Cave Dig – Foxchange Software - 1997 - First time playing?: Yes!

Alright, this? This right here? Greatest title screen in video game history. We're never topping this, it's all downhill from here, nothing more can compare to the majesty of Cave Dig’s crusty stock fox jpegs.

Anyway, we're looking at some Mac classic gaming history here. Okay, well maybe to a small handful of people. It can be kind of hard to tell how far certain Mac shareware games reach. This is the Mac game development debut of Matthew Beedle, also known by the name Foxchange Software, who developed this game when he was only 17. While he did branch out into other game formats over time, he primarily developed puzzle games about anthro foxes in the vein of Boulder Dash, Eggerland/Adventures of Lolo, Flappy and other such similar games. What started out as, uh, this, would get refined over the course of updates and sequels into some solid and polished puzzle game gems. I could have just skipped straight to reviewing Cave Dig 3, the last game Foxchange made in this style and the most refined, but I felt that it would be best to first review Cave Dig 1 and 2 as well as the other side games in this series, just so we can see how far Foxchange came from his adorably humble beginnings.

The plot of this game, as it is presented, is that Ably the fox is shot with a tranquilizer dart by a human and then wakes up in this cave. The actual plot according to the summary of this game’s events in Foxchange’s later game, Crystal Rock, is that there's this unseen cat called Madison that hates foxes and thought it would be funny if he made a torture labyrinth full of sentient fire and angry faces carved out of rocks and then put a fox in it. Lame, Madison. You should of put the human in the torture labyrinth. After all, humanity deserves to suffer and their blood tastes better this way, is uh, what this doll’s vampiric queen has told him.

Boulder Dash is the most clear inspiration gameplay wise. You dig through loose dirt, collect treasure and avoid getting crushed to death by falling boulders. The game is top-down, with Ably being able to move freely in eight directions, but presumably the game is taking place on a slope that causes boulders to roll to the bottom of the screen when you dig through the dirt below them. Unlike Boulder Dash however, all the levels take place on a single screen each, so no screen scrolling here. In addition, in Cave Dig there’s less emphasis on boulder physics, with some boulders present that don't ever roll on their own and can only be moved by pushing them, as well as boulders generally being able to be stacked atop one another without the one on top rolling off.

Another variation present is the swap mechanic, which is more or less a substitute for the mechanic in Boulder Dash where you could push boulders or dig dirt without moving via holding down the space key. In Cave Dig meanwhile, pressing space activates swap mode, where if Ably pushes a boulder or other pushable object she will swap places with it, allowing you to move objects out of corners that they would otherwise be stuck in.

The enemies meanwhile feel more akin to Eggerland than Boulder Dash. If you've ever played a game in the Eggerland series and then try Cave Dig, you'll immediately see it with The Rush, the stone faces that will instantly ram and kill you if you walk in their line of sight, mirroring the mechanics of the Medusa statues from Eggerland. In order to get past The Rush, you need to push an object such as a boulder or balloon (which is like the falling boulder but it floats up instead of falling down) between Ably and The Rush’s line of sight. The Rush will still try to ram you, but it will hit the boulder and then stop in its tracks there instead of killing Ably. The Rush can also only attack you in the axis that it's facing. So if it's facing to the side, The Rush can only ram you to the left and right, while moving above and below it is safe as those are blind spots in The Rush’s field of view.

Honestly, The Rush is one of the most well thought out game elements here. It's arguably more dynamic than the aforementioned Medusa statues from Eggerland. First thing to consider is the fact that The Rush’s failed attempts to ram you if you're shielded by a boulder still result in The Rush being moved to a different position on the game map, changing the danger zones and potentially either physically blocking the player or opening up a new pathway. Furthermore, The Rush also essentially serves as a way for the game to counter the swap mechanic. If swapping places with a boulder will leave Ably in the line of sight of The Rush, then that boulder is basically stuck there and can't be pushed or swapped without dying. This prevents the swap mechanic from being a completely overpowered mechanic that prevents boulders from ever being stuck in a bad position. In a game like Sokoban, a mechanic like the swap would break nearly every puzzle that game can throw at you, but in Cave Dig that's not the case.

