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Cave Explorer
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About the game
Cave Explorer opens with a short scene about a school day that takes an unexpected turn, and then drops you at the entrance of a tunnel system. The caves are spread over 16 screens of winding paths that you explore from above, one step at a time. Here and there you come across something: a short message, a hint, a discovery that changes the map, or the way into a puzzle room.
The puzzle rooms switch to a side view. You need to reach the exit door, and the only help is a handful of blocks. You can pick up the block in front of you, carry it, put it down and climb onto ledges one block high, so every room is a matter of building the right staircase in the right order. Finish them all and the caves have one more thing to show you, along with an ending.
Playing it here
Cave Explorer is a CHIP-8 program. CHIP-8 is a simple virtual machine from 1977, created for hobby computers like the COSMAC VIP, and people still write new games for it. This one targets plain CHIP-8. It runs here in the Octo emulator, with the speed and colours chosen for it in the archive.
Click Play, watch the intro and press any key to head into the caves. F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back, which is useful because the game itself does not save. A gamepad works too: the D-pad moves, A picks up or drops a block and B restarts a puzzle.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| W A S D or arrow keys | walk around the caves |
| A / D or left / right arrows (puzzles) | turn, walk and climb one-block ledges |
| E or Space (puzzles) | pick up the block in front of you, or put it down |
| Q (puzzles) | restart the puzzle |
| Any key | start; close a message |
| F2 / F4 | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
The first press turns you. In the puzzle rooms, pressing the other direction only turns your explorer around; press again to walk. Blocks are always picked up and put down on the side you are facing.
You need headroom. You can only lift a block if the space above your head is free, and you cannot climb while something blocks the way above. If you get stuck, Q starts the room over at no cost.
Read the notes. The short messages in the caves are hints, and one of them is nothing but a string of compass letters. Write it down: it reads a lot like directions.
Credits and licence
Cave Explorer was created by John Earnest, who also wrote Octo, the CHIP-8 development tool and emulator used to run it here (MIT licence). He placed the game in the public domain under CC0 1.0 through the Chip8 Community Archive. The licence text is linked from this page.