Most roguelikes give you a sword, gun, or collection of magical spells to deal with whatever is trying to kill you. Cavity Busters gives you one tooth.
Developed by SpaceMyFriend and Ben Ridge, Cavity Busters is a “toothpunk” bullet hell roguelite that originally launched in 2022 after spending around 18 months in Early Access. You play as Gummy the Soft, fighting through a particularly unpleasant body kingdom filled with cavity-infested enemies, diseases, bodily fluids, and bosses known as the Pearly Knights.
There are 317 upgrades, 10 playable characters, hundreds of handcrafted rooms, and enough dental jokes to make you wonder how there were any left by the time development finished.
Your Tooth Is Basically a Boomerang
Combat in Cavity Busters works a little differently from the usual twin-stick shooter. Gummy only has one tooth, but fortunately, it’s reusable. You can fire it at enemies before sucking it back toward you, with correctly timing the return dealing additional damage. Jumping onto stunned enemies gives you another way to attack, while your sticky little character can run along walls to escape the increasingly ridiculous number of projectiles filling each room.
You can jump into the air too, giving yourself more room to avoid incoming attacks and reposition when things start getting crowded. Considering Cavity Busters describes itself as a bullet hell, that’s going to happen quite a lot.
Getting Sick Can Actually Make You Stronger
Then there are the diseases. Rather than simply being another negative status effect to avoid, contracting a disease can give you a powerful advantage alongside an equally unpleasant downside.
Entamaphobia, for example, turns doorways into powerful lasers. Unfortunately, walking through those same doors will now hurt you. Other diseases offer their own combinations of benefits and drawbacks, forcing you to decide whether the advantage is worth whatever horrible problem comes attached to it.
There is a creature capable of curing diseases hidden somewhere inside the body. Find it and you can remove the negative effect while keeping the useful part of the upgrade.
Leaving a disease behind isn’t necessarily the safe option either. The body can consume unwanted diseases and use them to increase the difficulty instead. Apparently even refusing to get sick can come back to bite you.
There Are 317 Upgrades to Find
Diseases are only part of the build system. There are 317 upgrades capable of helping or hindering a run, alongside 10 characters with their own unique abilities. Every attempt takes you through a new body assembled from hundreds of handcrafted rooms, so there’s plenty of room to experiment with different combinations.
What you won’t find are permanent stat upgrades. Cavity Busters puts the emphasis on learning its movement and combat rather than gradually overpowering everything through permanent increases to health or damage. Death means another attempt with a different body to explore and another collection of upgrades to work around.
Bosses have multiple phases and attacks too, with the Pearly Knights providing some of the tougher fights standing between Gummy and whatever passes for good dental health in this world.
You Can Make Things Easier
Despite all that talk of difficult combat, Cavity Busters does have options for anyone who wants a slightly less punishing trip through the body.
You can give yourself additional starting health, increase your power, and adjust other settings to make runs more forgiving. Importantly, using those options doesn’t lock you out of content, so you’re free to make things easier without losing access to parts of the game. It also includes slow motion and other accessibility options.
Cavity Busters currently holds a Very Positive rating on Steam, with 95% of its English-language Steam purchaser reviews giving it a thumbs up. With wall-running, bullet hell combat, 317 upgrades, diseases that can completely change a run, and one extremely overworked tooth, it’s certainly not short on ideas.