This neat little take on roguelikes is focused on bite-sized romps through missions. You can choose between four types: kill a certain amount of monsters, collect gold pickups, find mystical orbs, or rescue fairies that are prisoner. You chose one, are given a round of items, and are pushed out into a random dungeon. Each time you complete one, the level goes up and that task gets bigger/harder.

One important thing of note is that items are extremely important, and you need to decide very carefully when to use each one. For example: because there’s not much time in the dungeon for you to get strong enough, you want to save your flames for extremely powerful roadblocks as opposed to a wimpy spider.

Cave Noire’s a really neat idea for “on the go” dungeon crawling, especially if you want to actually finish your run on your lunch break as opposed to quicksaving.

Cave Noire is a bit difficult to pidgeonhole into any particular genre classification. It’s most similar to roguelikes; dungeons are somewhat randomized, there’s a heavy emphasis on player improvement and strategy instead of just grinding experience, and it’s very easy to die. It’s also sort of a puzzle game, as you don’t gain levels in the traditional sense at all and it’s to your great advantage most times to learn how to avoid enemies instead of trying to plow your way through them. There’s also no guessing game to play with items; everything you pick up is immediately “identified” and comes from a very small list of tools.

There are several types of objectives with ten levels of increasing difficulty each, for a total of 40 variations to explore. And some of those later ones get very, very difficult!

• Cave Noire (Japan).gb - NOINTRO
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