It's new to me: Cave Noire

A rogue-like for the Game Boy that managed to do both its platform and its genre justice.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Cave Noire is a roguelike, but that’s something we know now. “Roguelike” wasn’t a thing yet back in 1991 when the game released, in the same way “Metroidvania” didn’t exist as a term until the time at which both Metroid and Castlevania games were Like That, but we can still retroactively notice elements of this kind of pathfinder game in titles that released before we had a name for them. (You know, like the Metroids that preceded the naming convention.) Now, you don’t need to have played 1980’s computer game, Rogue, to understand what a “roguelike” or “roguelite” is. There are a billion of the things on the market now, and the number of genres they’ve crossed over with is growing, too. Slay the Spire uses deck-building, Dicey Dungeons, of course, uses dice, and Cursed to Golf uses… golf. See? Variety!

Cave Noire is much more basic than those titles in terms of genre, since it’s now over 30 years old and released on the Game Boy just over a decade after Rogue hit computers. And yet, it had its own complexities and takes on the still-young genre without a name, and it’s a shame that it’s not available anywhere, as it’s basically a perfect portable roguelike that you can sit with for long stretches, or just pick up and play when you’ve got a few minutes to attempt a dungeon.

Cave Noire, like Rogue (and so many other roguelikes), has random dungeons. They might feel and look similar, but there will be differences when you reenter them. You’ll lose your gear when you die, and your items are randomized, as are enemy and treasure placements. One of the things that makes Cave Noire stick out from other roguelikes, both of the time and in the years since, is that the dungeons are short, and much more mission-based rather than the kind of setup where you go deeper and deeper for a long time, and have to determine when it’s time to turn around and go home and then come back for more, as you would in something like Etrian Odyssey or Dungeon Encounters. No, in Cave Noire, you go in, you accomplish your goal, and you’re teleported out. This might sound like it’s easy compared to lengthy, inherently brutal randomized dungeon crawls, but there’s a balance at play here: your inventory is very limited, you don’t gain experience that makes you stronger, and you are entirely at the whim of randomized treasures and drops (which themselves are rare) for upgrading your stats and equipment or finding yourself with an extra heal or offensive spell to cast.

Image credit: MobyGames

So, things are simple enough when you start, when your mission is to slay three monsters. You can find three monsters to defeat even with a measly 10 hit points and attack rating of 4 no problem, especially since you know you can heal after the first or second one and be good to go the rest of the way. The next mission requires you kill more monsters, though, and the next one even more than that, and you don’t receive more items to do so. You really have to save that one healing potion you received before entering the dungeon, or hold on to that fire scroll for an enemy that will definitely kill you in one hit should it get a chance to do so, because you now have to go deeper and deeper into the dungeon to find the correct number of enemies to kill before you’re able to exit. Oh, and the lights go out as you go deeper, and you just get the one lamp item to reverse that, which means you even need to consider when it’s the proper time to absolutely know what’s around you. Otherwise, that pair of eyes you see in the darkness could be just about anything, and your next step could be straight into life-ending lava, too.

Which is a longish way of saying that Cave Noire’s mission-by-mission breakdown might make things seem simple, but the complexity and intensity of the experience grows. This might be the best way to explain just how significant the change in difficulty goes as you proceed. There are four dungeon and quest types, each with their own arrangements of the standard dungeon theme, environment, and mission to complete. The first has you defeating X number of monsters per dungeon dive, another has you collecting gold, a third collecting a set number of orbs, and the fourth, freeing faeries from cages, which is a combination of finding the keys to open the cages, and also finding said cages. You’ve completed a quest type when you’ve finished level 6, but they actually go to 10 — getting to 6 is a significant challenge on its own, never mind completing it and then optionally continuing onward beyond that.

I mentioned that you have to defeat three monsters in the first level of the first quest: for level 5, you have to defeat 10. You might have picked up one or two extra hit points — which you do retain from level to level within a given quest — between then, but your other stats are all exactly the same on level 5 (or 6, or 8, or whatever) as they were on level 1. You’re in a position where you take quite a bit of damage, could be poisoned and take even more, and have just the one healing potion or antidote unless you find more in the dungeon, and yet, you now have to defeat over three times as many creatures as you did when you first started the quest, all while stretching your limited inventory thin. You can carry up to eight items, but you start with just four, and things like attack and defense upgrades actually take up inventory space, meaning a stronger sword is one less opportunity for an extra antidote or heal or fire spell.

It gets tough, is what I’m getting at, but the relative shortness of the quest levels means it’s easy to just pick yourself back up and try again without having felt like you wasted time. And you can also bounce from quest to quest, as you’re not forced to complete all of quest one before moving on to quest two and so on. If you find yourself stuck on a specific kind of quest, try another for a bit, and see if you can make some progress there.

