Caves of Lore review — A diamond in the rough

Many modern RPG games hold your hand and won’t let go. If you’re sent on a quest, there’s rarely any guesswork. Just follow the quest marker, grab, kill, or activate the thing, and report back to the person who gave you the quest for what will likely be a mediocre reward that you will immediately sell or store in a chest where it will sit forever. Caves of Lore, the passion project of a lone developer, challenges this trend by offering the player complex gameplay systems and a fresh narrative clouded in mystery. Not all parts of the game are made equally, however, with some being a simple one-story mine shaft, while others are a fathomless quarry.

The game opens with the player character looking for their dog, Arbo, in a foggy field. You’ve been warned against entering the area by the elders of your village, but you go regardless. Soon enough, you stumble down into a cave with no way of getting back up, finding Arbo in the process. It’s here where you can choose your starting stats and rediscover your name. Lannon and Lanna are the default gendered options, but you can write in whatever you’d like. I thought it would be funny to rename the dog, Arbo, to Boy and the boy, Lannon, to Dog, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll stick to their default names for this review. As for my stats, I wanted Lannon to be a warrior, so I siphoned points from my mind and spirit stats, which govern magical capabilities, and put them into strength, agility, speed, and resistance. I was also given the choice of a free starting trait and two abilities. For the trait, I selected brawler, making my unarmed attacks pack a wallop, and for my abilities, I chose a dash attack and a knockback attack. In the end, I had a super-powered boxer who could tank hits and dish them out with great damage and speed, but he also was dumb as dirt and spells were beyond him. It was exciting to have so many options at the start, allowing you to give your build a general shape and foundation.

As part of the introduction, Lannon and Arbo were attacked by a rat, which gave me my taste of the game’s turn-based grid-style combat. Needless to say, that rat didn’t stand a chance. I had Arbo use a howl ability to weaken it, and I made use of Lannon’s dash attack to take it down. After your party defeats enemies, you’re given a screen that shows which characters increased which stats. One of the most important stats in the game is monster lore. The more you fight a certain type of enemy, the more information you get about them, such as their strengths, weaknesses, health, movement range, etc.

After defeating the rat, we came across a skeleton holding a peculiar codex. Upon looting it, the player is given the ability to perceive magic that’s undetectable by the naked eye, making it possible to progress further into the cave. Just about immediately, a new obstacle arises: there’s a door with a lock that’s too difficult for a beginner player to pick. Here’s where another key gameplay mechanic is introduced, character abilities. Each character in your party has their own unique ability, and in this case, Arbo’s digging ability allowed us to find the key and progress. After pressing onward and punching my way through enough rats to qualify as a biblical-level threat to their species, I eventually came across two new party members, Merewen and Rycard. Upon speaking with them it quickly becomes clear that you’re not the only one with amnesia; it’s a problem plaguing the land thanks to the mysterious fog. With your initial party set, it’s time to escape from the caves you’re in and venture forth into the world above to uncover the mysteries of this world… and then into more caves!

I like this opening; it’s got a few things going for it. First, we have the initial mystery of who our main character is, then we have the mystery of the fog and the odd magical codex we find. We’re introduced to the basics of combat, leveling, and party mechanics. It’s a great start, but this game goes a lot deeper in terms of mechanics. In fact, I would argue the opening’s only sin is that it doesn’t go deep enough, as I rapidly became overwhelmed by all of the game’s other systems. For example, while camping was introduced as a way to heal in a short text pop-up in the opening, it’s not thoroughly explained. When camping, you can assign people to stand guard, play music, and heal wounded party members. In all of my hours of playing, I’m not really sure what standing guard or playing music do. It took me until a few hours into the game to realize that I could heal party members who fell in battle by camping. I was just reloading saves until then.

On the note of systems, this portion of the review will be going over the many, many game mechanics in Caves of Lore. Some are good, some are bad, and many are ugly. There aren’t always problems, but when there are, they’re caused by the game’s poor telegraphing, signposting, and overall lack of communication to the player.

Starting with character progression, there are two categories of ways to increase your party members’ power, either through level growth or gear. Starting with level growth, your characters will gain access to new abilities, skills, and traits over time, each of which has its own handy little tab. There’s a fourth tab for spells, but they fall somewhere between gear and level growth, so they’ll get mentioned last in the level growth category.

Traits are your typical passive stat-boost fare that comes with the territory of RPG games. There’s one for every type of weapon and magic available from the get-go. Beyond those, you need to accumulate enough of the aforementioned monster lore to gain the ability to buy new ones. Once you learn enough about a monster, you’ll unlock a new trait buy. These add some real spice to your party builds. Backstab damage, higher critical chance, wielding a two-handed weapon with one hand, better mana recovery, and many more are all on the table.

