The absolute classic Cave Story+ has a huge free upgrade on PC

Cave Story+ is a true classic and the developers have given the PC release an absolutely massive upgrade with tons new for the game including 2-player. This brings over masses of improvements from the console releases.

Even though the game is technically over 20 years old at this point, it looks to be worth a fresh visit thanks to all this. Although, the "Cave Story+ Update 2026" announcement on Steam appears to have been published perhaps a bit too early, as you need to opt into a Beta to actually access it which the announcement doesn't mention. The password appears to be "ModPizzaParty" to unlock the Beta. I assume the full release will actually be in the main branch soon.

You can expect to see 2-player, modding support, widescreen, new backgrounds, dialogue skipping and so much more. I'll let the expansive patch notes below speak for itself:

- CS+ Switch on PC

- 2-player mode

- Famitracks soundtrack

- Ridiculon soundtrack

- Sand Pit Challenge

- Jukebox

- Widescreen

- Animated and flipped dialogue portraits

- Lighting system

- Physical water

- Water backgrounds

- Map shading

- Strafing

- Skipping dialogue

- Difficulty tweaks

- Jelly stacking

- Puppy stacking

- Escape Booster's pit

- Easier Waterway cabin jump

- Iron Bond acquirement tweak

- Altered warehouse scene

- Modding support

- Stackable mods

- Lua API

- Converted code

- Arms

- Bosses

- Bullets

- Carets

- NPCs

- Player

- Unused code

- NPCs 58 and 79

- Various commented-out lines of code

- Mods can add custom...

- Graphics packs

- Seasonal themes

- Soundtracks

- Sounds

- Challenges

- Fonts

- Screen filters

- Settings

- Allow dialogue portrait flipping

- Enable lighting system

- Enable physical water

- Adjust internal resolution

- Change default player costume

- Conversion of data blobs to JSON

- Starting stage and event

- Tables

- Arms

- Bullet

- Caret

- Music

- NPC

- Stage

- Dialogue portrait animations

- Custom bitmaps can now overlay (instead of replace) vanilla bitmaps

- Per-room custom water backgrounds

- 4x resolution textures

- WAV sounds (instead of PixTone)

- Unified shaded and unshaded map data

- Merged challenge map tiles into main map tiles

- Booster's Lab fork

- CS+ TSC commands

- 2x sprite resolution

- New PXM file format

- Reads and writes JSON map metadata files

- Debug mode

- FPS counter (default)

- NPC list (default)

- Unlocked challenges (default)

- Unlocked jukebox (default)

- Holiday selection (options)

- NPC hitbox viewer (swap-left and pause)

- NPC code viewer (F8)

- Invincibility & infinite booster code (swap-right and pause)

- One-hit kill (jump and pause)

- Credits cheat code (up, left, down, right, up, left, down, right, L1)

- Costume unlock cheat code (up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right, L1)

- Fast-forward (swap-left and swap-right)

- Swap controllers in 2P mode (F12)

- New TSC commands

- XX2

- Similar to TSC+'s IMG

- OUT

- Changes the player's 'outfit', allowing mods to switch between playable characters

- Raised NPC limit from 512 to 1024

- Raised maximum number of tiles per stage from 256 to 65536

- PXM file format has been expanded to allow this

- Raised flag limit from 8000 to 10000

- Curly Story difficulty levels

- DSiWare Sanctuary Time Attack

- Snake, Super Missile Launcher, and Life Pot

- Alternate music in starting room

- Bonus image upon completion

- Extra 2-player costumes

- Easy Mode Curly

- Hard Mode Curly

- CS+ Quote (when using Classic graphics)

- Fixes

- Unobscured dialogue portraits (top and bottom rows are no longer missing)

- Restored missing features

- Scrolling damage numbers

- White circles that replace the '=' character in dialogue

- Text box scrolling text out of view instead of just disappearing

- 'THANK YOU' stars easter egg after the credits

- Centred Heavy Press and G-CLONE boss arenas

- Missing translation for Balrog's, Misery's, and the Doctor's descriptions in the normal credits

- Stage name no longer has two drop-shadows

- Text drop-shadows uses correct colour

- Level 2 and 3 missile graphics are no longer swapped in CS+ graphics

- Corrected centring of the '

- Animated dialogue portraits in Challenges

- Wind Fortress

- Sanctuary Time Attack

- Improved sprite-work

- Challenges now support seasonal graphics

- Updated credits illustrations in Classic graphics

- Boss Attack uses native Classic graphics instead of downscaled Cave Story+ graphics

- Various NPC sprite improvements, including an overhauled Heavy Press

- Improved Organya playback

- Drums use linear-interpolation sampling instead of nearest-neighbour sampling

- Fixed panning of right channel being inverted

- Fixed track panning not being initialised (would make notes very loud when panning is not explicitly specified)

- Improved Remastered soundtrack

- Last Cave (Hidden) has a unique version of the Last Cave theme

- Credits use a unique version of Mischievous Robot

- Corrected song looping

- Balrog's theme

- Sand Zone theme

- Labyrinth theme

- Last Cave (Hidden)

- Balcony

- Mischievous Robot (Credits)

- Updates from Freeware v1.0.0.4 to v1.0.0.6

- Behemoth rage effects

- Gravekeeper sound effects

- Closed chest flickering sprite and animation speed

- Modding-related fixes

- TSC commands

- CAT now clears auto-turbo mode instead of setting it.

- MYD supports events above 255.

- Game no longer corrupts when player has maximum weapons (8) or items (32).

- Weapons no longer level-up to level 2 prematurely when EXP requirement is lower for level 3 than level 2.

- NPC 150 can now use direction 10.

- A line-break is no longer redundantly inserted at the end of a maximum-length line of text.

- Recreated official English sprites from pre-release Cave Story

- Incorporated unused dialogue portrait animations into the game

- Smiling Balrog, in Malco's room

- Coughing Toroko, in the warehouse

- Fist-clenching Itoh, when first talking to him

- CRT screen filter

- HD Japanese font

- Challenge taglines

- Vastly-improved controller support

- Button icons

- Key icons

- Custom controller bindings

- Bindings for each player

- Separate bindings for controllers and keyboard

- All controllers control player 1 in single-player mode

- Automatic player controller allocation in two-player mode

Blimey! That's a lot.

While the game has a Native Linux version, it's not clear if the update will come to the Linux version so you may need to use Proton to play through the new build.