Cage Girl Review (PC)

The concept of a hopeless character trapped in a bottomless dungeon crawler sounds like the perfect combination for a video game. I’m just confused as to where the likes of stockings and high heels come into the equation. But that, weirdly, is what Cage Girl is: a perverse puzzler disguised as a traditional labyrinthine-based IP. The thing is, I’m not entirely sure if it’s a fitting marriage, or one that would be better off left as two separate entities.

I would love nothing more than to open this review with a glimmer of high praise for the game. I’d also love to be able to spend the first several minutes spouting out meaningful text about the game’s rich storyline and its vast potential as an ironclad puzzler. But the truth is, I’m already thinking ahead, as am I struggling to picture it as anything more than a tongue-in-cheek jab that solidifies its identity at the extent of arousing mass controversy. On the one hand, it is a puzzle game, but on the other hand, it’s something of a short-sighted excuse for its creator to make a beeline for the most explicit scenario remotely possible. And I suppose it works — sort of. But it’s cheap, and it’s a far cry from a class act.

If we’ve piqued your curiosity here, then you might as well pull up a chair and stick with us a while longer as we uncage this “wild” beast.

Caged Feelings

If you had the hopes of tucking into a story-rich action puzzler in which seemingly eccentric heroes foster powerful ties to picturesque worlds and thought-provoking moral arguments, then I’m about to go ahead and burst that bubble of yours. The truth here is that, while Cage Girl does feature something of a plot and a universe of its own, the bulk of the experience is fueled by themes of an inappropriate nature. And by that, I basically mean that the game’s primary focal point is its female lead—a cardboard cutout character who, for some reason unknown to us, has the goal of escaping from a top-down block-based labyrinth whilst also searching for items of importance, like high heels and stockings, for some apparent reason. But that’s about as much as Cage Girl gives out — that it’s about a girl escaping a loop.

The good news is, Cage Girl does incorporate some basic gameplay elements, though nothing particularly exciting. Working from a top-down perspective, your ultimate goal is to navigate various cobble walkways within a shadowy space, collect certain objects, and occasionally untangle yourself from restraints by actively searching for a loop hole, or another form of exit point on the same board. But that’s about the brunt of it, disappointingly. Perhaps there’s a little more to it, but from what I gathered during the thirty or forty minutes of the journey, the focal point wasn’t so much the labyrinth itself, but the female lead who consumed roughly fifty percent of the screen. That was completely unnecessary — but hey, we’ll put it down to creative differences, I guess.

Shallow Waters, Tight Ends

The graphics here aren’t what you would call a natural sight for sore eyes, I’ll say that much. Instead, the game more or less utilizes a lot of minimal detail and barren spaces to flesh out its UI and other areas of the screen. In other words, there just isn’t a lot to marvel at, more so given that everything that makes up the screen essentially refers you back to the poster child of the product, which is the protagonist. And let’s be honest, there really is only so much of one thing that you can look at before the novelty wears thin and it all becomes a little, well, stale. And that’s a crying shame, because Cage Girl could’ve done so, so much more with the concept it had in mind. A wasted opportunity, you could say.

I’ll stand by word and say that, as far as puzzle games go, Cage Girl really doesn’t do anything to elevate the genre to a new level. It’s a shame, really, that it doesn’t make any real attempt to capture much more than the bare bones of a C-list puzzler, but at least it’s playable. Well, sort of. 

Verdict

Cage Girl doesn’t exactly hide its true colors, nor does it make an effort to fool you into believing that its world is anything more than a perverse, almost shameless “dungeon crawler” with the bare minimum to show for its blatant lack of appreciation for the genre. I’d love to say that it houses some genuinely interesting features, but the truth here is that, in spite of its odd stab at drip feeding you the words that you want to hear—escape rooms; story-rich exploration; and in-depth mazes with intuitive puzzle solving—there isn’t anything of the sort. It is, in short, a fairly simple, perhaps even controversial concept that doesn’t bring much more to the pit than the basic kindling needed to spark a debate. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe, just maybe, that’s precisely what Cage Girl wants to achieve with its short time in the spotlight.

I can’t say that I expected much from Cage Girl. Having spent time combing over the in-game screenshots and trailer beforehand, I figured there would be a bit more to it than what it initially depicted. And yet, disappointingly, it never amounted to anything more than its debut teasers. The lack of content was one thing, but the fact that the mechanics and gameplay were also short-sighted and somewhat bare bones was the nail in the coffin—the driving factor behind the game’s greatest failures. I wanted more, but it seemed that it couldn’t shake its obsession with transforming a female lead into little more than shallow-minded eye candy.

Of course, there’s a market for everything in this day and age, so it could be that you or someone else find something that’s worth scraping out of Cage Girl. For me, it’s a big no-no.