If you want a more active form of progression, then look to abilities. There are 18 in total, and they’re pretty hit or miss. One ability lets you mark an enemy, allowing you to do more damage to them. Another ability will let you sacrifice some damage to move a few tiles further in combat. Do you have an archer in your party? Give them the puncture ability and let them pierce through multiple enemies with a single shot. Some are more useful than others, and their general effectiveness is generally overshadowed by spells.

That being said, the exceptions are indeed exceptional. Take the dash attack I chose for example. It penetrates through every enemy in a line, making it fun to see how many enemies I could hit with one attack. Then there’s the stronger version that charges forward and back to your original spot. It deals damage twice to every enemy in its wake, but there has to be room behind the enemy, a rule that doesn’t apply to the more simple dash. Still, the major value of these two abilities was that they were some of the only ways to apply melee damage to multiple enemies at a time, and magic can do that pretty effortlessly. Another important caveat is that they’re specific to your player character and others can’t obtain them.

The last piece of character progression to cover before moving on to spells is the skills category. There are 15 skills to level up like lock picking to open doors and chests, monster lore to learn about monsters faster, barter for shop prices, and an assortment of skills associated with weapons. Overall, I never really enjoyed this portion of character progression. Dumping a bunch of points into a skill was always a little boring, especially when the weapons only increase in max damage every third level, and skill point prices get pretty steep later on. It never gave me that “ah ha!” moment where I could feel my character getting tangibly stronger.

Finally, moving on to spells. Party members require specific books in their inventory to cast certain spells. If you remove the book, the associated spells go right out with it. However, if you keep using that spell in combat, the character casting it can “memorize” it, meaning it won’t disappear if you remove the book. I really like this system, as it forces the player to invest their time in a spell without being overly restrictive or punishing. Spells also have their own levels that increase as you use them, giving them higher damage, larger areas of effect, and new visuals. For example, Merewen started with a spell that cast down a small stalactite, which eventually evolved into dropping a massive, blocky boulder. It’s a small visual change, but it really does add to the sense of growth both in terms of power and how far you’ve come with your party. All in all, spells were my favorite gameplay mechanic by far.

Then, there’s the other form of progression. Gear is either bought, found, or made through smithing, alchemy, or enchanting. I never made gear, as I was never taught how, and I didn’t even know it was possible. I found an alchemy lab in a major hub, but I didn’t use it because I found enough potions to keep me going, and force-feeding my crew raw ingredients worked just as well for me in the heat of combat, and I could always rest at a campfire to restore the rest after the battle. As for enchanting and smithing, it’s a real shame I never found out how to do these, because the gear around the world isn’t that great.

All of these abilities and pieces of gear are a means to an end: to win at combat. So, how does the combat hold up? Well, it can be both deep and painfully repetitive. Here’s why. Enemy encounters are nearly constant in Caves of Lore. As you walk around the world, you might run into monsters, or they you, and if they make contact with one of your party members, you engage in a fight. It does lead to some fun moments reminiscent of the game Snake, where you’re trying to maneuver your conga line of party members to avoid the enemy. However, there were times when I would fight off some monsters, take a few steps, and fight some more, and then I would get a third encounter right after. Mind you, each of these fights takes a good few minutes to win. Sure, you have the option to stealthily avoid enemies, but then you lose out on XP, monster lore, and items, and in the early through mid-game, that’s not exactly a winning strategy.

A little past the start of the game, I was getting slammed. The enemies were tough for my low-level party and I had to play carefully. The difficulty was frustrating when combined with the manual save system, lack of information, and constant combat. If I wasn’t careful after winning a few fights in a row, I would be sent back to where I started. Eventually, I slowly reached a subtle tipping point where my party could handily beat anything the game threw at me. It was rewarding to go from a lowly squad of adventurers to a battle-hardened band of veterans.

At the same time, my party was often carried by a few star members, and I was confused as to how to make the rest of my party more effective. Rycard, one of the party members I picked up in the intro, was my rogue. I gave him various traits to allow him to deal bonus backstab damage and gain bonus critical attack chance, and I gave him a suite of abilities to jump over enemies, then further fortify his crit and backstab damage, and then another to straight up weaken their defenses. After all of that setup, he was worse than the rest of my crew by a good margin. Lannon could do more damage to most of the enemies on the board in two clicks with a dash attack than Rycard could with his full combo. This is where I really wish smithing and enchanting were better explained, because obtaining the proper gear is the only real way to amplify critical damage outside of a few traits. Although, I stumbled across a new party member, a fighter, halfway through the game who was already better than my dashing rogue, so maybe it’s just an overall balancing issue.

