Cave Story+ Brings Co-op, Mod Support, and Later Console Features to Steam

Cave Story+ on PC has finally received the kind of catch-up update long-time fans have wanted for years. Nicalis has pushed a major Steam patch that folds later console additions back into the PC release, turning what once felt like a historically important but comparatively limited version into something much closer to the modern feature set.

What the update adds

According to the patch details published for the update and summarized by Gematsu, the headline additions are two-player co-op and full mod support. But the patch is much broader than a single new mode. Nicalis says the Steam build now gets later soundtracks, the Sand Pit Challenge, a jukebox, widescreen support, animated dialogue portraits, enhanced lighting, physical water effects, water backgrounds, map shading, strafing, dialogue skipping, and a set of small difficulty and flow tweaks.

That matters because Cave Story is one of those games whose legacy has spread across many ports, revisions, and fan arguments about the best way to play it. Bringing the PC version closer to feature parity reduces the sense that Steam players were stuck on an older branch while console releases kept absorbing the extras.

Why mod support is the bigger shift

The longer-term change may be mod support. The update adds stackable mods, support for custom graphics packs, seasonal themes, soundtracks, sounds, and a Lua API that reaches into multiple parts of the game. For a title with this much historical goodwill, that is more than a bonus checkbox. It turns the Steam edition into a more durable community platform, where preservation and experimentation can happen at the same time.

Why this matters in 2026

Cave Story does not need a reinvention to stay relevant. What it needed was a cleaner PC package that respected how players actually revisit old classics: through replays, challenge runs, version comparisons, and mods. This update does exactly that. Instead of leaving the Steam release as a museum piece, Nicalis is turning it into a living edition that better reflects everything the game accumulated across later console releases.