Cygnus Entertainment confirms that Colossal Cave, a VR remake of the 1976 text-based Colossal Cave Adventure, arrives next month on Meta Quest 2.

First revealed in March, Colossal Cave is a first-person, single-player, 3D-action-adventure based on one of gaming’s oldest stories. Developed by Sierra On-Line founders Ken and Roberta Williams through a new studio, Cygnus, Colossal Cave contains just under 150 locations, and it’s keeping gameplay closely aligned with the original. You can find the full outline and the release date trailer below: 

Traverse winding caves, dripping with stalactites, with only a trusty lantern for illumination. Take in awe-inspiring scenes full of friendly and hostile woodland dwellers, treading with caution to not wake a slumbering dragon. Swiftly resolve challenging puzzles and discover exciting easter eggs throughout the caverns before embarking on the treacherous journey back to the mortal realm. 

We came away with positive impressions during our Colossal Cave preview at PAX West. Believing its still “an absorbing adventure in its own right,” we thought this old-school adventure had been faithfully reproduced:

There’s also a hearty dose of old-fashioned adventure game logic at work. Colossal Cave 3D is still willing to kill you if you don’t play your cards right and some of its solutions already felt wildly random in 1979, let alone now. By the same token, though, this feels like an expedition into a broad swath of video game history, enabled and expanded upon by the shift into VR. Every weird puzzle, running joke or odd solution left a mark on the medium.

Colossal Cave arrives on Meta Quest 2 on January 19, 2023. Even though the flatscreen edition is coming to PS4, PS5, Steam and all major consoles, no announcements have been made for PC VR or PSVR. When asked about PSVR 2 support in the reveal trailer’s comments, the team wouldn’t discuss unannounced platforms but admitted “you can bet it is a device we are quite interested in. Stay tuned.”

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