Having sat for a weekend reading through those “catalogues” that come with the papers advertising PC software for Soduka and what appear to be carbon copy adventure games, I have often wondered who played those games. Well now I have a better idea, as Secrets of the Lost Cavern is just such a game.
It looks a feels just like those games that came out with the launch of the CD-ROM drive. In fact the only other game I have ever played similar to this is a Zork title and that came free with my first CD drive. Problem is, that was almost 10 years ago.
Secret of the Lost Cavern sees you taking on the role of Arok, a hunter gatherer who gets forced to hide out in a old cave after being attacked by some of the local wildlife (did I mention that this game is set in prehistoric times, full of cave men and the like?) It is inside this cave where the story fills you in, by way of flashbacks, to a younger you and a mystical quest you feel the need to go off and fulfil.
Everything about the game feels rather generic. I have not played any of the other games from The Adventure Company but can not help but feel they are possibly all the same but with different graphical front ends. It’s a harmless game, an old fashioned adventure and within minutes you can see why this sort of thing is advertised in the Sunday papers. This is a PC game for people who don’t really know what a PC is capable of.
This is an Adventure game of the old school variety – a loose story from which some puzzles hang. Most of the quests involve you having to collect various tools and the like to complete something simple, this then opens another quest along the same lines. This is no bad thing, but it’s just that I (and I assume many others) have come to expect a lot more from my PC games.
For the majority of us games like this will pass us by and we will be none the poorer for it – but it’s a harmless old-school experience and a perfect stocking filler for the PC gamer parent
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