Drain the cave. Then go deeper.
Somewhere under everything there is a cave full of slime, and the slime is full of fuel. You go down with a flamethrower and a tank, and you do not come back up until you have collected every last globule. The green is alive. It has eyes, it knows the maze better than you do, and it comes for you the moment you drop in. Burn it — but burning costs fuel, and fuel is the thing you are down there to collect. Strip a cave clean and the floor opens onto a bigger one.
STORY & LORE
The yellow and the green
Two things down here look wet and neither is the other. The yellow globules hanging off the rock are fuel: pick one up and it goes in your tank and on your tally at the same time. The green is goop, and goop is alive. Nobody has ever explained why a cave is producing both, and nobody has offered enough money for anyone to ask.
The ten percent
Most of the cave is rock and slime. Every so often you pass a plate of hull, a run of rivets, or a fitting that is somehow still lit — something was down here before the slime was, and the slime has been eating it ever since. The big goop have something curled up inside them, and you only see it for the second after the body goes.
The rack
You bring your own nozzle. The stock rig works. Everything else on the rack is scavenged — brass off a salvage run, a length of somebody's hull, a burner that runs on bile — and each one throws a different coloured flame. They come loose the deeper you get.
HOW IT PLAYS
Collect everything
A cave is finished when there is not one globule left in it. That is the whole objective: the maze fills with fuel, you hoover it up, and the floor opens on a bigger maze. The counter at the top left is how much of this one you have left, and the minimap marks every globule you have not reached yet so the last few are findable rather than infuriating.
Fuel is the score and the ammo
Every globule is six percent in the tank and one on the tally. The flamethrower drains twenty-five percent a second, so roughly four seconds of held trigger per globule collected. Run the tank dry and the nozzle locks out until you let go and it trickles back — which is a long time to stand in a corridor with something wet coming toward you.
Drums
Four fuel drums sit in the far corner of each quadrant. Crack one and you get eight seconds of overcharge: a full tank that does not drain, double burn, and every goop in the cave turns and runs from you instead of at you. It is the only time down here you are the thing being avoided.
What the goop does
The goop navigates. A flow field over the maze is rebuilt several times a second, so they take corners and come around blocks rather than pressing themselves against the wall between you. Brutes burst into two gooplings when they go. Hosts move faster than they look like they should.
Damage
There is no health bar. The edges of the screen redden as the goop gets through your suit, and they keep reddening. Clear the cave and you carry what is left of your hull into the next one.
The cave is laid out like an arcade maze
Not like a generated maze. A recursive backtracker gives you dead ends and exactly one route between any two points, which is the wrong shape for being chased: what you want is loops, the ability to run a circuit, and never to turn a corner into a pocket. So the cave is a lattice of corridors with blocks of rock between them, mirrored down the middle, with segments removed only where removing them leaves nothing hanging — and anything that still ends up with one way out gets a second one opened before you ever see it. There is a shaft in the middle and a tunnel through each side wall that comes out the other side.
What comes up the shaft
Clear the cave of goop and more of it climbs out of the hole in the middle, a body at a time, faster and tougher each wave. The level still ends on the globules and not on the goop — the waves are the pressure, not the objective.
GALLERY
WHAT LIVES DOWN THERE
| Goop | Size | Health | Speed | Worth | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Goopling | Small | 2.2 | 1.55 | 1 | One eye. Fast, and there are always more. |
| Goop | Medium | 5.0 | 1.05 | 2 | The standard article. |
| Host | Medium | 8.0 | 1.25 | 4 | Three eyes and something blue inside it. |
| Brute | Large | 13.0 | 0.66 | 5 | Bursts into two gooplings when it goes. |
NOZZLES
Cosmetic — the flame colour changes, the burn does not. Unlocked by how deep you have ever been.
| Nozzle | Flame | Unlock |
|---|---|---|
| Stock Rig | Orange | Yours from the start |
| Salvage Brass | Warm gold | Clear 2 caves |
| Hull Scrap | Cold blue | Clear 4 caves |
| Bile Burner | Acid green | Clear 6 caves |
| Blacklight | Violet | Clear 8 caves |
NUMBERS
| Thing | Value |
|---|---|
| Tank | 100% |
| Globule | +6% fuel, +1 collected |
| Flame drain | 25% per second |
| Trickle back | 3.2% per second |
| Flame range | 4.4 metres |
| Overcharge | 8 seconds, double burn, goop flees |
| Cave 1 | 15x15, about 105 globules |
| Cave 8 | 23x23, about 275 globules |
VERSION HISTORY
- Genre moved from Shooting to Shooting › FPS. Categories are two levels now — overarching genres with sub-genres beneath them — so this is a more precise shelf rather than a different one: the game still appears under Shooting.
