The Cave is the latest game from legendary game designer Ron Gilbert, creator of games like Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island, after joining Tim Schafer’s team at Double Fine Studios. It attempts to merge old-school point-and-click adventure game design to a 2D platformer’s structure, along with a humorous and dark narrative about seven adventurers exploring a sentient, talking cave.

While the writing is outstanding, as is standard for Double Fine and Ron Gilbert in particular, the platforming and mechanics aren’t fluid or polished enough to make up for the gaming being pretty boring in general.

While there are seven playable characters, you can only bring three down into The Cave for each playthrough, and to see all the available content in the game (including cave paintings delineating each character’s back story or levels that are designed for specific characters), you’ll need to play through the game a total of three times.

If the game were entirely specialized based on your choice of characters rather than having small segments be specific, where most of the game is standardized, this forced replay value would be acceptable. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Replays are largely the same but with different dialogue and the occasional new level.

Along with this, your very first playthrough will START with heavy backtracking. Within half an hour I was stuck on one of the puzzles and had to run around the available environment numerous times to figure out what I actually needed to do. Old-school adventure games often had some level of backtracking in order to find items in the environment, but getting around was never a hassle and you always had a reasonably sized vantage of the area around your character.

Contrast this to The Cave, where your view of your surroundings is constantly limited and simple movement is clunky and frustrating and solving puzzles mentally takes a back seat to wasting your time with menial junk. The platforming is clearly not the focus of the game, but it’s integral to movement, of which there is A LOT, and since it’s not polished or fun, the rest of the game suffers because players must suffer through it.

Puzzle mechanics such as picking up or using items or objects in your surroundings are demonstrated very clearly early on, but the adventurers also have character-specific special abilities, such as the time traveler’s ability to teleport forward, or the knight’s protective aura. The game never really teaches you how to properly use these abilities, however, and as a result, the first time you enter a character-specific level, it’s highly likely that you won’t understand the ways the developers expect you to use abilities.

All of this is made even more infuriating by the great visual design and the excellent writing. The eponymous Cave is a snarky, silly character that mocks and taunts the adventurers, who are all in the Cave for very immoral, selfish reasons. They’re characterized very well, and listening to the Cave berate them is as entertaining as any classic Ron Gilbert game.

The Cave is a decent experience, but it’s very rarely a fun game. At least the Kickstarted Double Fine Adventure is still coming out this year.