Chances are, if you use YouTube relatively frequently, that you too were treated to the algorithm wanting to show you all these videos about cave exploration incidents several months back.
Before this year, I had no real opinion on cave exploration. After those videos? To say I had an unflattering opinion of those of us that choose to risk life and limb to explore dark and uninviting ground fissures would be an understatement. It’s a testament, then, that Cave Crave has somehow managed to showcase why those of us might decide to forgo the safety of our homes to explore the unknown in a damp and muddy cave.
What is it?: A singleplayer first person immersive VR cave diving simulator with an optional horror mode.
Platforms: Quest, PlayStation VR2 (Tested on Quest 3)
Release Date: Out Now (Quest), July 10, 2025 (PlayStation VR2)
Developer: 3R Games
Price: $14.99
To that end, Cave Crave is exactly what it says on the tin. Explore murky caves with the use of various tools; a headlamp with an infrared sensor, a hammer to carefully clear paths, picks to create handholds, and more. Crawling through a cave at first glance doesn’t seem like it would be very engaging. But even early on, Cave Crave asserts that even if these caves are cramped, there’s a lot of room to explore the gameplay implications of delving them.
Gameplay in Cave Crave is outwardly simple, but also contains a level of depth I didn’t quite expect. At its core, the goal is simple: find the secondary exit for the cave you’re in. Sometimes this is simple, only requiring a squeeze here and there you’ll have to hold your breath by squeezing both triggers, and then physically pulling yourself through a crack in the cave. At other times, you’ll require some extra preparation to descend or ascend a wall to a safer platform.
At any moment, you can summon a handhold from your inventory to shove straight into a wall, creating a path for you to climb. Grasping onto the handhold, however, takes stamina – you’ll want to keep a steady rhythm of placing handholds, swapping hands to regulate your stamina, all while grabbing new handholds and precisely shoving them into a cave wall. You can place them improperly if you aren’t careful, and they won’t stick if you don’t set them with enough force. Thankfully whenever I failed to place one, I can clearly understand why. During my play sessions, any mistakes feel like my own fault.
Similarly, using the hammer to break stalagmites and stalactites blocking my way is very intuitive. Rounding things off, the game tells you early on to regularly make sure to scrub off excess mud from your gloves using another tool, since letting too much build up can be disastrous for your grip strength. All told, all of Cave Crave’s tools feel like they synthesize nicely. Together, they help make cave exploration feel engaging, while avoiding feeling like needless busywork. After a while, it all becomes second nature.
Cave Crave offers snap and smooth turning as options for comfort, but otherwise controls are pretty set in stone. While you can move with artificial stick-based locomotion when standing up or crouching, crawling forces you to move by physically grabbing onto the cave wall and pulling yourself forward through tight crevices.
While Cave Crave’s story acts something like a tutorial, the game also offers numerous challenge stages that really stress your knowledge of the systems. Certain sections of cave walls let you draw diagrams with chalk, which is immediately more useful in the Horror Mode stages that come with significantly windier paths, complete with hazards to avoid. While the infrared sensor on your headlamp is useful to search for collectibles in normal stages, expending the battery life on your lamp to activate it becomes an essential resource during Horror Mode. While the normal difficulty was engaging enough, Horror Mode is arguably where the game’s systems truly shine.
Horror Mode is less a separate difficulty option, but rather another set of levels designed to stress players’ knowledge of the game’s various systems. There’s a very real danger in falling to your death if you aren’t careful – or losing progress from getting bit by giant spiders. Levels branch and loop in on themselves much more often, requiring smart usage of chalk to set landmarks to remember where you’ve been, and what paths you’ve already taken. Essentially, these stages are for players looking to test the limits of their skills.
Speaking of testing limits; this is where I’d like to mention the game’s performance. Cave Crave looks and runs great on Quest 3; while I’m sure the eventual PlayStation VR2 version will benefit from the OLED display, it doesn’t feel like players are getting a compromised experience on Quest. Resolutions are crisp, framerates are high, and the overall visual fidelity of the game – even if you’re “just” exploring caves – is quite nice.
Cave Crave – Final Verdict
Right now, Cave Crave is an easy recommendation on Quest 3. While the game will continue to receive updates in the weeks and months ahead, this experience already nails it where it counts. If you’ve ever fancied yourself a cave explorer, you could do far worse than giving this a shot. Cave Crave straddles the line between being simple enough to get into, while offering enough depth to keep players going for even more spelunking.
UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.
This article was originally published on uploadvr.com