Crawl

Rate it

Crawl through a cave to photograph the missing, cranking your light as you go.

Platforms: PC
Stores: itch.io
Price: Pay what you want
Rated: 4.5 of 5 from 326 ratings on itch.io
Length: about 20 minutes
Players: 1
Controls: Keyboard and mouse
Made by: Sole Rift
Released: 2024

What frightens You crawl through tight cave passages photographing people who went missing there, cranking your flashlight by hand to keep it lit and changing the camera's cartridge after every photo, while the maker warns that you are not alone down there. The maker also warns of pixelated blood and low-poly corpses.
Content: blood, corpses.

Crawl is a short first-person horror game by Sole Rift, free or pay what you want on itch.io for Windows. You squeeze through tight cave passages to photograph the people who went missing there, cranking your flashlight by hand and swapping the camera's cartridge after each shot, while something else moves in the dark. A run takes 20 minutes at most.

About Crawl

Crawl is a small horror game by Sole Rift, released on itch.io in February 2024 for Windows and built in Unity with Blender and Aseprite. It is free to download, with the option to pay what you like.

The job is simple to say: go down into a cave and take photos of the people who went missing there. Getting to them is the hard part. The passages are so tight that you crawl on your belly, and the only light is a flashlight you have to keep cranking by hand. Your camera is an instant one, so after every photo you have to put in a new cartridge before you can take the next. Each of these small chores takes your hands and your attention while you are stuck in a space with no room to turn.

The maker's warning is short: you are not alone down there. The game leans on the dark, the cramped tunnels and the noise of the crank to keep you uneasy, and it shows what it finds in low-poly bodies and pixelated blood behind a grainy PlayStation-style filter. A full run lasts 20 minutes at most.

After the main game there is an endless mode, Madness, where the aim is to take as many photos as you can without being killed, with a limited supply of syringes to heal and steady yourself. The photos you take are saved to a folder you can open from the menu. Crawl suits players who like short, claustrophobic horror built around one tense routine, in the line of Iron Lung and Lost in Vivo.

How to play Crawl

Download Crawl from its itch.io page for Windows; there is a second build for slower PCs.
Start the game and crawl forward into the cave passages.
Keep cranking the flashlight so it does not go dark.
Find the missing people and take a photo of each one.
Put a new cartridge in the camera after every photo before taking the next.
Once the main run is done, try the endless Madness mode.

Screenshots

Crawl screenshot: a hand-drawn map of winding cave passages held up in the dark

Crawl screenshot: the camera viewfinder framing a low-poly body lying in a cave, in grey

Crawl screenshot: a low, dark cave passage lit by the flashlight, the player's hand in the foreground

Crawl title art: an instant camera in a cave pushing out a photo with the word Crawl on it

Tips

Crank the light before you need it, not when it is already dying.
Reload the camera as soon as a photo is taken, so you are not caught with an empty one.
In Madness, save the syringes for when your vitals are low; there are only a few.
Play with headphones: in tunnels this tight, sound tells you more than the light does.