- Phone controls. The aiming in this game is a mouse delta read under pointer lock, and pointer lock does not exist on a handset — so an on-screen D-pad would have moved you and aimed nothing. It now carries the touch rig instead: a floating thumbstick on the left that sends the game its own movement keys, and a look surface on the right that drives the camera directly. The manifest gained `mobile` and `touch`, without which the rig would have rendered nothing at all. Not yet phone-VERIFIED — that still wants a human and a real handset.
- The big corner button is BURN and holds, which is what a flamethrower wants; a tap anywhere on the look side is a quick squirt.
- Phone fit, completed. The title screen is a centred flex column, and on a phone frame its content was taller than the box — so the overflow spilled equally past BOTH edges, slicing the top off the title and the bottom off the button, with nothing scrollable to reach either. It now scrolls, and the centring is done with auto margins so it still centres when there is room and the top stays reachable when there is not. Verified clean at 844x390, 390x844 and desktop.
- The cave is laid out like an arcade maze rather than generated like a maze: a mirrored lattice of corridors with loops everywhere, a shaft in the middle, and a tunnel through each side wall that comes out the other side. Verified over a hundred and twenty generated caves: no dead ends anywhere, everything reachable.
- More open ground. The corridors sit on a three-cell lattice, so the blocks between them are proper rock rather than one-cell pillars.
- Clear the goop and another wave climbs out of the shaft in the middle, a body at a time, faster and tougher each time. The level still ends on the globules.
- The objective is across the top of the screen at a size you can read — "BURN THE CAVE DRY — 143 GLOBULES LEFT" — with the drain gauge under it. It used to be eight-point text in the corner reading a fraction, which is a statistic rather than an instruction.
- The flame frays. Every blob rolls its own way through the jet, swells leaving the nozzle and pinches out at the end, rises as it burns, and the last stretch of it goes to dark smoke instead of fire fading out. The young ones carry a hard bright core.
- The jet breathes: two slow wobbles at frequencies that do not divide into each other, plus a sub under it, so it stops sitting on one note while the trigger is down — and letting go coughs rather than going silent.
- Still a locked frame with the trigger held at 1280x720, which is the constraint the whole flame system is built around.
- Fixed a stutter while the trigger was held. Flame particles were growing until each one filled a third of the screen, and forty overlapping additive sprites that size is millions of blended pixels a frame — up against a wall it cost two frames in three at 1080p.
- The stream is now fewer, fatter, brighter particles with a hard cap on how large one can be drawn, and anything too faint to see is skipped. Nose-to-wall firing went from 67 dropped frames in 180 to 3 in 145; firing down an open cave is completely clean.
- The sprite and HUD layer now backs its resolution off as the window grows, instead of drawing at devicePixelRatio 2 on a 1080p display for artwork this chunky, and the damage vignette is built once rather than every frame.
- Result: a locked 60fps at 1920x1080 as well as 1280x720, with essentially no dropped frames.
- Rebuilt from the wave-survival version into a collect-the-cave game: every cave is a maze seeded with fuel globules, and it is finished when you have taken all of them.
- Fuel is now both the objective and the ammunition — yellow globules go in the tank and on the tally, and the flamethrower spends them.
- Four drums per cave give eight seconds of overcharge, during which the goop flees.
- Goop navigates the maze on a flow field rebuilt several times a second instead of walking into walls.
- New renderer: the world is drawn into a fixed-size buffer and upscaled, so frame cost no longer grows with the window. The old build cast one ray per three screen pixels and ran at half rate on any display 1280 wide or more.
- Pause on ESC or P, a nozzle rack with five unlockable skins, eight achievements, and a HUD in a hand-cut alien face on riveted plate.
- Damage is a closing red vignette rather than a health bar.
- Desktop only. Holding a flamethrower on something takes a mouse.