video: short ending
video: long ending
Cave is an original project designed and created by Peter Lu. Cave is an experiment to try and derive narrative meaning from all the minute details of the game medium itself. The two characters move and act differently to portray the two ends of this point. The girl moves slow and realistically while the boy conforms more to our expectations of a more generic platformer. The experience was designed to deceive the player into a comforting “oh this is just a puzzle platformer” mindset and suddenly extracting the player from this frame of mind. The climactic moment of the game raises the question “am I playing the game or is this game playing me”. Ultimately, the game tries to tell a metaphorical story of the coming of age and the moral questions surrounding this.
peterlu @ games . ucla . edu