Crystal Caves Remaster incoming

Just found out that one of my childhood favourites is getting a remaster and it looks like it's actually going to be decent:

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The best miner in the Galaxy is back! Revisit the 3 original episodes in spectacular HD and guide Mylo through a brand new episode featuring new enemies, break away platforms and new biomes! Ramp up the excitement and compete against your friends on the online leaderboards, collect all 32 achievements and because we’re old school developers, there’s a Secret Level that’s quite revealing! Need even more adventure, well no problem, we are including a new in-game level editor via Steam Workshop so you can create as many new adventures you want and share them with everyone!
 

*Help Mylo get that burger joint all over again by guiding him through the original 3 episodes in HD!

 

*All new achievements will have you competing for that top position of the online leaderboard!

 

*Unearth exciting adventures in the all new Crystal Caves Episode, with challenging puzzles, action oriented hazards and rewards, featuring sandworms, break away platforms and much more!

 

*Be the first to earn all the achievements including discovering the “Secret of the Volcano”!

 

*Challenge your friends to beat your own adventures using our built-in level editor from the Steam Workshop

 

*New Difficulty levels, Cloud Saves, New OST in the classic style and finally get that damn hard crystal!

Modernizing the visuals of a classic game in HD in the mind of a gamer isn’t enough. A true remastering of a classic game must mean preserving everything that made the original game challenging, fun and addictive, well we did this and more with Crystal Caves by incorporating a new vibrant color pallet to the not only the gameplay action but the storyboard elements as well.

 

Here's hoping more classic Apogee titles will receive the same treatment in the future.

I've been playing this game (the DOS one) a ton lately, because I wanted to do a no-damage playthrough of the entire game, and right after conquering the third episode this shows up. Totally unexpected and mindblowing.

Some people are saying that the game should've have adlib style music. I kinda agree but the game looks great anyway. This is major game of my childhood too so I can't wait to play it.

Yes, this is the kind of remaster I want. The good old apogee stuff

Looks amazing. This is exactly what the world needs right now.

wow I had almost forgotten about this game.  This is awesome.

Crystal Caves HD now also has a page on GOG.

I'm quite looking forward to this.

I want more of that! Monster Bash anyone?

Oh hell yeah. Monster Bash! Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure! Everything, basically. This is a really nice "remake" because it stays true to the original while improving on it. Thank god they didn't go the vector graphics route, which more often than not looks like a flash game.

edit:

I've recently been playing Crystal Caves with my son, among other classics. We've made a ton of Jetpack levels together. I have a budding game designer on my hands, I think. I've been doing everything I can to encourage his creativity with level design in just about any game that supports modification, so the addition of a level editor is exciting news.

Crystal Caves HD was released today, on both Steam and GOG.

I picked up the game from GOG. I understood from reviews that the "normal" difficulty is actually quite challenging for people unfamiliar with the game, so I started on easy. I tend to die a couple of times in each level, but the levels are short so I can fairly quick learn from my mistakes and do more attempts. I finished five levels in an hour. There are plenty of achievements to earn and some of them are pretty creative. I like it so far.

It's pretty good. I played the DOS version (which is like the Normal difficulty) a lot so I went straight to Hard mode. It's pretty much the same except for the fact ammo is very scarce. That one stage in Ep. 1 with tons of breakable blocks ate all my ammo so I had to restart. I had to play more pacifist and breaking the BONUS balls was out of question. There's something about the hitboxes too; the seem smaller now, which makes some kills that used to be easy harder now. Maybe the reason is something else and not the hitboxes.

The level editor looks pretty neat. Overall the game it's pretty much what I expected. Having a good time with it right now.

15 hours ago, unerxai said:

There's something about the hitboxes too; the seem smaller now, which makes some kills that used to be easy harder now. Maybe the reason is something else and not the hitboxes.

I distinctly remember the hotboxes being ridiculous. I'm pretty sure everything takes up a full tile of space, so you can easily shoot things or get killed when visually there's no contact at all. Also I vaguely remember that despite appearing to move smoothly, things would actually have a discrete tile location. As in, I don't think the collisions take into account pixel position. I'm not 100% on the last part but either way, you're right about the hitboxes being very "sensitive" whether it's in your favor or not

Did anyone here play Secret Agent? I played a lot of it growing up and didn't hear about Crystal Caves until much later. The two are very similar.

37 minutes ago, GuyMcBrofist said:

Did anyone here play Secret Agent? I played a lot of it growing up and didn't hear about Crystal Caves until much later. The two are very similar.

I played it a bunch years ago. That's one that I haven't broken out in a long time.

I've beaten all four episodes of Crystal Caves HD now. There were some levels in the 2nd and 3rd episode that took me a lot of retries, even on easy. It was never unfair, though. The new 4th episode is of good quality and brings some fresh ideas to the game. Overall I enjoyed playing through this game.

What I've also noticed is that the game gets frequent updates. Linux support was added. There was a Halloween theme in October and currently the game has received a Christmas theme with snow and presents. It's also worth mentioning that there are currently over 300 user made levels in the Steam Workshop.