Cave Maze

Cave Maze gives you a square board and almost no light. The walls are there, but only the corridors immediately around you are lit, so the maze is revealed a few steps at a time. Dragging moves the character, and that is the only input.

The orange bar under the scoreboard is your torch, not a progress meter. It drains from the moment a level starts, and when it empties the game says so plainly: the dark closed in, try again. You gather embers scattered through the passages along the way.

Locked doors stand between you and the exit on later boards, and their keys are somewhere in the unlit parts. Exploring turns into a gamble you have to weigh. A wrong corridor costs torch you cannot get back, but the key will not turn up on its own either.

From level three, a wandering spirit also drifts through the dark, which makes the lit circle around you feel smaller than it is. The clock counts up rather than down, and Best keeps your quickest run in view for the next attempt.