Boss battles suffer from another issue, they lack narrative punch or emotional weight. The typical formula consists of your party running into a big monster, mouthing off to each other, and then fighting to the death. There were never any personal stakes in it, and most of them were weakly tied to the plot.

Speaking of the plot, the story is largely told by the various people you meet across your travels. It’s a typical tale with heroes and a dark lord, but what throws a monkey wrench into the triteness is that people have their own accounts of what’s happening. Many of the explanations or anecdotes you’ll receive conflict with each other. Combine the confliction with the memory loss, and you have the recipe for a strong mystery. Who were the nobles of the area? What was their legacy? What did the dark lord do? Did he even exist at all? All of these questions swirl around in a chaotic soup, really lending to the themes of memory loss and disorientation.

Due to the air of mystery, talking to various citizens of the local town, or to denizens of the local cave network was engaging, especially because you can greet them with every one of your party members and gain a different response. I even got free armor because I chose to greet someone as Arbo. At the same time, sometimes their responses are a little verbose, saying little that we didn’t already know in too many words.

While I liked the story overall, it did have some sore points. Around halfway through, the steps to completing the main quest became overly confusing. I got stuck in a few areas, needing to look to guides for help moving on, as the sparse notes in the quest log didn’t provide much in the way of clarification.

The problems encompassing this section of the game are the same problems that plague the rest of it, poor communication from the game to the player. There are plenty of complex systems in the game that could have been explained better, heck, one of them even involves tracking the lunar cycles of three in-game moons. Did I eventually get the hang of some of these systems? Yeah. Did I get the hang of them so late in the game that it hurt the experience? Also yeah. Were there other systems that completely eluded me? Absolutely.

At this point, you’ve probably noticed the common theme of communication problems, but there’s more to it. The other half of the equation is the poor UI, which intensifies the problem. Unintuitive and clunky are probably the best words to describe it. For example, instead of having a different tab in your inventory for each item type, everything is together in a long, semi-organized list of icons. You can jump to various sections, like weapons, armor, or clothing, but you can still easily spill over to the next section of items by scrolling a little too far. A “sort by stats” option for your gear would have been helpful. You really do need to learn how to learn how to play this game.

I ran into a few bugs while playing Caves of Lore, ranging from minorly inconvenient to incredibly frustrating. I was already grappling with information overload towards the start, so when my game bugged and my save got overwritten, thus losing an hour of progress, it put a bad taste in my mouth. There were times when I couldn’t heal my party at the campfire despite pressing the “rest until fully healed” button. Another time the game fully crashed. What was by far the most annoying of the bugs wasn’t even a bug at all, it was the response. Occasionally, I would get a pop-up apologizing for an apparent bug, and a request for a screenshot of the situation. Whenever this happens, the Unity debug console icon would pop up in the lower right-hand corner of my screen, partially obscuring the health and mana of one of my party members. In order to get rid of it whenever it came up, I had to restart the game. The real kicker is that I never noticed a bug happening when this message popped up.

On a brighter note, the music was consistently good and fit the fantasy theme. The combat track properly hyped up the battle with dramatic strings and drum beats. The song that played while wandering was cozy and felt like it would be right at home in a warm tavern. The audio was also consistently on point.

The graphics are generally good, but sometimes I couldn’t tell what was supposed to be interacted with. Some staircases looked like piles of rubble that fit right in with the cave settings. This actually happened to me before I met Merewen and Rycard. One second I was in a cave talking to Merewen, and then we were in a new section being introduced to Rycard. It wasn’t until doubling around much later in the game that I realized the two parts of the cave were connected and that what happened wasn’t a random time skip; I had accidentally clicked on the exit behind Merewen without even realizing it, and the other side blended in so well with the cave wall that I didn’t even perceive it.

As for the sprite work, enemy designs were absolutely sick. In one section, I was facing off against giant enemy spiders with what appeared to be coffins embedded into their backs. This tipped me off to the fact that they were counted as undead enemies, which meant my healer’s holy magic would be quite effective against them. This was a great visual cue, and I wish we saw more like this throughout the game. I also loved the way some enemies were animated. Goblins, for example, will scurry in on all fours at the start of combat encounters, showing their bestial nature.

In the end, my feelings on Caves of Lore are mixed. Even when I was frustrated with the game, I was always compelled to press on. For every problem I encountered, there was a stellar moment of discovery that made me appreciate that this game was made by a solo developer. I highly encourage anyone to try the game for themselves, as I got 25 hours out of one playthrough for a mere $10.

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