Cavelord is a scrolling action game that was written by Peter Finzel and released – in Germany only – by Ariolasoft in 1985. Thankfully, a fan hack has translated the game into English.
You control a man sat on a flying bird (similar to the one seen in Joust), and can shoot in eight directions. The aim is find three pieces of the King’s crown, collect gold, complete tasks for NPCs, and look for keys and switches that will open up the way forward.
Flying enemies spawn randomly and can damage you by either touching or shooting you. The landscape also has dangers that will hurt you, including volcanic eruptions and lightning strikes, so you need to avoid those wherever possible. A strength indicator, in numbers, on the bottom panel shows your health, and you only get one life, so you have to guard against damage as much as possible. You can occasionally find health pickups that replenish a proportion of your strength.
Touching an NPC will bring up a short text description at the bottom of the screen, which tells you what you need to do to appease that character. Take a key to a particular NPC, or find and return an egg to a talking dinosaur, and so on. Hanging vines slow down your flying bird and falling into water will sweep you downstream until you leave it.
Cavelord is a challenging game and can be extremely frustrating at times, but it is playable and somewhat addictive. Getting anywhere means having to remember where the danger lies and avoiding it, and also knowing how to deal with the flying enemies (because they have an annoying habit of finding the angles to get to you).
The game only has two levels and these are connected by large doors that you have to pay fifty gold to open. Getting all three pieces of the crown requires something of a superhuman effort, and – frankly – it’s not really worth the effort because when you do so the game just returns to the title screen. Which makes Cavelord a fun game to mess around with, but an annoying one to try to complete.
More: Cavelord on Wikipedia
More: Cavelord (German) on atarimania.com
More: Cavelord (English) on atarimania.com