The remaining enemies are less interesting. Flare Face will actively chase after Ably while adhering less to the grid-based movement of other enemies. The strategy for Flare Face is basically always to just outrun it, with nothing all that interesting done with it. Bouncy meanwhile will just bounce back and forward between whichever walls it's facing. Bouncy is safe to touch from its sides, but if it collides with you head-on, you'll die. Also, any time Ably dies, she says “ouhgh” in the most bored and unimpressed voice ever. I just think that's funny.

This game has 114 levels and enough interesting ideas for like, maybe 40. Many of the levels in Cave Dig are simply variations of previous levels you've already played. There's even a point where you play the exact same level with the exact same solution three times in a row, with the only difference being that there's one new hazard added each following level. There's also a large chunk of levels simply dedicated to weaving your way through patterns of moving enemies without making contact with them, feeling a bit more akin to Frogger than a puzzle game. In general, Cave Dig’s puzzles are pretty easy and feel somewhat deemphasized in spite of the puzzle-focused inspirations.

There's also some weird inconsistencies with how the mechanics work. Remember what I said about how The Rush can only attack you in the axis that it's facing? That's usually the case, but other times without explanation it will suddenly be able to attack you from the side, and the only way you'd figure that out is through trial and error. Sometimes Flare Faces gravitate towards the bottom of the screen, sometimes they don't. Sometimes objects that reach the bottom of the screen will then wrap around and appear at the top of the screen, sometimes they don't. There's also these pillars, which usually are very heavy, slow to push and fall to the bottom of the screen if there isn't an object below them, except for one instance where it bafflingly falls up like the apples from I Wanna Be The Guy, though in that singular case I think the flying pillar is an intentional joke, subverting your expectations and all. The game making up the rules as it goes should be a huge knock against it, and if the puzzles were harder and the levels were longer I'd have more issues with it. As it is though, every level is so small that even when you get an unfair death like that, you barely lose any progress. Likewise, the sluggish and often unresponsive controls, where if you lightly tap a directional button Ably won't actually move in the direction you tell her to unless you hold the directional button down a fraction of a second longer, while not feeling great, end up not impeding you much.

So all in all, the game is pretty repetitive. It has a solid base, but it just doesn't do enough with it to keep engaging for so many levels. With tighter controls, larger levels, more consistent mechanics and more clever puzzles, I can easily see Cave Dig being great. As it is, it's not bad, but it's pretty dull, and eventually you realise that the game has nothing left to throw at you and-

That's a gun.

Okay, never mind, Ably’s out to kill now. On one hand, I find it weird that the game held off on introducing a major mechanic like this until the endgame, but on the other hand, the raygun is overpowered as hell and more exists for a fun little power trip to close out the game as you get to blast the hell out of all of the enemies that gave you trouble prior to this point. Once again, the controls aren't great for the raygun. If you mash the fire button repeatedly then Ably will not stop firing until she has fired exactly as many shots as how many times you hit the fire button, even if that means repeatedly shooting long after you stopped pressing the fire button.

Following the power trip, you then have a boss rush of sorts where you fight tankier versions of all of the enemies that take fifty shots to bring down, and then the game gives you the ultimate reward; absolutely zero explanation for anything except for revealing that Ably got knocked up at the next new years party. Good for her. Honestly, this ending is as adorable as the rest of this game. Good job, Cave Dig, you're so damn cute that I just want to pinch you on the cheek.

Cave Dig 2 – Foxchange Software - 2000 - First time playing?: Yes!

