Cave Crave (2025) is a VR game where you explore caves. No monsters, no treasure chests, no puzzles—just the oppressive cave interiors tightening around you as you traverse further underground. Now, developers 3R Games are doing something few would expect: they’re purposefully recreating a now inaccessible cave system where a man died.
Next month, Cave Crave is releasing an update on Quest and PSVR 2 that brings to the game a recreation of Nutty Putty Cave, the infamous Utah-based cave system which attracted amateur and professional cavers alike before being permanently sealed shut in 2009, following a fatal accident that killed 26-year-old John Edward Jones.
In short, Jones was caving through Nutty Putty with a group when he broke off to go solo, finding himself trapped in a vertical fissure just 10 by 18 inches wide. What resulted was 27 hours of rescue attempts that ultimately failed to save him. You may have seen the image below, showing Jones’ route, as the haunting story has reverberated around the Internet ever since.
You can’t go there today in any capacity. In the wake of the disaster, explosives were used to collapse the ceiling of the section where Jones’ body was, and all entry points to the cave were permanently sealed off by filling them with concrete so nothing of the sort could ever happen there again.
To recreate Nutty Putty, 3R Games says they’ve used public documentation and an official cave map provided by Brandon Kowallis, a rescuer in the incident who later wrote a detailed account of the efforts to extract Jones. Kowallis’ recounting is a harrowing read that I won’t recap here.
Profit, Ethics, and the Virtual Tourist
Critically, the studio says its recreation of Nutty Putty “avoids gamification of the tragedy,” ostensibly by allowing users to visit in ‘Tourist Mode’, an option that removes bits like environmental hazards, collectibles, and player death.
“Our goal is to give VR explorers access to a place that can no longer be visited in reality—nothing more, nothing less,” says Piotr Surmacz, CEO of 3R Games and director of the title.
But recreating Nutty Putty raises questions. To the studio’s credit, they seem to be handling the recreation with grace, since it won’t be gamified. Still, I’m conflicted.
Dark Tourism isn’t anything new. Purposefully visiting a place you know has a history of misery and death can be for remembrance, exploring your own feelings on the matter, or simple morbid fascination. None of it should be penalized when it’s done with respect, and especially not when done in such a low stakes arena as a single-player virtual reality game.
I don’t take issue with the recreation. Ideally, some platform at some time in the future will recreate the whole world in detail, maybe even including the past and present so we can explore it virtually. To this day, one of my favorite apps is Google Earth VR, which lets you do that to an extent, admittedly with much less granularity since it only integrates 3D building, geographic scans, and Google Street View 360 photos.
Google Earth VR is free though, which somewhat abstracts profit motive from the equation—knowing full well Google makes money in other unseen ways, but not directly from me popping my head into some of the most gut wrenching places on Earth, like the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the crematorium at Buchenwald, or public memorials to tragedies of all sorts—many of which are captured on Google Street View.
While the update is free, Cave Crave is a paid game. In a way, it could be seen as profiting off the misery of Jones’ death to some extent. 3R Games hasn’t made any indication that it’s associated with any sort of charity or caving association, which you might expect given the nature of the update.
That difference—between exploration as public service and as commercial product—is where things get murky.
This will be the first real cave 3R Games is recreating for the game. Since launch on Quest and PSVR 2 in June 2025, Cave Crave has exclusively included fictional caves, which offer players challenging and memorable paths to traverse. Many popular caves have been involved in tragedies, albeit less publicized than Jones’, so recreating any cave may come with similar moral grey areas.
The whole thing leaves me with more questions than answers, which feels unsettling.
Is this a somber homage to the real world risks of caving? Or is it a publicity stunt to attract eyeballs to the studio’s game? I think it’s a little of both.
And how is stepping into Nutty Putty different from playing any game based in history, like World War II? Companies profit off those motifs all the time without any whiff of controversy despite the real implication that the events undoubtedly saw the deaths of thousands.
I’m still not sure. Maybe because it was more recent. Maybe because we can relate more directly to Jones; if he were alive today, maybe he’s be playing Cave Crave right now. Maybe I’m partially wrapped up in the taboo of reopening something that was purposefully closed, not only for safety, but as a memorial to a man who died in the most gruesome way any caver can think of. Maybe having it featured in a game, and not as a part of a public tool, feels just a little too off-color.
Whatever the case, in writing this, I’ve become part of the same dark tourism circuit as Cave Crave. And by reading it, so have you.
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