[contains minor spoilers]
... at least in theory. In reality, Caveblazers stumbles in a myriad of small ways, dragging even its best aspects down into the muck of mediocrity. It's not such a precipitous drop that I'd laugh at anyone claiming the game to be one of their favorites, but a few hours are all you need to understand why Caveblazers has failed to gain traction. To put it plainly: the game is willfully annoying in the worst ways possible.
First off, the main bosses are a masterclass in obnoxious design. There are a total of eight big baddies to topple (four of which you'll face on a full run) that vary drastically in strength and difficulty. And I do mean drastically; on the far ends of the spectrum you have Azguard and Chrono'boid, the former rarely managing to hit you more than once while the latter is unironically harder than all three phases of the final boss. And then you have bosses like Grubbington & Iron Face: unpredictable but easily bested goons, which are counterbalanced by Medusa & Deathrig: repetitive slogs that will punish the slightest miscalculations. The last two fiends—Felfang & Goliath—are messy, manic fights that you'll either coast through with ease, or be sent flying around the room like divorcee's stress ball.
Imbalanced bosses may be par for the course in gaming, but here's the kicker: these bosses can be encountered in any order, with nothing but their HP values changed. Hell, even their damage remains the same! This means you'll often face the game's hardest bosses right off the bat, all while you're probably still stuck with your impotent starter weapons, tiny health bar, and whatever two blessings Caveblazers has deigned to give you. Occasionally you might manage to pull through. but your rewards are also randomized, ranging anywhere from healing items, to much-needed blessings, to shit-tier bombs you'll never use even in an emergency. So there's always a chance you could strike it rich and get a piece of equipment that carries you to the end of the game... or—and what occurs more often—simply bleed out from a thousand little cuts, in spite of all your hard work.
And look, I get it—roguelites are all about the individuality of a run, and making do with the scraps you've been given. Of course an early jetpack in Spelunky or an S-tier chest in Enter the Gungeon can swing momentum wildly in your favor, but the difference here is that Caveblazers refuses to offer the player meaningful decisions. There aren't any shops here, nor stage branches, nor optional challenges beyond the secret arena in the first level. In this linear land you'll live and die by Caveblazer's RNG, subject to its capricious whims like a raft caught in a tempest. Even the gambling shrines have a massive loot table, dropping anything from a powerful new weapon to yet another shit-tier bomb—and those shrines aren't cheap!
There are two quasi-remedies to Caveblazer's RNG-dependance, but I find that neither is a reliable fix. The first is perhaps the coolest mechanic unique to the game: altars where you can combine items together. The hitch is that it has to be two of the same item, but the resulting super-item is almost always worth it, and you'll likely to stumble across a duplicate to use somewhere during your journey (it's usually another ring). The second is far more game-changing: a run-modifier that adds a shop to the end of every odd-numbered floor. But to unlock it, you'll have to delve pretty deep through the game and know exactly where to look for the relic. Not only that, but it also removes the free blessings offered to the player, a change that initially makes the game harder as you have to divest funds away from healing in order to now afford equipment and blessings. So it's not a step in the right direction as much as it's an equally-punishing sideways hobble.
Speaking of equipment, Caveblazers offers players both sword and bow to conquer its perilous depths with, but your survival depends largely on your use of the latter. Enemies in this game are quicker, stronger, and more ruthless than you could ever be, able to react instantaneously amidst the chaos of combat, all while you're still processing which one of you just took damage. This leaves you fundamentally outclassed—that is, until you take potshots at them a screen away, where they'll happily let themselves be used as target practice. As someone that tried his damnedest to make melee builds work (and they can, but you need both range upgrades and lifesteal), trust me when I claim it's far easier to find a decent bow and to lean on that for the rest of the game. Plus if you stumble across some arrow blessings like pierce, double damage, and ricochet, your enemies will be lucky if they ever share a screen with you again.
What really kills melee builds in this game however is the fact that half of the bosses prefer to hover outside of your attack range. Some may welcome a good thwacking (Felfang, Grubbington) but most are aerial threats that either spend no time on the ground (Deathrig, Goliath) or punish you when you decide to get up close and personal (Iron Face, Chrono'boid). The last boss in particular loves to be a floating, squirrely little cad, bombarding you from afar with homing explosives. Again, it's not to say melee builds are impossible (though they kind of are against the last boss), but rather that the path of least resistance winds down the obvious road of archery.
Even then, the road is still riddled with plenty of resistance, with most of it coming from a handful of enemies: Jumpers, Kullos, and Demon Orcs. The Jumper is Caveblazer's resident Creeper, able to fling its explosive body around at great distances whenever it wants. While they're the most nettlesome of the lot (expect to take plenty of explosions on the chin), the Kullos are the most dangerous, able to slip through your barrage of arrows and harass you 'til death do you part. Demon Orcs are out of depth monsters that make rare appearances but can be a stubborn adversary, relentlessly hunting you down and deflecting a majority of your attacks. Tiki Grubs and Cave Trolls also earn honorable mentions for being able to single-handedly end runs, but the evil trinity above earn their infamy for how early and often they appear. Unlike Spelunky, Caveblazers's traps, hazards, and foes don't really scale as you progress; Kullos are the most dangerous enemy at the start of the game, and they'll remain the most dangerous enemy by the end of it.
All of these systems add up to make Caveblazers a wildly imbalanced experience, where a dozen little roadblocks can equal your inevitable end. Causes for defeat are numerous: it could be a combination of enemies you're fighting, or an important blessing missing from your repertoire, or a lack of decent equipment before facing your first boss. And there are more major issues I haven't even covered: sometimes blessings are hidden behind walls you have to bomb when you have no bombs (and no, the shit-tier bombs don't destroy terrain). Sometimes you'll be saving up for a health shrine that won't appear for multiple floors in a row. And the potion system is atrocious, devoid of the typical means to identify what it does before quaffing it (ie identify scroll or vendor appraisal). You either have to toss it to a specific genus of monster and remember of color potion they drank, or throw your dice to the wind and hope its not a permanent debuff to an integral stat... something that'll happen far more often than it feels like it should.
The amateur game designer in me is stupefied over Caveblazers. I feel like its problems are glaringly obvious after you spend a short amount of time with it... but perhaps the twisted truth is that all these eccentricates are intentional. For all I know, Deadpan Games may see Caveblazers as a resounding success, evoking a heady blend of dungeon-delving randomness with precision-based combat. But it's a messy, unwieldy concoction, one that grows more bitter the further you delve. The dungeon's offerings are too random, its combat too frantic to feel graceful (or even controllable), and even your wins can feel as undeserved and capricious as your deaths do. Caveblazers makes a valiant attempt at being a well-built roguelite, but all it proves is how difficult it is to even reach the shadows of the genre's greatest.
