RoguedexPart 2 (May 2024) · #5 of 7 in that tierWatch the moment (0:43:16)
Cavity Busters
- Developed by
- SpaceMyFriend, Ben Ridge
- Published by
- SpaceMyFriend
$14.99
Cavity Busters is a roguelite toothpunk bullet hell where you bite and chomp cavity infested enemies. Run on the walls, dodge through bullet filled rooms and stomp baddies. Collect power ups, contract powerful diseases, and carve your way through a bloated body kingdom.
Consensus
C69.8/100
Steam players96% positiveVery Positive125 reviews
OpenCritic ↗61/100
VG Insights estimate ↗≈3.8K copies · ≈$36.1K gross
What creators say
Ranked Apr 2023 · #3 of 42 in that tierWatch the moment (2:03:54)
What players say
A solo-developed toothpunk roguelite bullet hell in which you play a single tooth (Gummy The Soft) who shoots and recalls himself as a boomerang, dashes, parries, and runs along walls through a bloated body kingdom.
Players receive it warmly: Steam shows Very Positive at roughly 96% across about 125 reviews, and several reviewers call it underrated and say they prefer it to The Binding of Isaac. Critical coverage is thin, with one OpenCritic review (6.1/10, Nindie Spotlight) and two Metacritic-listed reviews (80 and 75), which is too few for Metacritic to show a score. The recurring themes are inventive movement and mechanics plus a large item pool, set against a steep, overwhelming start and poor item readability. It began Early Access on Steam in August 2020, went 1.0 on 18 March 2022, and reached Xbox, PlayStation and Switch in April 2023 via JanduSoft. The dev keeps updating it, and the Steam page cites ongoing content updates.
Players love
- Movement and skill expression: dash with i-frames, bullet parry, wall-running and sliding, stomping enemies from above, all chainable
- Tooth-as-weapon boomerang: shooting the tooth and recalling it deals damage both ways, making gunplay feel inventive and satisfying
- Large item pool (Steam lists 317 upgrades; console listings say 280) that can make a run wildly strong, weak or both, with diseased upgrades as risk/reward
- Playable characters feel mechanically different rather than like stat-modifier reskins
- Wall-digging mechanic adds risk/reward and is seen as well balanced: helpful but not a cheat button
- Reviewers praise boss and enemy design and the amount of content for the price ($14.99)
- Music and gross-but-funny audio/art style praised, including many tooth puns
- Steady post-launch content updates; reviewers say each update brings new content; runs well on Steam Deck
Common complaints
- Overwhelming onboarding: many mechanics are thrown at the player at once, and key information gets lost in rapid-fire tutorials
- Item descriptions are hidden or vague; some items are unidentified and some set HP to 1, which can unknowingly end a run
- Stability complaints: crashes, freezes and audio bugs reported on Windows and under Proton/Linux (Windows-only on Steam)
- Clunky feel to some early weapons: one requires picking up the ammo you fire, the other auto-aims
- Samey colour palette makes enemies, items and props hard to tell apart (IndieGameFans review)
- No autosave mid-run reported by a player, so a crash costs the whole run
- Critics and some players see it as a close Isaac/Gungeon derivative that does not surpass them
Can feel tedious
- Steep learning curve and a punishing early game; one reviewer took several attempts to beat the first boss
- Too many systems to juggle at once (parry, roll, wall-run, ammo pickup, stomp) feels cumbersome to some players
- Constant dodging, rolling and wall-running reads as more bullet hell than roguelike to players who expected an item-driven game
- Decoding unidentified items by trial and error is frustrating
- Technical crashes interrupt long runs
What's unique
- You are a tooth: a boomerang-style shoot-and-recall attack that damages enemies on the way out and back
- Wall-run and wall-dig mechanic adds a second traversal layer unusual for top-down shooters
- Disease upgrades you can contract and cure to keep the good effects, as a risk/reward item twist
- Mouse-and-keyboard-first design with bullet parry and i-frame dash, more fast-paced than tank or twin-stick Isaac clones
- Dental/body-horror toothpunk theme with pun-heavy humour and a 'bloated body kingdom' that changes each run
Players want
- Introduce mechanics gradually with a better tutorial or pacing, so runs start simple like Isaac and complexity builds through items
- Make item descriptions clear and show what items do, especially HP-altering ones, instead of hiding them
- Improve visual clarity and colour differentiation between enemies, pickups and environment
- Fix crashes and freezes and improve Proton/Linux compatibility (no native Mac or Linux build)
- Add a mid-run save or resume safety for crash cases
Summarised from Steam reviews and community discussion.
Steam tags
Bullet HellRogue-liteShoot 'Em UpDifficultAction RoguelikeDungeon CrawlerShooter2DRogue-likeTop-Down
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Tier list Part 2 (2024)
Cavity Busters is a top-down bullet hell shooter roguelike where you play as a tooth with a huge pile of overlapping mechanics: throwing and recalling your tooth, a health-fuelled auto-shotgun, a zoomed-out jump, and wall-dashing with slow-mo. Items are plentiful, often carry big downsides, and you can spend health to dig new rooms and extend floors almost indefinitely. He finds it inventive, content-rich, funny and strong in its boss fights, but thinks the sheer chaos and mechanical overload drag it down. Verdict is a tier placement that sounds like 'high S' or 'high C' (the ASR says 'high SE'), which is ambiguous.
Liked
Disliked