Cavern Glider is the arcade's simplest cabinet and possibly its cruellest. There is one control and it has two positions. Open your mouth and the glider climbs. Close it and the glider falls. That is the entire game. Between those two states is a winding neon cave that never ends, never repeats, and gets faster, narrower and choppier the further you fly. Distance is your score, and the walls are the only thing that can take it from you.
Motion mode watches your jaw. The throttle opens when the tracker's jaw-open reading passes 0.24 and closes when it drops back under 0.16 — two different numbers on purpose, so a half-open mouth does not flicker the engine on and off. A circle in the bottom-left corner of the stage reads OPEN or CLOSED, so you can see exactly what the camera sees rather than guessing. Your climb and sink speeds are eased rather than accumulated: hold your mouth open and you settle into a steady climb in about half a second instead of accelerating forever. That single design choice is what makes a camera-latency input survivable.
Start with Control flies the same cave with the keyboard or a thumb — hold Space, Arrow Up, or press and hold anywhere on the stage. The camera is never requested. It is not the easy option. Control mode restores the original helicopter physics, where holding the input builds speed the longer you hold it, and it flies a cave that starts twice as fast and pinches to 180 units wide against motion mode's 240. Distance accrues far quicker there, which is why the leaderboard keeps the two modes on separate boards and your personal best is stored per mode.
The cave is built from three overlapping waves: a long slow roll, a medium swell, and a short jitter. They drift in and out of phase, so a run gives you open straights, tight pinches, and the occasional stack where all three peak at once. Random phases each run mean no two flights are the same and nothing can be memorised. Scroll speed and gap width both ramp over your first kilometre or so and then stop — but the wall amplitude keeps climbing past that, so a long run ends in a cave that is not narrower, just far more violent.
Ten virtual pixels of cave is one metre, and metres are the only currency. There are no pickups, no bonuses, no extra lives. A soft ping marks every hundred metres, which is the only pacing signal the game gives you. Crashing shows your distance and your best, and offers to post the run to the arcade leaderboard. Because a crash is instant and total, the skill curve is entirely about staying centred in the gap rather than reacting at the wall.
The input is a single binary state, so there is no aiming, no precision and no reach involved — you can play seated, still, and with your hands in your lap. Motion mode is deliberately the gentler tune. If holding your mouth open is tiring or awkward, Control mode plays identically from the keyboard or a touchscreen. The pause button freezes the run and holds the sound toggle, and the game auto-pauses when you switch tabs or rotate the phone. On phones it plays in landscape.
Face tracking happens on your device, inside the browser. No camera footage is uploaded or stored. See the privacy policy. For lighting and framing that keep the tracker locked on, see the play space guide.
Momentum. Both modes ease or accelerate rather than snapping, so reversals take a beat. Start the correction before you need it.
The tracker lost your face. The last mouth state is held for 600 milliseconds and then released, and a hint appears after a second. Centre your head and keep the light in front of you rather than behind.
It is harder, not easier — faster cave, tighter gap, less forgiving physics. Motion and Control runs sit on separate leaderboard boards either way.