Cave Story (doukutsu-rs)

Game: Cave Story → (Windows, 2004)

doukutsu-rs: a faithful reimplementation of the Cave Story engine written in Rust, which started as a project to learn the language. A single executable uses the data from the original freeware release, Cave Story+, and the Switch version. It decouples game logic from frame rate with motion interpolation for high refresh rate displays, has no fixed resolution (the widescreen camera is Clownacy’s code), lets you switch between 50 and 60 ticks per second to match the freeware release or Cave Story+, has two-player local multiplayer, lets you skip cutscenes like the Switch version, and adds lighting effects slightly fancier than that version’s. With Cave Story+ it’s a drop-in replacement for its executable, on the Mac too, where the original no longer runs on macOS 10.15 or later. Version 1.0.0 (June 3) dropped the beta label: according to its authors, the game has been complete since 0.99.0, and since then they’ve only been fixing bugs and refining accuracy. That release rebuilt the Android port on SDL2 and added native Wayland support on Linux. There are builds for 32- and 64-bit Windows, macOS (Intel from 10.14, and Apple silicon), and Linux (also on Flatpak), plus Android and Switch.

You needNo purchase needed: the original 2004 freeware release is enough; doukutsu-rs goes in the same folder as its Doukutsu.exe and, on first launch, extracts the resources embedded in it. The data from your own copy of Cave Story+ (Steam, GOG, Epic, or Humble; the Epic one needs a stray opengl32.dll deleted) or of the Switch version, dumped with its update, works too. The 2026 remastered Steam release isn’t supported yet. Plus Windows, macOS 10.14 or later, or Linux.

How it gets to PC

Fan reimplementation

Console

Microsoft Windows

Original studio

Studio Pixel

Year

2004

Author

doukutsu-rs

Stars

1.3k

Last activity

2026-10-26 · 5 days ago

Latest version

1.0.0 · 2026-06-03

License

MIT

Language

Rust

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