This isn't really a sequel to Cave Dig 1 as much as it is just an updated version, right down to having the exact same levels. Nonetheless, enough is different here for at least a brief look. The differences are mainly to do with presentation. We are no longer playing as Ably anymore, but instead we're playing as Simon, with a different story to compliment the new protagonist. This time Simon is a lab animal that was injected with an experimental serum that basically in short transformed him from an ordinary wild fox into an anthro furry. While he was attempting to escape, he was distracted by and drawn to a portal within the laboratory, which teleported him to the labyrinth of the first game.

It's a slightly darker story than the first game, what with the animal testing and such, and the music has changed to a much more sombre and melancholic tune to suit the darker atmosphere that is immediately undone by Simon’s goofy in-game sprite. For someone currently in the midst of an existential crisis as a result of suddenly gaining sapience, his doofy smile and wide-open Banjo Kazooie-esque googly eyes don't exactly fit the tone. The voice clips are different too, so instead of going “ouhgh” when dying like Ably does, Simon instead goes “WAHRGNLGBML” at full mic-peaking volume. It's hard to say which death cry is sillier, frankly.

Going off of the credits, Cave Dig 1 was mainly made from graphical assets sourced online, while Cave Dig 2 uses assets made by Foxchange himself. This is good, but also will not stop me from saying that Cave Dig 2 kind of looks worse. I say this more in terms of how it impacts gameplay than how it looks aesthetically. Honestly, the brightly coloured glowing neon look that the tile sprites have, standing out against the black background, are kind of cool and give the game an otherworldly atmosphere, especially alongside the strange enemy designs. Unfortunately though, it's far less readable than Cave Dig 1. Nearly every tile looks like a speckled boulder, including things such as the dirt you can dig through, making it difficult to tell what you're even looking at a lot of the time.

The game does control quite a bit better however. It's much more responsive than Cave Dig 1’s sluggish movement, and the raygun is less cumbersome too. In spite of that, I'm probably still more likely to recommend Cave Dig 1. See, Cave Dig 1’s story, threadbare as it is, actually leads into several other Foxchange games such as Cave Fox and Mr Cat’s Quest. Cave Dig 2’s story meanwhile is retold in Cave Dig 3, so you really miss nothing if you skip Cave Dig 2 since both the levels and story are covered in Cave Dig 1 and 3 respectively. Then again, Crystal Rock recaps Cave Dig 1's story anyway, so your call.

Mr Cat's Quest – Foxchange Software - 1997 - First time playing?: Yes!

It's now 1904 and Madison Cat just stole Mr Cat’s wife. Madison Cat is just a prick to everyone and everything it seems. Also, uh, is Madison Cat immortal? Because later games with Madison as the antagonist take place in 2001, and Madison is at least old enough to have a curly mustache in Mr Cat’s Quest, so based on this and using math we can confirm that Madison is roughly old as hell. This art is hilarious, by the way. Madison looks ready to tie Mr Cat’s wife to some train tracks and all the while, going off of her excited smile, Mrs Cat is really into it.

Okay, so when I said earlier that Cave Dig had enough ideas for 40 levels, I hadn't played Mr Cat's Quest when I wrote that. The reason I bring that up is that Mr Cat”s Quest has 42 levels, though levels 41 and 42 are dedicated to getting the gun and fighting the final boss respectively, so the game has 40 main levels. Turns out, yes, Mr Cat's Quest, while shorter, is more engaging and less repetitive than Cave Dig as a result.

Once again though, it's not quite a full new game. Many of the level designs are reused from Cave Dig, with a few new ones mixed in alongside some new mechanics such as quicksand and bombs. Regardless, the levels carried over from Cave Dig are generally among the more challenging ones from that game, so there's less padding with overly simplistic level designs here than there was in Cave Dig.

There's not much to say other than that, though. The mechanics are all the same as Cave Dig, which I've already talked about twice now. The sprites are much more readable than Cave Dig 2, though it's slightly odd that the plungers that replace The Rush can be fired at you backwards if you walk behind them. The final boss feels more like a final boss and actually has some relevance to the story for once, so there's that too. It's fine.

