Cave: Predatory Innocence
Cave is a narrative management game about being a newborn predatory force. Your only means of interacting with the world are the people you lure into the cave. Their bodies become your limbs. Their life experiences become your nutrition.
Expand your reach, manage power and bodies, and choose how Cave grows. Survive repeated Purges and discover what Cave is becoming.
Inevitably, your actions will draw the attention of the Purge. Sooner or later, they will find and destroy all your bodies. Cave will hibernate, dreaming of the lives it has absorbed, and awaken again when someone stumbles into it.
Current build: alpha, playable. Controls: designed for mouse / touchpad.
Feedback wanted:
Was the objective clear in the first few minutes? What confused you first? What made you keep playing, or stop? Please leave a comment after playing — even brief reactions help.
Comments
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What a fresh and interesting concept! it's totally alien to me! I love it. encountered no bugs that I could see. game is definitely thought provoking and unique! I love the idea of being some unseen force tucked away in the caves pondering how to manipulate humans into doing it's bidding :D
the objective was clear: survive by using bodies to do my bidding. it could be a little clearer how to manage properly- I can't seem to balance enough to collect more than three-4 hosts at a time.
Curiosity drove me to keep playing! only stopped to go to work. +2 support <3
Thank you! I am so happy you liked it, and that my intent is getting through.
I think I made a mistake with adding a layer of mechanics between bodies and tasks. Fairly certain that that's the main current friction - it makes balancing harder than it should be. So I'm tossing the whole interaction layer and replacing it with a different one, which will make balancing intuitive and diegetic.
I actually managed to get pretty far! the hangup I ended on was I unlocked one of the ways of knowing myself and I accidentally triggered an event at the same time, soft locking the save
but it's a really good game! it needs some ambiance, some sound! love it, A+++
13/04/2026 20:48 version:
- Reduce difficulty
- Split notifications UI to ongoing and events
- Add Suspicion ongoing notification
- Add guidances in ongoing notifications
12/14/2026 15:13 version:
- Improve node overlay labels
- Highlight unowned Habiti in Body Card
- Better Editor ergonomics
- Keyboard time controls
- Pause while selecting bodies
- Add Understanding
- Add What Am I?
- Add How Did I Come To Be?
- Add Do Locals Know Of Me?
- Add Does The Patriarchy Know Of Me?
- Add How Hard Can I Go?
- Add How Big Can I Get?
- Cave Level Up now gives Understandings
- Prose cleanup
09/04/2026 21:44 version:
- Add Lure Villager
- Add Hommleter habitus
- More prose
- Add screen shake when a body dies
- Red pulsing background when Purge is on
- Add Merchant of Hommlet quest
- Add permanent Coin chests
- Proxy death animation
- Better throughput management
- Better Cave resource logic
- Add Trading Post
- Add Wood Wholesaler
- Add Slave Market
- Add Slave Uprising
- Add Accountant quest
- Optimize veins and bodies
- Add Inside and Outside hubs
- Add Food, Heat, Bodies, Purge, UI tutorials
- Tighten prose
03/04/2026 23:27 version
- Add "Show FPS" toggle in Main Menu
- Mark suspicious activities
- Add Hommlet
- Add Hommlet Lodging
- Add Coin resource
- Add Buy Coin Chest
- Add Coin Chest
- Add Day Labor
- Make Explore permanent (Know Thyself option)
- Optimize UI
01/04/2026 02:16 version
- Make Main Menu look better
- Add a few more Habiti
- Deprecate camera focus on selection
- Add Hommlet and Day Laborer
31/03/2026 05:01 version
- Improve body assignment
- Improve tutorial texts
- Improve post-absorption report display
- Improve label logic
- Add 27 Habiti
- Add and make visible Habiti effects
- Add tutorial for Absorption and Habiti
28/03/2026 18:25 version:
- Add Node labels
- When changing throttle during pause, update values
- Make background light on cycle scale with progress
- Add Tutorials Phase 1
- Add Habiti (initial implementation)
23/03/2026 21:15 version:
- Fix camera on wide screens
- Add game UI icons
- Improve resource transfer displays
- Disconnected nodes do not animate
- Show body healthbar in swarm row
- Fancy fillbar and slider
- Pretty transfers
- Improve all Cards
- Make all icons look good
17/03/2026 21:06 version:
- Improve Swarm and Body Cards
- Make Avatars persistent, unified display for webgl and dom
- Hide throttle on Egg
- Add tutorial for time controls
- Fix blueprints exposure in devtools scope
- Fix initial camera zoom
- Hide power requirement when hiding throttle
- Fix drag window egde in devtools
- Add Thoughts
- Add entity debug inspector
15/03/2026 02:34 version
- Deprecate Faces
- Make Cave Card clearer
- Make Cave furry
- Nice default placements
- Add Visuals Editor
- Add new node fill
- Add new shapes
- Nice displays for all nodes
11/03/2026 14:54 version:
- Add animated background
- Add noise to all vein params
- Add vein walls
- Make veins taper slightly
- Spawn and Kill animations
- Replace Aura with Light
- Add Light to Cave display
11/03/2006 02:11 version:
- Add versioning for saved data
- No "are you sure" popup when clicking play without an autosave present
- Swarm avatars shuffle
10/03/2026 20:39 version:
- Add notifications stack
- Add tutorial
10/03/2026 14:40 version:
- Add Larder (food buffer).
- Bodies that are not a Face or Swarm (assigned or traveling) must not contribute attributes to pool, but they continue paying upkeep.
- No pull resources when throttled down to 0.
- Disconnect triggered one-off cycle entities from power veins and stop showing throttle.