Play Cave Noire Online

Ever played a roguelike that fits in your pocket? Cave Noire on the Game Boy is this weird little gem where you dive into randomly generated dungeons, but with a twist—you're not just mindlessly hacking through monsters. There are four types of quests, like rescuing fairies or hoarding gold, each with ten escalating difficulty levels. The first time I tried the fairy quest, I got wrecked by some teleporting tiles I didn’t see coming.

Combat’s simple but tense—you and monsters take turns moving and attacking in this strict order: you move, you swing, they swing, then they shuffle around. No fancy animations, just numbers clashing behind the scenes. Found a sword? Your attack stat ticks up. Grabbed armor? Suddenly those bat bites don’t hurt as much. But the dungeons themselves are out to get you too—step on lava and ouch, fall down a pit and there goes half your health. Some walls crumble if you bump into them, which saved me once when a giant scorpion had me cornered.

What’s cool is how the monsters mess with the environment. Kill a certain floating eye and—poof—the whole room’s fog lifts. But then there’s this other jerk that spreads fog when it dies. The game only saves when you clear a difficulty level, so every run feels like a fresh gamble. It’s brutal, but in that satisfying "one-more-try" way.