Crystal Rock – Foxchange Software - 1998 - First time playing?: Yes!

Okay, I have played the same set of levels in a row three times now. Are we going to make that four times? Nope, Crystal Rock is the first game in this series to feel like a proper sequel. It's still using the same basic mechanics and enemy types, but it's got a lot more variety and creativity across the board, alongside some new elements such as bombs.

Taking place after Cave Dig 1, Ably from that game has had 11 children. What do you mean that game said she had 10 children? That doesn't deny the possibility of “ten and then another one they forgot to count.” One of her daughters was also named Ably, and she ended up in a relationship with a boy fox named Pepper. Madison Cat, being petty as expected, decided to throw New Ably and Pepper into a new maze just to spite Old Ably. Anyway, as a result, this is the first game in the series we've looked at which has two playable characters, with both Ably and Pepper being selectable from the title screen. They're completely identical gameplay-wise, it's just a different sprite.

In general, Crystal Rock is much more challenging. But, there's also a bunch of new tutorial messages you can see by walking into signposts throughout the levels that teach you some of the different techniques and strategies so-

Those are spikes, Foxchange. I guess that sprite got Foxchanged in development.

There's actually a couple of instances where I think the game tells you too much with the tutorial messages. There's this cool puzzle where you have to use pushable boulders to make a bridge for a rolling boulder to get to a specific point in the level, but you're sadly not given a chance to figure this out on your own as the tutorial message spells it out for you.

In addition to a new set of challenging Cave Dig levels, the Boulder Dash gameplay is mixed up with more minigame-esque levels here and there, such as a level that plays with gravity by having your chosen character fall if there isn't a platform beneath them, or one very strange instance where your control is shifted from your fox of choice to the enemies and you have to move them out of the way of the CPU controlled foxes. Given that it took Cave Dig over 90 levels before it introduced anything new in the form of the gun, Crystal Rock being playful and creative with its level designs throughout the whole game is a vast improvement. The graphical tiles are also very clear and readable in this game, with enemies and obstacles having generally consistent behaviour.

So, Crystal Rock is the best game of the lot, right? Actually, no. See, Crystal Rock has the same unresponsive input issues of Cave Dig 1, but they are much more of a hindrance here due to the level design frequently requiring being frame perfect. A common set piece the game relies on is digging a block of dirt that then unleashes an enemy or hazard that chases you through the level. These traps frequently require you to immediately start fleeing the very next frame after digging that dirt tile. The problem is that it's hard to do a light tap and then immediately run for it when your light taps are consistently not registered by the game because you didn't press the key long enough. So then you try holding it a bit longer, but this time you also step forward when you dig because you held the key too long, and even after hitting that sweet spot where you hold the key long enough for it to register as an input but not long enough to be read as two inputs, you now also have to run through an obstacle course with frame perfect inputs immediately or die.

The latter half of the game is primarily made up of obstacle courses filled with killer crayon drawings of Linus Torvalds’ head bouncing around which you have to weave through, filling the role of Bouncy from Cave Dig. The controls just feel too sticky and unresponsive for a lot of the precise weaving through enemies that dominate the later levels and it gets exhausting fast. Not helping things is the fact that the game over sequence in this game, which you'll be seeing far more than the game over screens in previous games, is quite a bit longer this time around and more of a pace breaker. It is, however, at least adorable. I love small dogs.

On the bright side, the final boss of Crystal Rock is surprisingly really cool, by far the best boss out of any of these games so far that goes far beyond the usual “shoot at it and then move out of the way when it gets close” strategy that the bosses of Cave Dig and Mr Cat’s Quest used. I wouldn't say that Crystal Rock is a dramatic drop in quality from the previous games as there's a lot of things it does far better than its predecessors, but I do still feel that it's the most annoying of these games due to the control issues. Or maybe I'm just a scrub and it's a skill issue. Feel free to point and laugh and bully me if you think I suck at furry Boulder Dash.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 18th July 2025