Cave Noire

The game revolves around four quests: killing monsters, freeing fairies, or collecting gold/orbs, with ten difficulties each. The difficulty determines how big the target number is, the stats the player starts with, and what monsters are encountered. Starting a quest creates a randomly generated dungeon where the player has one chance to reach the goal – death means a new dungeon has to be created. Beating a difficulty level unlocks the next; this is also the one thing the game saves. As the level number progresses, the strength of the monsters the player faces also increases.

The dungeon itself is shown from a top-down perspective and features the hero, walls, floor tiles, monsters, and items to collect. Movement is turn-based and each turn is divided into four phases (player movement, player attack, monster attack, and finally monster movement). Attacks are only possible when the two participants stand in adjacent tiles; the computer simply calculates the result from the participants' statistics (attack, defence, luck, and a random component) which then lowers the health points of the attacked hero/monster. Reaching a health of zero means defeat.

In Japan, reviewers in the game magazine Famicom Tsūshin said Cave Noire's various small quests give it a good pick up and play quality. Other reviewers complimented how easy it was to play and its unique take on the role-playing game genre.

Hideaki Fujimori of Hippon Super! described it as a bizarre RPG, and saying he was most impressed by how easy it was to read the status and items displays which was not always the case in Game Boy games.