The Very Big Cave Adventure

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The Very Big Cave Adventure Is an Interactive Fiction game written by Ian Ellery and St Bride's School, and published in the UK by CRL Group PLC in 1986. It is an Affectionate Parody of Colossal Cave Adventure, with punning humour turned Up to Eleven.

The Very Big Cave Adventure was designed using the text adventure builder Quill, with settings tweaked to make it less obviously Quilled than some of the games published in that era. It was released on the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64.

The player is ostensibly guided by a prefect named Trixie Trinian, who also takes the role of narrator. The game begins in a forest but quickly descends into a maze of twisty passages and caves. The object of the game is to become as rich as possible, by obtaining and then selling treasures.

Tropes used in The Very Big Cave Adventure include:

• Adventure Narrator Syndrome: Averted by having Trixie do all the exposition.
• Bittersweet Ending: A good player can make £250,000, but also finds out that Trixie was part of a sting operation, leading the winner to get arrested for stealing all the treasure.
• Exposition Fairy: Trixie.
• Hollywood Homely: The player is described as "pretty ordinary" and "a bit weedy".
• Implausible Deniability: The first time you tell the rampaging bull you're not there, it believes you. Because it works in a gully, making it a gully-bull.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: The spring is housed in a "wellie-house", which sounds like a nickname for, well, a well-house - but it turns out to contain a pair of wellies.
  • If you examine the spring it will bounce you out of the room.
  • Beside the stream is a small fence. He'll buy treasures from you and ask no questions.
• Informed Attractiveness: If asked to describe herself, Trixie claims to be "extraordinarily attractive".
• Japanese Ranguage: The Space Invaders subgame includes such phrases as "Your ship is destloyed!"
• Kissing Discretion Shot: Trying to kiss Trixie gets one of these. It could even be interpreted as Post-Kiss Catatonia, but see Kiss Kiss Slap below.
• Kiss Kiss Slap: Attempting to kiss Trixie results in a black mark for disrespecting a prefect. Whether she's genuinely offended is less clear.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: "That Man", a masked crime-fighter with a fancy car and a cave just outside Gotham; "The Jester", a clown-like villain chased by That Man.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In the Space Invaders mini game, Trixie refers to the player as "a large sprite", suggesting she sees him/her as a character in the arcade game. Whether she sees the player as a sprite the rest of the time is unclear.
  • Also played with a couple of times, when younger Saint Bride's students interfere with the game - implying that, in-universe, the "adventure" is more of a tourist side-show.
• The Many Deaths of You:

I say, where are you? And what's that pair of smoking boots doing here? Oh well. Better look for a new adventurer. That one was a bit weedy anyway. —Trixie

• Meaningful Name: Trixie can be a little... tricksy.
• Mini Game: One of the rooms can only be escaped by playing a (text-only) game of Space Invaders.
• Optional Sexual Encounter: At the "dirty crack", after a stern lecture from Trixie, the player is given the option of paying a treasure in order to look in a certain room. The room's picture and description consist of a blank screen and the single word "CENSORED". Allegedly.
• Scenery Porn: Some of the locations have very detailed descriptions of sumptuous scenery.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Some of the room descriptions amble into this territory.
• Schmuck Bait: see Optional Sexual Encounter, above.
• Shout-Out: A "sharpened ZX81" gets thrown at the player.
  • There's a bottle described as "Green. Originally one of a set of ten."
  • When the player gets temporarily stuck in the wellie-house, Trixie comments "A similar thing once happened to three old ladies of my acquaintance."
  • There's a Space Invaders sub-game,
  • a Gotham City-themed section,
  • and an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland tribute.
• Soap Punishment: If the player swears, (s)he is instantly teleported to the "swear box", which contains a wash-basin, a bar of soap and no visible exit.
• Take That: Played with.
  • The "rude word" on the wall of the Debris Room varies between platforms:
    • In the ZX Spectrum version, it is "COMMODORE", in the Commodore 64 version, it's "SPECTRUM". The Spectrum and C64 were major rivals in the '80s UK.
    • In the CPC version, it's "Sugar". This probably refers to Amstrad's founder, (now Sir) Alan Sugar. "Sugar" is/was also a common substitute swear word in UK schools.
  • In the modern art exhibition, the initial description comments "you are astounded to see that only three people are present". If you examine the pictures, you switch to being astounded that so many people have come to look at them.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The Space Invaders subgame. Extra-annoying to some players as it has to be beaten to continue with the main game, and typing "left", "right" and "fire" repeatedly (but not too repeatedly. Typing the same command twice in a row gets you killed.) just ain't the same.
• A Worldwide Punomenon: It seems as if the authors included every pun (and other reasonably clean joke) an entire class full of schoolkids could think of.
  • There's a can marked "Cheers" that contains canned cheering.
  • And a "stuffed dinosaur" that turns out to be an ageing, heavy hippy.
• You Can't Get Ye Flask: The text parser is no worse than in a lot of similar games at the time, but its limitations are sometimes lampshaded in-game.
  • Use of words like "take" and "put" are met with a helpful "Try 'get' or 'drop'". This seems less helpful if you're carrying a bomb, mind you.
  • Impossible or un-parsable commands are responded to with either "You jolly well can't, so there" (Trixie is a prefect, after all) or, in some versions, "Sorry, this thick computer doesn't understand that."