Windows & Linux · Steam Deck ready
Cave Escape
The darker it gets, the faster you run.
Your torch is your clock, your map, and the only thing keeping you alive. Descend a cave that regrows every run, where the light gets shorter, the maze gets stranger, and panic makes you fast. Find the ladder before the dark finds you.
The premise
The way out is down
You wake up underground holding somebody else's torch. There are ninety seconds of light in it, one way out, and no reason given.
Cave Escape is a top-down maze-escape game about a light that is always leaving. Every level is generated fresh, timed to the hundredth of a second, and scored — and the further you go, the less the cave behaves.
The torch
The torch is the whole game
It is your clock and your map at once, and it is the only light down here. As it burns down the walls close in, the corridor you are standing in stops being visible, and you start moving faster — up to three times your walking speed, whether you want to or not. That is not a power. That is panic, and it will run you straight past the turning you needed.
Torches left burning by whoever came before add twelve seconds each. You will hear one before you see it.
What lives there
Nothing down here is safe in both directions
Hunters
Repelled by a bright torch. They stalk you at less than your speed — you can always walk away — then stop dead, flare their eyes, screech, and pounce. The warning is real: move during it and the lunge misses.
The Lost
Drawn to a bright torch. They wear your own shape, drained of colour, and they cry out in a voice that is not yours. Something came down here before you did.
So a full torch keeps the hunters off and brings the Lost. A dying one loses the Lost and commits the hunters — while you are already running at three times your own speed. Neither state is safe. There is no setting on the torch that solves the cave.
The one verb
One verb, and it costs light
Hold the compass and it points the way out. It also burns your torch three times faster, charges you the moment you press it, and the deeper you are the more it lies — sweeping off true rather than pointing, so it has to be watched to be read. Watching is what you are paying for.
Seven moods
Every cave is a different cave
Seven moods, drawn deeper and more often the further you fall, and every one of them is named on your HUD before you take a step.
- Infested — twice the hunters, standing water, spores in the air.
- Warren — the corridors loop back on themselves. Backtracking stops working.
- Draughty — a cold wind eats your torch. You can hear the way out.
- Lodestone — the rock pulls at your compass.
- Sparse — few torches were left burning here.
- Deep — this one goes a long way down.
No ceiling
There is no bottom
The maze grows, the exit moves further away, the dead ends open into loops, and the creatures keep coming. Your best time on every level is kept, and the Descent leaderboard ranks the whole world by how far down you got and how fast you moved once you were there.
Nobody has found the bottom, because there isn't one.
Features
What you get
- A cave that regrows every run — no two descents are the same maze
- Ninety seconds of light, and everything you do spends it
- Two creatures that want opposite things from your torch
- Seven cave moods that change what a level is, not just how big it is
- A global leaderboard, and a personal best on every level you have ever escaped
- 22 achievements
- Full controller support, and it runs at the Steam Deck's native resolution