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New Apple Vision Pro Game Turns Your Room Into a Cave

Cueva de las Manos turns your hand shadows into tools for solving painted physics puzzles.

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Two hands casting shadows onto a painted rock puzzle inside the Cueva de las Manos Vision Pro game
Cueva de las Manos turns the shadow of your hands into solid shapes that can move parts of each puzzle.Image: Philipp Stollenmayer

Cueva de las Manos (opens in a new tab) launches August 12 as a new Vision Pro puzzle game that uses the shape of your room and the shadow of your hands to build its puzzles around you.

Instead of placing a game board inside a floating window, it wraps stone walls around your furniture. The paintings on those walls then come alive when your shadow touches them.

The launch trailer shows a room changing into a cave before hand shadows begin moving the painted figures.Video: Philipp Stollenmayer

Your room becomes the cave

The game begins with a short walk around a rock in the middle of your space. That movement gives Vision Pro more angles to scan the room.

Cueva de las Manos uses the world mesh, Vision Pro’s 3D map of nearby walls, furniture, and other surfaces. It covers that map with rock, so a table can become a formation and a hanging lamp can become a stalactite.

A living room partly covered by virtual cave rock in Cueva de las Manos
The game uses a 3D scan to fit its cave around the shape of the player’s room.Image: Philipp Stollenmayer

The walk is part setup and part entrance. Circle the rock in one direction and the cave appears. Walk the other way and you can leave it.

A smaller space should still work. Stollenmayer says the central rock automatically flattens when there is not enough room to walk behind it.

Your hands finish the paintings

Each puzzle starts as a still scene painted on the rock. Hold your hand between the scene and its light, and yellow dust gathers around the shadow. The shadow then becomes a solid object with weight inside the puzzle.

That lets your hands act like hooks, bridges, dominoes, and catapults. The examples shown before launch include pushing cattle toward a fire, turning a horse upright, and sending a chicken across the scene.

A hand shadow glowing orange as it moves a painted figure in Cueva de las Manos
Once a hand shadow reaches the painting, it becomes part of the physics puzzle.Image: Philipp Stollenmayer

The launch version also includes a one-hand mode. It turns on automatically until the game sees a second hand.

A real cave sits behind the game

The name means Cave of the Hands. It comes from the Cueva de las Manos World Heritage Site in Patagonia, Argentina.

According to UNESCO (opens in a new tab), the site holds layers of prehistoric art made across thousands of years. Its earliest works reach back about 13,000 years. The walls include stenciled hands, guanacos, and hunting scenes made with natural mineral pigments.

Stollenmayer says the virtual drawings closely follow the originals. Players can also place a hand over the old stencils to learn about the real cave.

The Stone Age people used stone dust to summon virtual spirits, while today we use pixels.

Philipp Stollenmayer

Cueva de las Manos costs $2.99 and requires visionOS 26.4 or later. The 329.4 MB download supports English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

By making your room the cave and your shadow the controller, it shows what a game built only for Vision Pro can do with the real space around you.

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