Secret of the Lost Cavern, Episodes 1-4 Review

The Paleolithic era was a period in prehistory distinguished by the development of the first stone tools.

It's also the time when Fred Flintstone and his entourage of stone age survivors joked for a whopping 166 episodes. Secrets of the Lost Cavern instead runs for a short four instalments, but shares the same prehistoric setting.

Just not the longevity or the quality. Secrets of the Lost Cavern may appear a dazzling adventure rendered for modern play, but its gameplay is as unpolished as Flintstone furniture.

Like many things in this ancient adventure, all is not what it seems. On the surface, Secret of the Lost Cavern – essentially a title previously released on the PC, split up into four concise episodes here – has much in common with other iPhone and iPod touch adventures.

Viewed in first-person, it lets you scan environments by moving a finger across the screen. Elements with which you can interact are highlighted with icons. Touching these icons incites contextual actions or stores the object to your inventory.

Given the setting, most of the items involved have a cartoon-style caveman feel: rocks, twigs, animal skins, and other raw materials. Annoyingly, however, some can only be used within the areas you pick them up: certain items are presumably too heavy for the rather svelt protagonist Arok to carry on his person.

There's a reason for this: Secret of the Lost Cavern is about solving problems. Items are fixed because they're tied to specific puzzles at that location. Moving from one area to another (read: "different caves") relies on your ability to explore the surrounding area and combine local elements to create solutions.

The first cave in the initial free episode, for instance, is quite small. Should you not fathom exactly what you're meant to be doing and why, then that is all of Secret of the Lost Cavern you'll ever see; one dark, dank cave.

It doesn't exactly show off the game's visual flair and there's much to admire on that score. Making it through Episode 1 means being treated to lush visuals, even if there's almost intolerable slowdown whenever fire or flowing water appears.

There are far greater problems than graphics. While much is shared in structure, Secret of the Lost Cavern fails to have the same polished gameplay as other iPhone adventure games like Jules Vern's Return to Mysterious Island.

The controls are a little awkward, items sometime needing two or three taps before they respond.

The voice acting is also consistently awful. It would be unreasonable to expect an Oscar-winning performance, yet the result of bad voice work is a game devoid of any charm or character whatsoever. The whole thing feels like a machine - you're there merely to get the engine running, though the chances are you'll not care why for all too long.

And that's the benefit of the game's episodic format. There's no reason for it to have been broken up in this manner other than to split the download times, but the advantage of doing so is that the first - and not coincidentally only free - episode does let you know exactly what you're in for.

Things improve as you move forward, but it's fair to say that if you're not on board from the word go, you need not purchase any of the other three releases.