Review: Cave Crave | GamesHedge

Developed by 3R Games and published by Take It Studios!, Cave Crave is a brand-new title that allows you to wear your diving gear and explore some of the most haunting and beautiful caves in the VR world. Cave diving is not an easy task, and very few people on Earth are brave enough to do it. Even if we put aside the claustrophobia, there are a lot of risks and costs associated with it, and many people have actually lost their lives following their passion for cave diving. This high-stakes passion, however, has never persuaded crazed fans to abandon their pursuit of discovering new caves and diving into them to explore the mysteries that lie in the dark and mossy crevices of these places. 3R Games’ latest title, Cave Crave, removes all of these risks and allows you to explore caves straight from the comfort of your living room. This is our review of Cave Crave on the Meta Quest in which we dive into a spider-infested cave and find some dinosaur fossils in claustrophobic cave systems.

Cave Crave offers three game modes at launch. You have your Campaign Mode, a Tourist Mode, and a Horror Mode. The Campaign Mode and Tourist Mode are interconnected as they share the same levels. The Campaign Mode will offer the full game experience, where you experience the narrative of the game. Once you complete a cave, you unlock the next cave, and you can also try out the previously unlocked caves in the Tourist Mode. The Tourist Mode removes all time limits, collectibles, narrative elements, and everything else so you can dive into a cave, explore till you fancy, and not worry about any objectives. The main campaign levels often ask you to perform specific tasks like collecting items, completing specific tasks, and you must complete them before your battery dies.

The Horror aspect of Cave Crave feels a little unexplored at this moment. There is a level where you explore a spider-infested cave in order to find some collectibles and leave with your life. These are not technically horror, but if you hate spiders, this level is going to give you nightmares. I did run into a Spider during this level, but it just respawned me back to the previous checkpoint. The cave design is excellent, but the actual size of the spider was a little disappointing. The two levels on offer are not technically enough for a separate mode, but they give you a small idea of what the developers want to feature here. We will need to wait for future levels to arrive in the game to truly explore this mode, but for the time being, you can stick to the main campaign and its multitude of caves.

Cave Crave shines when it comes to its gameplay and level design. Starting with its gameplay, you use Meta Quest’s controllers to play the game. Using both controllers, you will move your hands in-game and make crawling or climbing gestures, which result in your in-game character moving forward. Moving your head around allows you to look around in the cave and look for a path ahead. Movement is extremely satisfying as you grab onto different surfaces in the cave and progress in the game. It makes you feel like you are climbing through caves and mud-ridden cliffs in real life. Normal exploration is simple, movement using your left controller’s joystick, but when you need to climb around, you must rely on your hands and the controller’s pinch buttons. The triggers help you hold your breath and squeeze through tight areas.

You can only squeeze your breath for a limited time, so if you take too long to complete these sections, you will die and respawn at the previous checkpoint that you passed. These sections are really intense because not only are the areas tight and dark, but you are at risk of running out of breath as well. To help you with various tasks, you unlock different items for use as you progress through the initial levels. For clearing obstacles such as rock formations, you get an axe; for climbing flat surfaces, you can use pitons to make artificial climbing spaces and go straight up. Your trusty torch sits at the top of your head, and you can use hand gestures to increase or decrease its intensity. 3R Games has not left little details out to make the experience as authentic as possible, and this is what makes Cave Crave such an amazing experience. You also get an infrared to look around caves in complete darkness, but it drains your battery much faster, so you have to limit its use.

The overall experience feels extremely authentic as you use different tools to dive into these caves and explore unknown areas. The caves are a dirty place, and as you move around them, you will start noticing your gloves become dirty as well, and this leads to you slipping on the surface. To counter this, you must regularly clean your gloves too. This brings us to the level design of Cave Crave. The caves in the game are a treat to explore. They feel very natural, and I do not remember a single time when I said that this cave feels very weirdly designed. Each cave has its own atmosphere, challenges, and routes to explore. The mud caves look exactly like mud, while the rock caves feel rocky and hard to touch.

Each surface also behaves differently as you approach it. It is easier to prick the mud caves with the pitons, but you have to slam them down really hard in rock caves to make sure that they do not give way when you climb up them. Since there are no in-game maps, you have to rely on chalk to navigate inside these caves. This is where it gets a little sloppy because, unlike in real life, you cannot use chalk on every wall. In the game, certain points appear conveniently on forks in the path, which allow you to mark which path to take and which to avoid. You can draw anything on these rocks that could be helpful if you get lost. They stick out from the rest of the cave walls a little, so it feels a little artificial.

Depending on what cave type you are exploring, the cave will offer a visual delight for your eyes. They are highly detailed and come with different small things here and there that give you an idea of how the real thing would work. You can smash blockades, pick up small rocks and throw them around, and even small water bodies in these caves are reactive to different actions. Rock caves feel dry and hard, while mud caves feel slippery. If you head over to the Horror levels, the spider nest level feels absolutely disgusting, like you are exploring some sort of cosmic horror den. The caves feel very atmospheric thanks to dark tones, impressive lighting, and believable route design. Depending on your chosen game mode, the soundtrack also differs, adding to its immersion.

At this point, Cave Crave has around six levels in its base campaign mode, and all of these caves can be explored in its Tourist mode as well. Apart from these levels, the Horror mode has two levels, which seem to be too low to be considered as a proper mode. It is a fun distraction from the main campaign mode, but the number of levels does not do it justice. The developers are promising more levels both for the main as well as the Horror mode, so the overall content will grow in size with time.

The life of Cave Crave will depend on the level of content that arrives in the game because one cave can only provide so much replayability. Since its release, we have already received a brand-new map, Mosslump Cave, in the game, which is both unique in terms of visual design and shows that the developer is still actively working to add more content to the game. With a few more maps added to the Horror section as well as the base game mode, Cave Crave will offer quite a lot of content for any new players who decide to jump into it.

Cave Crave is also a very polished title, and we do not remember experiencing any sort of game-breaking bugs during our gameplay. The onboarding communication is a little confusing, and it may take you a little time to figure out how crawling works and how you can squeeze through tight spaces, but once you understand how it works, it is a very smooth game to jump into and even works pretty well for a quick play session.

There is another issue: when you respawn after dying, the camera changes its orientation every time you respawn in the game, which results in you rotating your body to align yourself with the new view. This can be annoying if you die a few times at the same location. For our review, we tried the game on Meta Quest 3, so we basically have the most powerful hardware out there. It should be fine on Meta Quest 1 and 2, but Cave Crave does feature impressive visuals and sound design, so it is not very light on resource utilization.

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Final Verdict:

Cave Crave is a great example of how VR can allow players to experience something that they may not be able to experience in real life. If you have always wanted to dive into claustrophobic caves and experience what it is like deep down in the world of cave diving, but are too afraid to do it in real life, Cave Crave can satisfy your cave exploration needs. Featuring great gameplay mechanics and a haunting atmosphere, Cave Crave brings the intense feeling of actually being in the down under without the actual phobia. It is a great, polished release that does not feel incomplete at any level. It is a great addition to any VR library that loves extreme sports, daring world adventures, or is just curious to explore some caves.

Final Score: 8.5/10

Review Access to Cave Crave was provided for this review by the developers. Read our Review Policy.