You might not gain in-game experience by playing the quests again and again, but you certainly gain actual experience in how to approach and handle them in the future. And doing so also gives you more opportunities to see what kinds of items exist in Cave Noire. You have the basic kind of stuff that’s already been mentioned, but there is a spell that places a boulder in the way of an enemy that’s chasing you, or one to create a flight of stairs where you’re standing so you can just go down to the next floor and escape whatever horror is on your current one.

Since you don’t gain experience and fighting will mostly hasten your death, unless you’re in the quest where the specific goal is to defeat monsters, you probably shouldn’t do it. Sometimes combat is unavoidable, but oftentimes, with a little thinking on your feet and planning and proper item deployment, you can avoid getting tangled up with monsters. It doesn’t make the game pointless or overly easy: Cave Noire has been designed with avoiding combat in mind, and because of this, the systems are tailored toward you achieving that goal as much as you can. There’s a turn order in place in Cave Noire, with your character moving one space in the dungeon, and then the enemies move their space. You get priority in an attack, but if you decide to do something like open up a treasure chest next to you first while an enemy is already adjacent, they’ll attack you first, since your opting not to engage does not convince them to similarly hold off. You can use this kind of priority system to your advantage however, making sure you are moving away from where enemies will be after their own movements, in order to avoid getting caught up in fights with them.

It doesn’t work for every foe, or else things really would be too easy: there are enemies who will chase you around, and you do not want that to happen, because those monsters also tend to hit hard. Others move in a set path, though, so if you kind of putter around back-and-forth for a bit or pass on your turn with the B button, and can pick up on how they’re moving around a given room, you can avoid coming into contact with them. Be warned, though, that some monsters just kind of sit around for a bit, and after however many turns, they decide it’s time to hunt. So you might think you’re safe from that skeleton, until it turns out that it was just giving you a head start before it tries to cave your skull in. And in some cases, you want to be the one hunting monsters, even in situations where you’re avoiding enemies: fireball enemies, when defeated, can light up a room, either saving you from using a lamp to light it up, or making up for the fact you already used that lamp.

Monsters aren’t the only thing to avoid. There are pieces of floor that will break away if you stand on them for too long — you’ll get a little warning exclamation when a tile is going to break on the next turn, but if you don’t move from that space, it’ll break with you on it, and send you to the floor below. Which hurts nearly as much as any strong monster’s attack, by the way. Lava is an instant kill, so don’t step in that, and while some spaces let you cross gaps in the floor, not all the spaces surrounding that one do, even if they look similar on a surface level. Along the same lines, there are hidden paths in some walls, which you’ll find by walking into them after seeing a question mark text bubble appear. Two such bubbles appear in walls that are next to each other, but only one opens up, so you better hope you guessed right if a monster is on your tail.

The soundtrack is short, as this 15-minute video of the entire thing implies, but the music within is excellent. No surprise there, given that Cave Noire is a Konami title that released at a time when that basically guaranteed some bangers, but all the more impressive since much of the dungeon music is simply arrangements of the same theme. It works, though, and never feels like it’s grating, which is a credit to the work of the sound team as well as Cave Noire’s gameplay, which again, is short-burst in the first place.

There is an unofficial English translation of Cave Noire, created by Aeon Genesis, which helps make up for the fact it never released in an official capacity outside of Japan, but even if you were to skip out on patching a ROM with said translation (or finding it already patched somewhere out there), you’d be fine. The game’s design is very much based around icons, so, it’s pretty clear what’s a health potion since there’s a heart on it, and that a sword has something to do with your attack, a shield your defense, and so on. That being said, the translation does help to clear up what some of the less obvious items are called or for, and you’ll have a better sense of, well, everything that’s happening when it’s in a language you can read.

In addition, the manual for the game has been translated, as well, and can be found in a PDF. It gives background on the game’s story — which you simply don’t get into in the actual game, a not uncommon thing for either the genre or the time period or the storage-short platform it was on — in addition to the usual stuff like controls and explanations for the game’s various systems. You can figure a lot of this out on your own simply by playing, but it’s also possible that you’d miss something that Cave Noire is capable of doing if you can’t see the manual. The detail within is pretty good, as you can see in this pair of Dungeon Navigation pages:

Just a real nifty roguelike from a time before that was even a word, perfectly designed for its platform thanks to its pick-up-and-play nature. The whole game is designed around the idea of playing in short bursts, but if you’ve got the time, it’s also easy to get sucked into doing more, especially since the challenge so rapidly increases. While it’s not officially out there anywhere, it’s worth seeking out if you’re into roguelikes even a little bit, especially since a translation exists to help ease you in even further.

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