Cave Story

Cave Story is a 2004 Metroidvania game developed by Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya. It was released on December 20, 2004 for Microsoft Windows. The game revolves around Quote, a robot who wakes up suffering from amnesia and explores in diverse cavernous areas in order to uncover his backstory and escape from the cave. The character gains access to new areas as he powers up his weapons by collecting triangular experience crystals and solves various platforming puzzles. Quote speaks to non-player characters scattered around the game world in order to learn more about the world and its inhabitants. Cave Story features 2D platform mechanics and is reminiscent of the games Amaya played in his youth, such as Metroid and Castlevania. After its initial self-published release, the game slowly gained popularity on the Internet. It received widespread critical acclaim for many polished aspects of its design, such as its compelling characters, setting, story, and gameplay. Cave Story is considered by many as one of the most influential video games of all time. It became an influence on indie games and the video game industry. It demonstrated the ability of a single person to develop a video game compared to the large manpower of major video game studios. Independent video game developer Nicalis worked with Amaya to port the game to WiiWare and DSiWare in 2010. An enhanced version, Cave Story+, was released for Steam in November 2011, and the original game was released for the Nintendo 3DS in October 2012 with added content. A 3D remake of the game, titled Cave Story 3D, was developed by Nicalis and published by NIS America for the Nintendo 3DS in November 2011. A port of Cave Story+ for the Nintendo Switch was released in June 2017, with many visual enhancements. In 2026, the Steam version of the game was updated to more closely resemble the Switch version.