About
Cave Story (Doukutsu Monogatari) is the 2004 indie game credited in the readme to Studio Pixel/Nicalis. doukutsu-rs is a from-scratch reimplementation of the Cave Story engine with added quality-of-life improvements, intended to let players enjoy the original 2004 freeware release like a modern game. It ships no game data of its own — it must be paired with data files from the original freeware release, Cave Story+, or a Nintendo Switch dump — and builds are available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android.
How it differs from the original
Beyond its quality-of-life additions, it can act as a drop-in replacement for the Cave Story+ executable, but it does not yet support the 2026 Steam remastered release, and save files from the remastered (2017 Switch-era) version are incompatible with the original version's saves.
Getting started
It runs by being placed alongside data files from a supported edition — the original freeware install, a Cave Story+ copy, or a Nintendo Switch dump — extracting what it needs automatically on first launch. Default controls use the arrow keys to move, Z to jump, and X to shoot for player one, with a separate control set for local two-player, both changeable from an in-game menu.
Known limitations
- compatibility: Remastered version saves are incompatible with original version saves and may cause softlocks, graphical glitches, or spawning in wrong locations.
Additional notes
- Technical note
- On the Epic Games Store build of Cave Story+, Nicalis ships a stray 32-bit opengl32.dll that conflicts with doukutsu-rs's 64-bit OpenGL build and crashes it on startup; deleting that DLL fixes the issue.