Adventure Gamers - Forums

marcd2011 - 24 January 2013 07:52 AM

Interplay - 23 January 2013 09:11 PM

Is it just me or is the frame rate terrible?

check what resolution it’s running in. For some reason on my pc it defaulted to 1920x1080@23hz which meant framerate was limited to 23 fps! It’s silky smooth at 60hz

Have played through a few levels and i do like the atmosphere, the humour and the puzzles, but god damn the backtracking is VERY annoying! Having to seperately control each character and walk them to the same place over and over, i don’t know if i’ll have the patience to play through the game a 2nd time..

The framerate is capped at 30. They will remove it at a later date.

I’ve been playing with the time traveller, the twins and the scientist, and it’s been a lot of fun. Moving around hasn’t been a problem, except climbing up ladders which is soooo slow (you can press space to climb down faster, but going up takes forever). Except for the whole miner level (which has tons of backtracking and obnoxious puzzles) and one weird puzzle in the time traveller level which requires you to do something unintuitive with the interface, it’s been a blast. And playing with horrible people instead of the usual adventure game boy scout (who somehow still spends most of his time stealing stuff and ruining people’s day) is always nice.

I think I’m very close to the end (I’ve got all the paintings for my characters), and I’ll probably give it a little time before moving on to another playthrough—although I’m not too worried about replayability, because the character-specific sections seem to make up the biggest part of the game. Next will probably be the knight, the monk and the twins again (because they’re just too cute/creepy; also extremely useful to reduce backtracking).

Dag - 24 January 2013 11:23 AM

As if that wan’t enough, the default resolution for the game is one that my monitor doesn’t support, so I just get a black screen on startup, and it’s not obvious (to me) how to change the resolution from outside of the game.

Too many games have this kind of problem…
Edit c:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Doublefine\TheCave\screen.dat with a good text editor (e.g. NP++).

Started with the twins (Anyone didn’t choose the twins ? ), the monk and the time traveller, I like so far but I’m still very early in the game (miner puzzles).

xxax - 24 January 2013 10:35 AM

marcd2011 - 24 January 2013 07:52 AM

Interplay - 23 January 2013 09:11 PM

Is it just me or is the frame rate terrible?

check what resolution it’s running in. For some reason on my pc it defaulted to 1920x1080@23hz which meant framerate was limited to 23 fps! It’s silky smooth at 60hz

Have played through a few levels and i do like the atmosphere, the humour and the puzzles, but god damn the backtracking is VERY annoying! Having to seperately control each character and walk them to the same place over and over, i don’t know if i’ll have the patience to play through the game a 2nd time..

The framerate is capped at 30. They will remove it at a later date.

I had read about the capped frame rate on Steam forums.  Actually, though, my initial frame rate was terrible (and I had already adjusted the settings to the proper refresh rate).  I didn’t have Fraps on at the time, so I don’t know the actual number but I’m guessing it was around 15 (almost unplayable).  And my computer/GPU is way overpowered for this game, so that’s not it.  Interestingly, later on I reloaded the game and then turned off vertical sync.  Fraps then showed a rock solid silky smooth 60 fps (so I’m not sure if the 30 fps cap is actually true).  Also, interestingly, the game would sometimes run at a rock solid 30 fps randomly and then would go back to 60 fps at other times.  So far, the release is seeming very, very buggy.  Almost makes me wish I like Dag had opted for the PSN release.  However, when it was running at 60 fps 1920x1080, I thought the graphics looked great and obviously much better than what the PS3 will produce.

I started the game with the twins, the hillbilly, and the knight.  I played about an hour and then saved and quit.  Unfortunately, when I started the game up again, my game had apparently not saved (there are reports on Steam about game crashing when saving).  Since then, I restarted with the time traveler, the adventurer, and the scientist (those twins will have to wait).  On my second playthrough, the framerate issue was fixed and I have been really enjoying the game.  The ladders, etc., are annoying.  I would personally categorize this game as a puzzle platformer, a la Lost Vikings, but I’m not big on labels.  I think the game will appeal to adventure game fans, though those that hate platforming might want to try a demo.

