The Enchanted Cave 2

A Flash-era favourite, mostly intact

The Enchanted Cave 2 is solo developer Dustin Auxier's sequel to a free browser game many reviewers here remember specifically and fondly from the Flash era — one describes the original as "not only one of my favorite Flash games of all time, but one of my most-played games of all time." The sequel keeps that DNA largely intact: a hundred-floor dungeon crawl with permanent character death within a run, item crafting from what you find along the way, and a New Game Plus structure where each completed or failed attempt still banks permanent upgrades toward the next. That structure gives the game genuine long-term purpose despite its simple surface — reviewers describe returning across dozens of hours specifically because each run meaningfully strengthens the next, rather than starting from true zero.

What multiple reviewers credit as the game's real distinguishing quality, next to genre peers, is its pace. More than one review specifically frames it as easier and more relaxing than typical roguelikes — "hard to die," in one reviewer's words — recommending it to players who want the genre's structure without its usual edge-of-seat tension. For a category of games often defined by punishing difficulty, that's a deliberate and fairly executed design choice rather than a shortfall, and it's a meaningful reason this game has found an audience beyond hardcore roguelike fans.

A hundred floors, one loop

The specific, most consistent criticism in this corpus is about depth rather than difficulty. Several detailed reviews describe the mechanical loop staying essentially static as the floor count climbs — the same core actions against progressively bigger numbers, rather than new systems or wrinkles being introduced to match the escalating scale. One reviewer's blunt account: reaching floor 30 feels functionally identical to floor 5, "just bigger" numbers on both sides of the fight. That's a specific, fair criticism of pacing rather than a complaint about the genre's difficulty, and it recurs often enough across otherwise-positive and negative reviews alike to treat as a genuine structural limitation rather than a minority taste issue.

A separate, more technical complaint concerns saving. The Enchanted Cave 2 has no mid-run autosave, and multiple reviewers report losing meaningful progress — in one case, immediately after clearing the game's first boss — to a simple crash with no recovery option. Paired with reports from players who owned the free Flash version that the same specific bugs carried over unchanged into the paid Steam release, the corpus's overall message is consistent: the core game is genuinely well-loved, but the specific things that would separate a fair free browser game from a fully realised paid product — save reliability, escalating mechanical depth, quality-of-life travel options — haven't fully arrived.

A small, notable credit worth naming

One detail worth surfacing on its own: The Enchanted Cave 2's entire soundtrack was composed by Grant Kirkhope, known for scoring Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye 007 and other well-remembered games. For a solo-developer roguelite priced under NZ$15, that's a genuinely notable piece of talent attached to the project, and it goes some way toward explaining why the game's presentation punches above its otherwise simple pixel-art weight — several reviewers mention the music specifically as more memorable than they expected going in, even when the same review goes on to criticise the gameplay's lack of depth.

That pedigree shows in specifics rather than just reputation — Kirkhope's score for The Enchanted Cave 2 was released as its own standalone album, and video-game-music enthusiasts have singled out individual tracks, like its boss theme, for dedicated attention years after the game's release. For a genre where most small dungeon crawlers rely on stock or serviceable audio, having a name-recognition composer producing genuinely distinctive work is a real point of quality this review corpus doesn't spend much time discussing, likely because it simply works well enough not to draw complaints — the highest compliment a game's music can receive in a review is often silence about it.

Quality-of-life gaps

Beyond the missing autosave, reviewers name a consistent set of smaller quality-of-life omissions that compound across a hundred-floor run: no quick-travel option back to floors already cleared, and no way to skip encounters the game itself recognises as trivial — fights where the player takes zero damage, repeated purely as a formality. Neither gap is severe on its own, but multiple reviewers independently raise both, suggesting they're a real, felt friction across long play sessions rather than a one-off nitpick. For a game whose core loop already draws criticism for staying static across its full length, the absence of tools to speed through the parts everyone agrees are trivial makes that repetition land harder than it otherwise might.

Verdict

The Enchanted Cave 2 is a well-loved, low-stakes roguelite that earns its 94% Very Positive rating through genuine nostalgia and a deliberately relaxed pace that sets it apart from harsher genre peers — real, specific qualities rather than vague charm. It's also honestly limited in ways its own long-time fans describe consistently: a hundred-floor structure that doesn't meaningfully deepen as it climbs, a missing autosave that's cost real players real hours, and bugs some reviewers say never got fixed between the free and paid versions. At its low price, that's a fair trade for a relaxing dungeon crawl rather than a demanding one — just don't expect floor 80 to ask anything different of you than floor 20 did.