Cavern of Dreams

Genre: 3D Platformer

Players: 1

.

Review:

Cavern of Dreams is a family friendly 3D Platformer released in 2023 on PC and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2024. This game attempts to recreate the style and gameplay of classic Nintendo 64 3D Platformers (particularly Banjo-Kazooie), and puts players in the role of a tiny dragon named Finn hoping to collect the stolen eggs of his siblings.

As a throwback game, Cavern of Dreams naturally features a retro-styled presentation with low-poly 3D characters and environments, and players really wanting to bring back the old days can even opt to use a blur filter. However, blur filter or no, this game’s visuals do a marvelous job of copying the style of Banjo-Kazooie. This is all backed by a surprisingly subdued soundtrack that nevertheless takes clear inspiration from Grant Kirkhope’s work on Banjo-Kazooie, including little touches like having the music alter on the fly depending on where in a level you are.

For the gameplay, Cavern of Dreams does a surprisingly good job of replicating not only the gameplay but the level design of Banjo-Kazooie in particular. As in that classic game, Cavern of Dreams has a hub world that leads to the other main worlds in the game, but it’s less direct about that fact than Super Mario 64 and its paintings, and worlds can have alternate exits leading to different locations as well.

The worlds themselves don’t seem to have any particular rhyme or reason. After leaving the cave for the first time, you find yourself in a wooded lake area, which makes sense. But the next area appears to be a cavernous sewer that leads to an outer-space armada. I really appreciate the creativity that went into both the level design and world design here, but there’s definitely a lack of overall cohesion here.

While in these worlds, you’ll mainly be searching for eggs (this game’s version of Super Mario 64’s stars or Banjo-Kazooie’s jiggies), with a secondary focus on mushrooms. Eggs will gradually unlock Finn’s abilities allowing him to explore further, while mushrooms can be fed to the hatched dragons of the eggs you’ve acquired to create direct portals to the lands you’ve discovered rather than forcing you to wind through the at-times labyrinthine mazelike paths to get there.

To get eggs, you’ll generally either be doing some platforming and exploration, or you’ll be puzzle-solving – there is no combat in the game, no enemies to stomp on. The puzzles in this game are varied, and occasionally clever, though at times what you need to do isn’t clear. The Platforming is similarly fairly good, though the camera can be a bit irritating and your character’s low, floaty jumps don’t make this as viscerally enjoyable as some of the best games in this genre.

If I had to sum up my frustrations with this game, I think it would be an overall lack of polish and cohesive design. There are areas in the game where your character can get physically stuck, or where you’re capable of getting to but the game’s designers didn’t seem to anticipate that. There’s a move where you can jump higher if you jump immediately after landing from another jump, but it’s inconsistent in how it works. Game mechanics are introduced and maybe occasionally revisited, but the game doesn’t really center around any core mechanic. Just overall there seem to be a lot of ideas here and some generally good implementation, but no one overarching design driving it all.

All of this is to say that Cavern of Dreams never quite reaches the heights of the games like Banjo-Kazooie and Super Mario 64 that it aims to replicate, but this is probably the closest I’ve seen anyone come at this goal outside of Yooka-Laylee, which is fairly high praise given that Yooka-Laylee was created by former Banjo-Kazooie developers. As such, if you enjoy 3D Platformers and especially if you have a fondness for the Nintendo 64 era of the genre, Cavern of Dreams will be well worth trying out.

tl;dr – Cavern of Dreams is a family friendly 3D Platformer where players take the role of a tiny dragon trying to get back a bunch of stolen dragon eggs. The game design here is clearly aiming to replicate the look and feel of classic Nintendo 64 games like Banjo-Kazooie, and it largely succeeds, though the game does lack an overall sense of cohesion tying it all together. Still, this is well worth a look for fans of 3D Platformers, and particularly those with a fondness for N64 classics of the genre.

Grade: B-

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