Stilt Village
GBA
Cavern of Dreams is a collectathon 3D platformer styled after a Nintendo 64 game. It released last year, and had the misfortune of coming out the day before Mario (the date was set long before Wonder was even announced), so it didn't exactly gather a lot of attention. I'm sure being a platformer exclusive to Steam also limited its reach somewhat as well, for some reason it feels like only the Nintendo ecosystem allows these games to truly blow up, at least on forums like this. Even I, who loved the demo at Next Fest, have only just now gotten around to it. Which, as it turns out, is a shame.
The more I think on it, the more remarkable this game really is. It's very small in scope, at only four main worlds plus a hub, but it's perhaps the first actual Banjo successor in a genre of Banjo clones that copy the basic structure but miss the substance.
I haven't seen any screenshots that really do it justice, which is why I only have a trailer here, but it's gorgeous in motion, a real 64-bit art expo (although even I immediately turned off the authentic N64 vaseline smear filter from the options.) The world is described as "surreal", and I suppose that's right, but not to an extent that's especially unusual for the time. Think of walking into that weird room at the end of the Ice Cavern, or the Astral Observatory in Majora's Mask, but make it a regular occurrence with the baseline being at least as dreamlike as Spyro. Wonderful spaces to exist in.
The music is atmospheric but never did much for me, though it does pick up on the necessity of dynamic tracks like Banjo had, which I don't think I've seen anyone else do besides maybe Yooka-Laylee. Did it even? I genuinely don't remember.
The game design is all well above average, except for that damned starfish. Still. It's a bit slight. I can't say I actually missed combat like I thought I would, in the end it's just not a terribly important part of these games I suppose. But despite its best efforts, the world still feels pretty small once you're familiar with it, and the game is ultimately about half the size of Banjo-Kazooie or Spyro the Dragon, never mind the giant and ponderous games which followed them. Modern indie collectathons often have fewer worlds than their inspirations, but they nevertheless pad things out in some fashion to try and make up for that. Cavern of Dreams thankfully feels no need to do so, but that does leave it feeling about as short as its tiny level count would suggest. I finished it in a night.
It therefore has trouble really making use of the quite creative systems of progression it sets up. Not counting the very first one that ends the tutorial section and gives you access to the first world, the game has a grand total of 5 progression checks where you need a certain amount of an item to progress. Banjo-Kazooie has 18, and that's not counting the optional ones. It feels like you only get a taste of progression before you're already at the end of the game.
Plotwise, the game is Spyro 3 meets Undertale. Or maybe Bubble Bobble? No, I won't elaborate. The contents are full-on N64 though. There are a few worlds inside paintings and one bit that's a tribute to Ocarina of Time's Haunted Wasteland in particular, but mainly the focus is on Banjo-Kazooie. Especially Clanker's Cavern. You've no idea how much the developer loved Clanker's Cavern. Same though.
It's the first time I've seen any game reproduce Banjo-Tooie's knotted up cross-world solutions. It actually really manages to strike a balance between the two, containing elements of both Kazooie's immediacy and Tooie's ambitious complexity.
Like Kazooie, you can complete each world fully as you come to it. Its mushrooms are nearly as well-placed as Kazooie's notes, a first in my experience. The main objectives meanwhile are kind of a mix of more basic puzzles and platforming challenges as well as drawn-out multi-step scenarios, with the latter taking over towards the end of the game. You will find a good amount of eggs just sitting there or hidden away somewhere, but you will also really have to work for some of them.
There are many challenges centered around having to bring an item from one place to another, or even smuggle it between worlds, especially later in the game. There are a bunch of little connections and sub-areas you find that just have a single collectible in them, and often it will only be apparent where you were much later in the game. But then one of these ends up being the key to a puzzle in the third world that requires you to bring something from the first.
We also have world-altering mechanics like stopping a snowstorm to unfreeze the water or tilting an airship to change what you can reach. The former brings to mind the significance of Mumbo oxygenating Jolly Roger's Lagoon, while the latter recalls the Zelda dungeon-isms of Grunty Industries. Both are things that have to be unlocked by performing a level-spanning task which itself has no reward, being just a means to an end.
