doukutsu-rs

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 issues & 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.