Cave Crave (2025) This is a VR game where you explore caves. There are no monsters, no treasure chests, no puzzles. Clamor the oppressive cave interior lies further underground around you. Currently, developer 3R games do what most people expect. They purposefully replicate the current inaccessible cave system in which the man died.
next month, The longing of the cave Following the fatal accident that killed 26-year-old John Edward Jones, before it was permanently sealed in 2009, it is releasing an update to Quest and PSVR 2 that brings the game’s recreation of the caves of Nut Pate, the infamous Utah-based cave system that captivated amateur and professional caverns.
In short, Jones crossed the group and nut putty when it broke to go solo, trapped in a vertical cleft of 10 x 18 inches wide. As a result, there was a 27-hour rescue attempt that ultimately failed to save him. Since then, unforgettable stories have echoed around the internet, so you may have seen the image below, showing Jones’ route.
No matter what abilities you can go there today. In the wake of the disaster, the explosives were used to collapse the ceiling of a section of Jones’ body, and all entrances to the cave were permanently sealed by filling it with concrete, so it never happened there again.
To replicate Nutty Putty, 3R Games says it used public documents and official cave maps provided by Brandon Kowallis, the case rescuer who wrote a detailed account of the efforts to extract Jones. Kowallis’ Recounting is a disastrous reading that doesn’t summarise here.
Profit, Ethics, Virtual Tourists
Importantly, the studio says that recreation of nut patties “avoids tragic gamification.” On the surface, it is an option to remove bits such as environmental hazards, collectibles, and player deaths by allowing users to visit in “tourist mode.”
“Our goal is to ensure that VR Explorer has access to places that are no longer available to visit in real life. There’s nothing better,” says Piotr Surmacz, CEO of 3R Games and Director of the title.
However, recreating nut pate raises doubt. To the studio’s achievement, they don’t gaming, so it seems they treat recreation with grace. Still, I’m at odds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m_6j1akkmc
Dark tourism is nothing new. Visit your place intentionally know Having a history of misery and death is for memory, exploring your own feelings about problems, or for simple pathological appeal. It should not be penalized when it is done with respect, and should not be fined, especially if it is done in such a low-stakes arena as a single-player virtual reality game.
I have no recreational issues. Ideally, some platforms at some point in the future could also be able to replicate the whole world in detail and virtually explore it, perhaps including the past and present. To this day, one of my favourite apps is Google Earth VRThis allows you to do so to some extent, as it only integrates 3D buildings, geographical scans, and photos from Google Street View 360.
Google Earth VR But it abstracts the motivations of profits from equations that are somewhat abstracted. Having a well completely makes money in other invisible ways, but does not dive directly from me directly into the bravest places on earth, like the exclusion zone of Chernobyl, the crematorium of Buchenwald, or the public monument to the tragedy of any kind of perspective.
The update is free, The longing of the cave It’s a paid game. In a way, we can see the misery of Jones’ death as profitable to some extent. The 3R game does not indicate that it is associated with any kind of charity or caving association.
The difference is where things become blurred between exploration as a public service and as a commercial product.
This will be the first Authentic Cave 3R Games is recreated for the game. Since the launch of Quest and PSVR 2 in June 2025, The longing of the cave It contains only fictional caves, providing players with a path to traverse challenging and memorable paths. Many popular caves have been involved in the tragedy, but have not been made public more publicly than Jones. Any Caves may come with similar moral gray areas.
The whole thing leaves me with more questions than answers, which makes me feel uneasy.
Is this a gloomy homage to the risks of real-world caves? Or is it a promotional stunt that attracts your eyes to a studio game? I think it’s a little of both.
And how is it different to playing a nut putty? Any A game based on history, like World War II? Companies are always profiting from these motifs without the curb of controversy, despite the true meaning that this event undoubtedly saw the deaths of thousands of people.
I don’t really know yet. Probably because it was more recent. Maybe because we can be more directly related to Jones. If he was alive today, maybe he’s playing The longing of the cave Right now. Maybe I’m partially wrapped in a taboo that reopens what was purposefully closed, not just for safety, but as a memorial to a man who died in the most frightening way anyone could think of. I feel that maybe it’s a bit off-color to feature it in the game rather than as part of the public tool.
Either way, writing this made me become part of the same dark tourist circuit The longing of the cave. And by reading it, you too.