It even builds upon the Metroidvania elements of Tooie in a sense. It encourages freeform use of your moveset, and it's noticeable from the very beginning of the game that you can skip some puzzles with pure finesse. However, using advanced movement techniques, the game can be broken wide open and tackled in basically any order, with a great many obstacles being entirely skippable if you know what you're doing. I do not, and only discovered this from watching a 100% speedrun, which is finished in scarcely over 40 minutes. I don't know to exactly what extent this was intentional, but it ends up accommodating something that Tooie is caught flat footed by. Should you attempt to sequence break it, the game often has no idea what to do, and the ground will shrink beneath you hours later if you skip early moves simply because you could.
This isn't to say it's entirely like Banjo, either. The movement is wholly unique, much more momentum-based and freeform. Not really Mario parkour, but almost like Sonic Adventure?
When I first played the demo, I suspected that the N64 romhacking scene was an influence on the level design. I think the thing that stuck out to me was the puzzles, which felt remarkably similar to the sort of things romhack developers make out of necessity because they can't easily introduce new assets that move or interact with the player. Things like giving you a riddle that hints at what object you need to hit in order to open a door is how they work around those limitations. These environmental observation puzzles are common here. And indeed, Mark Kurko of Jiggies of Time fame was included under Special Thanks in the credits, so this feeling of mine may be warranted.
While it looks quite a lot like Banjo in certain areas, the presentation is largely different otherwise. The background lore adds sorrow to the game which, along with its surreal and often eerie environments, gives it a tone sort of like an 80's fantasy movie. ...At least from how they're talked about; I don't think I've ever seen one. There's an innocence to the immediate story, but a darkness lurking just out of frame most of the time.
As I mentioned earlier, the game has no combat whatsoever. There are some monsters, mostly in the final world, but the majority of them are pretty passive obstacles even then. Because of this, there's a certain quiet to the world, and a frequent sense of "it has nothing to do with me, but something happened here". That lack of understanding and the shelter from the darkest elements of the setting really adds to the child's perspective you occupy.
The true villains are murky and greater scope. The main antagonist is so inconsequential that confronting her is completely optional thanks to a really cool 100% reward in the form of the ability to fly. Your ultimate goal is to leave the cavern, and you can indeed just... leave, as a sort of alternate anticlimax ending, if you so choose.
Everything that lead to the world you're experiencing today and your current problems is decisions made in the distant past, things you can't really do anything about. You fell into this world, its problems are bigger than you and there isn't much you can do in the here and now besides helping out the people you meet along the way.
An interesting element I've yet to figure out the intent behind is how basically every character outside of the antagonist is defined in some way by a form of pacifism. There is not really an explicit message about violence the way there is in Undertale; almost none of this is directly relevant to the story at all. But that it's such a running theme in everyone's backstories has to have been deliberate.
Ultimately, this is one of the better collectathons ever made. Easily my favorite one of the modern revival so far, and possibly surpassing the best non-Banjo efforts from 96-04. Things that no one else has ever attempted or gotten right are pulled off perfectly competently here. It's one of those games that comes as a relief more than anything, like it's scratching an itch that's been there forever.
It was my impression back when I played the demo; and even now after experiencing the modest scope of the game, I think this is a more authentic successor than Yooka-Laylee ever was. It doesn't try to replicate most of the humor and presentation, but Yooka didn't get the former right and the latter just came off as trying way too hard to ride Banjo's coattails. And Cavern of Dreams looks much more like a Banjo game than the blocky, bright and clean playset world of Yooka anyway. Most importantly though, there's just no comparison in the game design. Yooka was a slightly below average clone with some of the worst 3D level design I've ever encountered, and Cavern of Dreams understands and effortlessly reproduces and iterates on what both Banjo games accomplished in its own modest way.
Most of all, it's a must for anyone who ever loved existing in and exploring the worlds of N64 games. That if nothing else is the experience it is intent on delivering, and it does so with flying colors. I didn't even grow up with the console, and I felt like a kid again!