Kurufinwe - 24 January 2013 10:47 AM

I’ve been playing with the time traveller, the twins and the scientist, and it’s been a lot of fun.

Same team as me!

Moving around hasn’t been a problem, except climbing up ladders which is soooo slow (you can press space to climb down faster, but going up takes forever).

Anyone know if there’s an equivalent for this on the PS3? I’ve actually been jumping off ladders intentionally to speed it up—sometimes you grab on again lower down and sometimes you die and respawn, but even that can be faster than climbing down the ladder… (as long as you respawn at the bottom!)

Err, or maybe “pressing space” is the same thing I’m doing - is the space the jump button?

one weird puzzle in the time traveller level which requires you to do something unintuitive with the interface,

This had me hung up for the longest time. I actually thought it was a glitch. Glad to hear I’m not the only one.

thejobloshow - 24 January 2013 02:34 AM

(Of course there might be a character who is invulnerable to fall damage so in that case disregard my whinge.)

There is. The knight can slow-fall long distances and survive. (Well, I haven’t tried him yet but Ron showed me that when I previewed the game last spring, so I’m assuming it’s still true.)

Interplay - 24 January 2013 12:59 PM

I think the game will appeal to adventure game fans, though those that hate platforming might want to try a demo.

I love platforming and would never go as far to say that The Cave falls anywhere near that genre of gaming.

Platforming games are designed to engage the player with cleverly mapped out levels, and mechanics that make the sheer act of running and jumping thrilling, challenging and unique.

This however is elongated, repetitive, tedious running and jumping, with no challenge, joy, inventiveness or reward, in between adventure game puzzles.

And the biggest annoyance (probably the point that has stopped me playing) is having to go through this terribly implemented, tedious running and jumping 3 separate times for each major puzzle!

fov - 24 January 2013 01:12 PM

Anyone know if there’s an equivalent for this on the PS3? I’ve actually been jumping off ladders intentionally to speed it up—sometimes you grab on again lower down and sometimes you die and respawn, but even that can be faster than climbing down the ladder… (as long as you respawn at the bottom!)

Err, or maybe “pressing space” is the same thing I’m doing - is the space the jump button?

Yes, it’s the jump button. If you hit it without a direction, the character just slides down the ladder and stops right before hitting the ground. Shaves off at least 2 hours of game time out of any playthrough.

I started with the monk, the twins and the scientist. So far, tedious movement and great puzzles. At the beginning I was really annoyed by the physics of the game (contrary to Limbo where the character was controlled really nice and smooth). But after the first hour or two I stopped caring and focused on the puzzles. Here I have no complaints. All of them are logical and I ran into several hard ones, which is nice. I love the level design of all characters’ personal levels. Love the humor!! Haven’t played a game with a quality sense of humor in a long long time.
So my call is: not a platformer definitely. Maybe not an adventure either, but strongly leaning on the latter. My only serious complaint is that if Ron thought it’d be cooler to move your characters like that, he should have done it better. The movement must be a joy to the player, not a brain killer. Besides that, great game. I’m really enjoying it and would replay it again in again. Three different characters means almost completely different replay. And even with my first crew I saw multiple solutions here and there. And items I have never used, which means that I may have missed something.

This sort of backtracking is the same sort of tedious travel in King’s Quest games, where you walked through eeeeevery old screen to get from A to B. Enjoyable the first time, but the repeated forth and back is just argahrasjkfhsagkl.

I wished the character’s spoke too. He’s so good at writing funny dialogue, it’s a shame it’s limited to the cave and the occasional supporting character.

Would have been nice for the player to have had a command/option to get the other character’s to follow you or stay where they are.

So personally I found Stacking a considerably more satisfying modern take of the adventure game, but it’s nice to see Gilbert can still make funny games for adventure gamers to enjoy. 

( Sadly I really, really couldn’t get very far through Deathspank!)

I don’t think I have seen this mentioned yet (sorry if I skipped over it) but, is this keyboard control?  I can’t handle keyboard at all. If that is the case, I will certainly skip over this game.