Colossal Cave Adventure

Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based adventure game made back around 1975 by Will Crowther. Its main setting is a cave that the player is tasked with exploring through simple text inputs like directions and actions. The player’s main goal in the game is to increase their score for collecting treasure and exiting the cave, to find these treasures you need to solve puzzles. It is the first text adventure game and is considered the precursor to the adventure genre.

Things I enjoyed about the game was that it was easy to grasp the concept of the game. The choice of a very simple dungeon crawler adventure for a text-based game works great. It is like you are participating in an adventure novel. Since the game doesn’t provide a map, you might have to draw up your own through trial and error, which I found to add more depth to the game-play. There are also moments when the narrator, that provide details, gives the player attitude for doing things incorrectly, especially if they die.

My negatives for the game are as followed. It can be very easy to get lost and not know what to do. When I played for the first time, I had arrived at the room with the magic word in the cave after getting past the grate. In that room is a magic wand that is needed for later to collect a treasure, however this rod also causes the bird to be scared so you can’t capture it when holding the rod. I only figured this out after looking up how to progress since I was stuck without the bird. Also, since the game is trial and error there is a lot of backtracking, at first this isn’t a bad thing but after a while it becomes more and more of a hassle and hurts the replay ability factor for me.