The Cave by Neil Aitken
“A Journey of Self-Discovery”. That turns out to be a rather misleading subtitle; I think much more clarity is created by the walkthrough, which tells us the following:
I think it is hard to understand The Cave without this knowledge. It looks a lot like a simple fantasy adventure where you have to escape from a cave and defeat some enemies along the way. But then why create a cave with random connections, where you revisit the same locations over and over? Why have puzzles that are mostly trivial, easy to solve without even meaning to? And why have the game end rather abruptly, not because of some series of achievements, but because we have taken a certain number of otherwise causally inefficacious actions? It’s hardly a satisfying experience compared to what a much more traditional approach might have brought us.
In fact what is happening is that the game purposefully throws situations at us, sometimes repeatedly, giving us different routes to success; all with the aim of allowing us to define a character by choosing to use certain stats. If you cast spells a lot, you end up with a high Intelligence. I suspect that if you fight a lot, you’ll be increasing your Strength.
As a dungeon crawl or a story of self-disovery, The Cave is rather lacking, although there are some nice moments of surprise. (I especially enjoyed the moment when I crawled into a chest in order to feel safe and sound.) But how does is succeed as an alternative way to generate the basic character ability scores for your favourite roleplaying game?
Given the six scores you end up with, the assumption seems to be that the game we are talking about is Dungeons & Dragons. Now character creation in D&D is in some ways very complicated (when it comes to choosing the mechanical bells and whistles of your character), but very simple when it comes to choosing your ability scores. If you want your character to be half-way decent, there is little choice. A wizard simply must have high Intelligence. A fighter needs Strength and Constitution. D&D4 indeed goes so far as to indicate, with the character class, how you should distribute your points. So… what problem is The Cave trying to solve? You could go in, cast a lot of spells, and end up with scores that are good for a wizard; but then it seems you could as easily just have chosen scores that are good for a wizard. (And it’s not the case that the game is a good way of discovering that you would like to play a wizard. For that, it is far too far removed from the actual D&D experience.)
I can imagine a game like The Cave being actually quite interesting in a very different context. Take Ultima IV, where character creation takes the form of being presented with a series of ethical dilemmas. “You are honour-bound to serve a lord who tortures innocent people in his dungeon. Will you free the captives or honour your commitments?” That could be interesting. Traveler had a character creation system where you basically simulated an entire life-path. That could also work really well in a choice format. More in general, it seems to me that it makes a lot of sense to use interactive fiction as a way to create interesting, surprising, narratively meaningful characters for particular roleplaying games. (It depends on the game, of course! You can’t do this kind of thing for a game like My Life with Master, where the characters have to fit a detailed collaboratively created setting.) So I see some potential in the underlying idea, but I don’t really see The Cave itself as a particularly useful tool.