by: Michael Barnes

Once upon a time, long before quirky retro platformers became all the rage in the indie development scene, there was a little freeware PC game designed by a guy called Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya. He released it on the Web in 2004, after spending some five years of development on the project. The game became something of a cult classic at a time when 2D platformers were almost non-existent, out of fashion, and even unavailable.

Braid, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Littlebigplanet, and Outland were still years away from happening. And now, seven years on, Cave Story remains one of the very best- if not the best- of the old school, revivalist platform games. There are few modern games that evidence as much passion, heart, and soul as Pixel’s surprisingly influential and timeless design. Its singular commitment to recreating the feeling and atmosphere that characterized the best NES games pays off in spades, its ability to evoke an artificial sense of nostalgia is uncanny.

The newest edition, following on from WiiWare and DS editions, is Cave Story 3D. Developed and made over for the 3DS by Nicalis and published by Prinny proponents NIS, Cave Story 3D is the best version of the game to date. Pixel’s world of rabbit-like Mimigas, mysteriously deadly red flowers, Sky Dragon eggs, and adorable robot soldiers is completely intact, with the only major overhaul being a complete makeover of the original 2D sprite-based graphics that take advantage of the platform’s glasses-less 3D technology and the addition of some minor additional content. The music has been freshened up and remixed, but it remains memorable and a fine example of the atavistic chiptune style. If you just can’t bear the loss of the original lo-res character sprites, they’ve kindly included a mode that will let you play with them.

With a game like Cave Story, modernizing the visual style could have been catastrophic. Pixel’s original art had an authenticity and a spirit that would have fit right in with the 1986 NES releases. The transition to 3D does absolutely nothing to damage the game’s charm or unique style, and the dimensionality of the game world literally adds a new layer of depth to it. The world of Cave Story comes alive like a miniature diorama. This doesn’t affect gameplay at all, but the lighting, textures, and depth of field draws you in, and it provides an unusual sense of tactility that somehow makes the game seem even warmer and more magical.

Gameplay remains the same, which is to say that it remains the same as it would have been if the game had existed in 1986. It may be a little more intense than something from that era, perhaps more like a Treasure game, but it’s laden with fairly typical running, jumping, and shooting with several very different weapons that are upgraded by picking up energy triangles that increase the power of each. There are also Metroid-like life capsules and missile expansions to be found along the way along with story-specific items required to progress to new areas. Exploration is a key activity, and the game’s wonderful characters, diverse environments, and unusual enemies including jellyfish and ghosts mean that there’s always something interesting around the corner.

This is a classic example of the adventure platforming genre, with virtually no revisionist, ironic, or postmodern elements. But the execution here bears an unironic, heartfelt authenticity that makes games that appeal to retro sensibilities like Braid feel like borderline fraud. There are very few games that actually manage to capture that “X” factor that childhood favorites like Blaster Master, Goonies II, and Kid Icarus managed, but Cave Story 3D does.