Cave Story is originally the work of a single man called Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya and was released as freeware. The game's success led to a more polished version by Nicalis and Studio Pixel under the name “Cave Story +”.
Cave Story aims to provide a similar retro game-play experience circa Master System era. The game has simple graphics, colours, contains simple platforming and shooting elements whilst providing a large challenge.
The plot is fairly minimal and vague. The protagonist finds himself within a dark cave with no knowledge about his location. The game's story has a bit more to it than that which is slowly unveiled as you progress. Despite that, it's really just a standard story of good and evil.
The game is effectively split into levels because you need to use a teleport to get to the main areas. Once you are in an area, the world is fairly linear with some slight deviations.
The arrow keys move the character, and you use Z and X to jump and shoot respectively. A and S switches weapons, Q brings up the inventory and W is the map. The game's protagonist is agile due to his high jumps and mid-air control. Initially, you start off with one weapon, but as you progress you discover more in addition to some weapon and health upgrades. There's a nice variety to the weapons like a fireball-throwing gun, a throwing sword, and missiles. The game has an interesting mechanic where your equipped weapon increases in level after collecting golden triangles left behind by defeated enemies, but levels down when you get hit. Increasing levels increases power, range and aesthetics of the projectiles. The system means the emphasis of the battles is damage avoidance; going all-guns-blazing will ultimately force you to change weapons which could put you at a tactical disadvantage.
The difficulty of the boss battles seems quite inconsistent, with some being rather tough and some being a bit on the easy side. Quite often, you will get a save point nearby, but then sometimes you won't; forcing you to re-do large sections, often with tricky jumps and enemies that can kill you in one hit; leading to some very frustrating moments.
Cave Story has a lot of retro charm, but has the usual annoyances with retro games. The story is fairly minimal, the levels are pretty simplistic, and initially has a lot of annoying back-tracking to pad out the game. Later on, there's not so much of the back-tracking, but then you start getting the trickier bosses and enemies with one-hit kill attacks to frustrate you instead.
If you have the skill, Cave Story isn't a particularly long game, but replaying difficult sections will artificially stretch out the game. There's three difficulty levels, three possible endings, and some extra game modes. The extremely high ratings for the game seem inflated because some versions of the game are free, but if you are paying £6.99 for the Steam version, or even more for the 3DS version, then you will probably see it in a different light. It's obviously not a bad game, but for me just seems average.