Cave Story

You think indie games started with Minecraft. Or Braid, if you’re being generous. A couple of blokes with a Steam page and a dream. I know. That’s the story everyone tells, because that’s the story Steam tells.

The story actually starts in 2004, before any of that existed, when a Japanese software engineer named Daisuke Amaya finished a game he’d been building alone in his spare time for five years. Code, art, music, design, story — all one bloke. Then he put it on the internet for free and asked for nothing.

Cave Story.

You wake up in a cave with no memory, find a village of rabbit-people called Mimiga, and within an hour you’re shooting your way through a floating island with a plot that goes somewhere you will not see coming. It’s a run-and-gun platformer, but the twist is in the weapons: they level up as you get kills, and taking damage knocks them back down. So the shiny level-three gun you’re proud of is also the thing you’re terrified of losing, and you end up making real risk tradeoffs mid-fight about which weapon to actually commit to. Every system in this game is doing work. Nothing is filler.

And the game feel — this is the bit that matters. Movement has weight and momentum in the way you’d recognise from the good Sonic games, except here it’s in service of precision rather than speed. Jumping into a new area and immediately reading its layout through its enemy placement. That’s not luck. That’s five years of one man tuning every screen by hand because nobody else was going to do it.

Here’s the important bit: play the original freeware version, not the remaster. The original is still out there, free, running on a potato, and it’s the game as Pixel intended it — his pixel art, his music, his pacing. The later commercial versions have been redressed with new sprites and rearranged music, and what you lose in that transaction is exactly the thing that makes the original special. This is a game where the author’s hand is visible in every pixel. Don’t play a smoothed-over version of it.

It’s free. It’s four-ish hours to a first ending, longer if you go hunting the true one, which is gated behind some of the meanest optional challenges in the genre — the kind that made a generation of players learn the game at a level they didn’t know they had.

One person made this. No publisher, no team, no engine licence. Then the entire indie boom showed up five years later and built an industry on the template.

You get a weekend and a PC. You’ve got no excuse.

— Play the original. It’s free. cavestory.org hosts it, along with the fan translation. The paid versions on Steam and Switch are fine, but the author’s version costs nothing and is better.