We all have our blind spots, and mine is 2D platforming—which made diving into Silksong particularly painful for me last month. In the games I was raised on, movement either happened in three dimensions or while watching from a birds-eye view. When I'm expected to run and jump sidescroll-ways, my brain responds like a cornered animal. My hands can't be trusted, and nobody is safe—least of all me.
Today, that's begun to change thanks to This Is No Cave.
It's a minimalist sci-fi platformer, where you play as a charming little yellow-suited astronaut attempting to escape their crash landing on an alien planet by using their boot thrusters and grappling hook to fling their tumbling body through a labyrinth of subterranean tunnels. (Those tunnels, I'm told, are not a cave.)
The secret to making 2D movement manageable for me, it turns out, is to take the buttons out of my hands. In This Is No Cave, movement is controlled with mouseclicks: Left click jumps and fires suit thrusters to launch yourself towards my cursor, while right click latches onto grapple points with my grappling hook.
That's it. The simplicity of controls, however, doesn't detract from the complexity of the platforming: progress requires prolonged sequences of precisely timed thruster boosts, grappling hook slingshots, and midair momentum reversals.
But since I'm not moving my character directly—they automatically sprint forward whenever they're on a flat surface—executing those maneuvers is much more manageable than it would be if I had a bunch of individual movement inputs to fumble over during a moment of high-speed panic.
That's not to say my parkour is flawless by any means. I'm still flinging my astronaut to splatter against a rock wall with unfortunate regularity. But the mouseclick movement means I'm able to manage more fluid platforming than I've generally been able to accomplish.
And if I eventually find that I can't keep up with its expectations, This Is No Cave luckily has a number of accessibility options, from adjusting thruster boost charges to adjusting the overall game speed. They're a welcome inclusion, even if you just want to appreciate its lovely layered pixel art at a more laidback pace.
Plus, it's pretty affordable. This Is No Cave is available on Steam now for $5 thanks to a 30% launch discount that ends at the end of the month.
