Step into the underground world of caves in the most realistic VR spelunking game, where the entire environment is your map, just waiting to be discovered. Beat environmental challenges including steep climbs, narrow tunnels and water. Mark your own clues on cave walls with chalk. Clear your path of obstacles with a hammer. Climb walls and ceilings using ice axes. Maintain your gear to ensure its reliability so you can reach more challenging areas...

Crawl through small spaces as you venture ever deeper

Before playing Cave Crave I knew I wasn't a huge fan of tight spaces, but I didn't think I was claustrophobic... Turns out I am more anxious of crawling through small spaces than I realised. I think the Nutty Putty Cave accident of 2009 didn't help matters, as that was an incident that always troubled me. But here I was, strapping on the VR headset, about to face my fears.

The early part of the game is a simple tutorial on how to move about, and use some of the equipment. It walks you through holding your breath in order to squeeze through particularly narrow areas and once I'd gotten over my initial mild phobia, I found the game quite challenging... and, believe it or not, oddly relaxing.

If you fail to meet a challenge, like running out of air when squeezing through a tight area, the save point transports you back to the beginning of that area so you don't have to recrawl through the distance you've already covered.

There's a story that runs throughout, about your character and his fractured relationship with his father

There's a story that runs throughout, about your character and his fractured relationship with his father. This helps to provide a nice touching element to the game adding to a more immersive experience.

You can play the story mode, simply explore the caves without any story and there's even a sort of horror mode where large spiders roam the caves.

Overall, this is a pretty enjoyable game which makes great use of the VR technology. And the developers have already added additional free content to the game just after launch, with more DLC planned in the near future.

8

Darren Rea