source, but uh, look at it. Yeah. Yeah that’s probably correct.