Caveboy Escape review: charming, cute and time-devouring

It’s been a tough week, and after playing Thief, a PC meltdown and various other problems keeping myself alive in China, I decided I needed some much deserved rest. So it was with great happiness that I agreed to play and review Caveboy Escape.

Caveboy Escape from Malaysia-based Appxplore—available on Android, iOS and Blackberry—is a tile matching puzzle game in which you must guide the ever-so-cute Caveboy through a maze before it collapses. You do this by walking along three of the same coloured tiles, and then moving onto another color. The trick is finding the right path to get you to the exit before the maze collapses. Caveboy Escape looked cute, it looked relaxing and most of all, it didn’t look too stressful!

Simple… in theory

Caveboy Escape is not an easy game, and I struggled with the first few levels. It took about twenty minutes for me to get the method down and another twenty to actually implement it. For a mobile game, this is a steep learning curve but the feeling of progression is certainly worth the effort. Pretty soon you will be racing through levels, spotting hidden paths, and guiding Caveboy toward his salvation.

One of the great things about Caveboy Escape is that you always know exactly what you are meant to be doing, and failure to do so is always your fault. Maybe you missed that all-important connection between tiles, or maybe you strayed too far down the wrong path and ran out of time, or maybe you just took a wrong turn. It’s your fault; the game might not be easy, but its puzzles are not inexplicable, and can be solved with a bit of brain work.

Just too much…

It’s a strange thing to complain about, but Caveboy Escape is just too damn big. Caveboy Escape has five stages, and each stage has 100 levels, each with several mazes. This means that by the end of the game, you will have played through over 1,000 different mazes. Trust me, that’s a lot. Now, content is a complicated thing, because although more of it is always good, it also becomes increasingly difficult for developers to balance content with progression, Caveboy Escape is an example of when this balance is not right.

The stages increase in difficulty by increasing levels in size,and later by adding keys that need to be collected before the level can be escaped. The developments are great, but there are too many levels in-between them. The end result of this is that you end up playing through more than half of the game with very little challenge; you’re just going through the motions of collecting enough stars to unlock the next stage.

There are in-app purchases (IAP) in the form of elixirs that freeze time and show you the quickest path to the end of a level, but while they were useful in the first few stages, after that I found them pretty irrelevant. My girlfriend did bug me into buying some for her romps around the later levels, so this was certainly a nice, simple use of IAP.

But still very addictive

I am a gamer with an addictive personality, so I am not the best lab-rat for this experiment. So I did what any good reviewer does and enlisted the help of their significant other.