REVIEW – Cave Crave doesn’t need monsters to get under your skin – it does it by daring you to squeeze into places you’d never choose to enter with a clear head. On Meta Quest and PlayStation VR2, this is a patience-and-forearms kind of trip: you cling, you mark routes with chalk, you drive picks into rock. And the moment the game asks for “take a breath – hold it”, you realize the real scare here isn’t horror – it’s physics.

The first time I saw the Cave Crave trailer, it looked like the rare VR experience that actually commits to a full-on caving simulation. It deliberately leaned into that closed-in, nowhere-to-go feeling, and I could easily see it turning into a straight-up nightmare for anyone prone to claustrophobia. Since that’s not a button it pushes for me, the obvious question was whether I’d still make it through without getting rattled.

In the story mode, you step into the boots of Jake, who heads underground on an emotionally messy, resentment-fueled journey while following in his father’s footsteps. The hook is personal: he grew up with a dad who spent more time chasing expeditions than being home, until caves practically became more important than family.

Stuck To The Wall: When The Cave Grabs Your Controllers Too

3R Games clearly built this around physical movement, and you feel the payoff immediately as you push deeper underground. Most of the time, the natural way to move is to reach out to the walls, the floor, even the ceiling, then pull yourself along through tightening passages. The real stress test hits when you reach sections where the difference between “made it” and “nope” is measured in inches. That’s when you have to take a deep breath, then use your controller triggers to hold it while you winch yourself through to the other side. If you’re too slow or accidentally let that breath go, Jake’s run is over. Thankfully, the checkpoints are generous, so a botched squeeze doesn’t send you back into the stone age.

Movement is only half the deal – you also get a set of tools that make the underground trek feel like an actual expedition. The first essential is your helmet-mounted light, because in the dark it becomes your lifeline, and you adjust it by reaching above your head. In this review build, the grab zone felt slightly off, but the developers say an upcoming patch will shift it into a better position. Next come the climbing picks, and you really do have to drive them into the rock – which can be finicky in VR. Hang too long, ignore your gloves, and you can slip; set them poorly, and they might rotate or even pop out while you climb. To keep your gloves usable, you’re given a cleaning tool to scrape mud and grime off your palms. It works well, but if your Meta Quest is set to activate hand tracking by tapping the controllers together, it’s easy to trigger that by mistake right when you’re trying to clean up.

Chalk, Hammer, Tablet: Small Survival Gear, Big Nerves

The next batch of gadgets helps you push through problem spots while keeping track of where you’ve been – and which routes you’ve already tried. Stalactites can block your path, but you’re equipped with a hammer to smash those obstacles and reopen the way forward. You also get chalk, and when you hit a fork – or just want to make sure you’re not looping the same tunnels – you can draw arrows and markings on the rock to show where you’ve traveled. It’s surprisingly useful. Finally, there’s your tablet, which keeps an eye on objectives, counts the fossils you’ve collected, and gives you access to in-game options.

Beyond the core crawling-and-climbing, there’s a story mode that follows Jake’s path while feeding you the emotional baggage in measured doses. There’s also a Tourist mode for freer exploration, and a Horror mode that throws you into uncharted sections with limited resources and unpleasant threats, tightening the whole experience. Right now, the content doesn’t feel endless, but what’s there works well for the roughly $14.99 price point. 3R Games has also said that post-launch, they want to add new caves, story chapters, extra tools, and even new mechanics (like swimming) through free updates, which could give the game much longer legs.

The Feeling Of Isolation: When Silence Starts To Press Back

Visually, it delivers what it needs to, with solid cave detail whether you’re staring at mud, stone, or the textures that make tight spaces feel uncomfortably real. Lighting is everything down here, and the helmet light’s adjustable focus and spread adds a lot – it amplifies that cramped sensation, and in the tightest spots it can even nudge you toward a mild claustrophobic edge. Cave layouts and the overall fluidity of movement do a ton of heavy lifting for immersion, and it’s easy to forget you’re standing in your room.

My main visual gripe isn’t really on the developers – it’s a familiar Quest issue in dimly lit games, where deep blacks get swallowed by murky grays. Because of that, it feels completely reasonable to expect the PlayStation VR2 version to come out ahead in caves thanks to OLED displays that can actually hit true black.

The audio work is strong, and the minimal cave atmosphere is effective precisely because it avoids overdoing it: near-total silence gets interrupted by a low hum or the sound of rubble shifting, which sells the loneliness underground. In story mode, the voice work for Jake and his father’s recordings is solid enough to carry its role without drawing attention to itself. Add the snap of breaking stalactites, the thud of picks biting into rock, and water drops falling from above, and the soundscape hits every target it’s aiming for. There’s some light background music too, but I turned it off – the solitude feels sharper without it.

The VR Game That Won’t Let You Coast

Cave Crave delivers exactly what it promises: a VR spelunking adventure that treats the environment as a real obstacle course, not stage dressing. The physical movement and tool use create a genuinely powerful sense of presence as you grip wall, floor, and ceiling, inching yourself through narrow sections. That claustrophobic pressure hangs around in the background, and once the tunnels tighten further – especially in areas where you have to inhale and hold your breath – it can genuinely spike your pulse. The visuals and sound design pile on a strong sense of isolation, while the lighting and the helmet light’s adjustable beam spread constantly reinforce how little space you actually have, keeping tension high from start to finish. Still, you can feel that the current content won’t keep everyone returning for months, even with story mode, Tourist mode, and Horror mode included. At this price, though, what’s here is polished and functional. And with free updates promised – more chapters, more caves, more tools, and new gameplay mechanics – the overall package could grow into something much bigger. I’m curious how far the next updates are willing to push you underground.

-Herpai Gergely “BadSector”-

Publisher: 3R Games ( Meta Quest / Steam ), Take IT Studio! Sp. z o.o. ( PlayStation VR2 )
Developer: 3R Games S.A.
Genre: VR spelunking simulator (adventure/puzzle) with an optional horror mode
Release: June 26, 2025 ( Meta Quest ), July 10, 2025 ( PlayStation VR2 ), December 12, 2025 (PC VR – SteamVR)