Cave Story +
Worth the wait
Cave Story is one of those games I’d always had intentions to get back to. When it turned up Humble Indie Bundle 4 in 2011, one friend reported that it was good, but I quickly abandoned it after dying a few too many times in the very beginning. A year or two later a different friend later reported that it was meant to be one of the best games ever, and though this was communicated (if I recall correctly) as hearsay rather than personal opinion, and with undefined criteria as to why, at the time it seemed plausible enough at that I gave it a couple of hours before again sliding into the sort of temporary pause that accidentally becomes indefinite abandonment. Thereafter it kept turning up in lists of the best metroidvanias, lists I would read because I thought I identified as a fan of metroidvanias, but I could never reconcile such a pronouncement on this game with my brief, not-all-that memorable experience of it.
Six years on and I was looking forward to making a proper go of Cave Story this week, but then (of course) it happened to turn up on another week of deadlines and travel. Stressing about a presentation and strapped for time, I thought the inevitable result of this would be yet another deferral, another proclamation that yes, I will play this one day, just not today, sorry.
What happened instead was an almost fevered couple of days last week in which I ended up cramming slivers of the actual work I was meant to be doing around increasingly emotionally-fraught bouts of playing Cave Story, as the game slowly and then all at once took over my psyche in some perfect storm of my unfortunate underlying tendencies to seek procrastination from tasks that I find difficult even as deadlines loom, combining with the almost materially emergent realisation that Cave Story is, it turns out, actually, truly, one of the “best” games ever, to the extent that saying this even feels like a true thing and not just the hyperbolic reporting of emotion/opinion as fact. Holy shit, my friends.
