Forgotten Cave: Roguelite Dungeon Crawler

A promise the reviewers say doesn't hold up

Forgotten Cave's own store page is unambiguous about what it's selling: "Forgotten Cave is a roguelite dungeon crawler featuring endless procedurally generated dungeons... Dive into procedurally generated dungeons, where every run is different." That's the entire premise of the genre it's named after, and it's the specific claim this review has to weigh against what the handful of people who have actually bought the game report.

This game has exactly four reviews in its entire lifetime on Steam, spanning March 2025 through March 2026, and all four are negative. That's a genuinely small sample -- small enough that this review has read every single one of them, which is worth saying plainly given how few there are. Three of the four independently make the same specific factual claim: the dungeon isn't procedurally generated at all. "This is not procedurally generated. There are 4 rooms," reads the first, five votes, posted a month after launch. Seven months later, a longer review agrees in more detail: "The game's title claims to be a 'roguelite dungeon crawler' but it isn't a roguelite... The rooms are not generated, they are fixed." A third, from March 2026, describes the game as unfinished with controls that don't "relay" direction to the player. Three separate reviewers, across a year, landing on the identical specific complaint, is a stronger signal than the small headline number suggests.

Missing the basics

Beyond the procedural-generation dispute, the same reviews describe two functional problems serious enough to flag on their own. First, a bug tied to character death: the April 2025 review states plainly that "the game bugs if you let yourself die." Second, and more basic still: "there is no menu or way to quit without force closing the game via Windows" -- a complaint that would be unusual to invent and costly to fabricate, since it's trivially checkable by anyone who owns the game.

Steam's own systems back up the picture of a game that received minimal ongoing investment. The achievement API returns nothing at all for this title -- consistent with the store page's own category list, which doesn't include Steam Achievements. And the entire news history for Forgotten Cave, across roughly a year and a half of Early Access, consists of one update, posted 5 March 2026, describing "performance improvements," "stability enhancements" and unspecified "bug fixes" in generic, templated language that names no specific system or issue.

A catalogue worth knowing about

The most serious claim in the review corpus comes from the most recent entry, dated March 2026, whose author says they filed a scam complaint with Steam after discovering that Forgotten Cave's developer and publisher -- listed identically as Hard Shark Games -- has "46 games... up all at once at the same price." That specific number is checkable, and it holds up: a Steam storefront search for games by Hard Shark Games returns fifty titles as of this review, spanning genres with no apparent connection to one another -- a blackjack game, a speedboat simulator, a beat-'em-up, a supermarket simulator, a bowling game, a mahjong solitaire app, a starship shooter, a real estate tycoon game, and Forgotten Cave itself -- almost all priced within a few dollars of each other.

This review can't verify what that reviewer's Steam complaint alleged about code being "taken from another dev's work," and it isn't repeated here as fact. What can be verified directly, and is worth reporting plainly, is the shape of the publisher's output: a single credited studio releasing dozens of unrelated, similarly-priced games in a short span, of which this one -- on the evidence of its own review corpus -- shipped without the headline feature its own store page describes. Readers weighing a purchase from this publisher should know that pattern exists before they see it for themselves.

Verdict

There isn't a version of this review that recommends Forgotten Cave. A near-empty but completely unanimous review corpus describes a roguelite dungeon crawler that, by three independent accounts, isn't procedurally generated, breaks on player death, and has no way to close it from inside the game. One vague patch in a year suggests it isn't being meaningfully worked on either. NZ$8.99 buys very little here, and the wider catalogue it comes from is reason enough to be cautious about anything else carrying the same developer's name.