Seven operations. One round each, if you are any good.
Cave Sniper is a week of work for a man who only ever calls himself CONTROL. Seven operations, one shot a day, and a callsign — KESTREL — that stops working on Sunday. Each morning starts underground: you walk the passage out to daylight, find the ledge, and set the rifle on a valley you have never seen before. Somewhere in the compound below is one man described only by his coat and his hat, walking among people who are not on the sheet. Read the wind, hold your breath, lead him, and account for the second it takes the round to arrive — and the two more it takes the sound of it to come back to you. Between days you spend what you were paid on better glass. On some days they work out which hill it came from, and then it is you, a trail, and a sidearm.
STORY & LORE
CONTROL
You never meet him and he never gives you a name, only an operation, a place, and one line of traffic before you move out. The week is laid out in advance: seven men who each keep some part of the valley running, taken in an order somebody else decided. On the seventh day the number stops working.
The walk out
Every day opens in the dark. The passage is the same length each morning, water comes off the roof, dust hangs in the shafts where the rock has cracked, and the light at the far end grows the closer you get. By the time you reach the mouth your eyes have adjusted enough to read a valley you have never stood over before. It is the only quiet part of the day.
The sheet
You are never given a name or a face you can trust — you are given a coat and a hat, a range, and the light you will be shooting in. Somebody down there is wearing that combination and nobody else is. Whether you can find him before the window closes is the whole job.
HOW IT PLAYS
Finding him
The valley is drawn rather than photographed, so magnification genuinely resolves it: what is a four-pixel smudge with the naked eye becomes a person with a coat, a hat and a walk at 8x. Every actor patrols a line, and exactly one of them matches the dossier. Later in the week the mark spends his time on a roof, and moves faster.
The shot: range, drop, wind
The round leaves at the rifle's muzzle velocity and falls for the whole flight, and the crosswind pushes it the whole way too. Both are real: at seven hundred metres the issue rifle needs about five and a half milliradians of holdover, the .338 needs under four. The reticle is a true mil grid at whatever magnification you are on, and the dope card under the tube gives you the hold and the lead in the same units — so "5.4 mil" means the fifth mark and a bit, and the chevron on the ladder shows you where that is. The M107's computer skips the arithmetic and paints the impact point directly.
Breath and sway
The rifle never sits still. Hold SHIFT to steady it and the sway drops to a sixth, but the breath ring around the scope drains while you do — run it dry and you gasp, and the sway comes back worse than it started until you recover.
Rounds, and what a miss costs
You are issued three rounds a day, two from day five. A miss throws up dust; a hit on the wrong person is worse. Either way the compound starts moving properly, the mark speeds up, and about twelve seconds later somebody walks him inside and the day is over with nothing to collect.
The trail
On days four, six and seven they work out roughly where the shot came from and send people up after you. No scope, no range: just the trail, a sidearm and a magazine that runs out faster than the line does. Hold until they stop coming.
What you hear
Every sound in the game is played into a reverb built for the room you are standing in: short, dark and dense underground, long and sparse with discrete slaps off the far walls out on the ledge. A shot is a transient that clips, a low blast you feel more than hear, and then three seconds of the valley answering. The report of the impact has to travel back to you at a third of a kilometre a second, so at nine hundred metres you watch him drop a full two seconds before you hear it land.
The country
Limestone ridges with the bedding showing through, a dry wadi cutting the basin, a stand of date palms along it, a mudbrick compound with parapets and roof tanks and a watchtower on the corner, a minaret on the far shoulder of the valley, and gravel and thorn scrub all the way back to your ridge. Five times of day, each with its own light and its own haze. None of it is a photograph: it is drawn every frame at the size of your screen, which is why magnifying it resolves more rather than less.
You are not the only thing using the cave
Something lives down there. It is eyeless and the colour of wet limestone, with a skull far too big for it and arms that reach the floor, and the first thing you see is two points of your own torchlight coming back out of the dark. It holds still and watches you go past. Get within about four metres and it screams and is gone. It cannot hurt you, and it does not need to.
GALLERY
RIFLES
Hold is the holdover in milliradians — the mark on the ladder you put on him. A faster round needs less of it and drifts less in the wind.
| Rifle | Cartridge | Price | Zoom | Rounds | Hold @700m | What it does for you |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MK11 MOD 0 | 7.62×51 M118LR | — | 8× | 3 | 5.4 mil | Semi-automatic, so the follow-up is quick. Nothing else is done for you. |
| M40 RECON | 7.62×51 MATCH | 900 | 10× | 3 | 4.7 mil | Bolt gun. Better glass, 30% less wobble, a longer breath. |
| L115 LONG TOM | .338 Lapua Magnum | 2100 | 12× | 3 | 3.9 mil | Flattest round on the rack and the wind barely touches it. Slow to work. |
| SRS-9 QUIET | .300 Norma subsonic | 3400 | 11× | 4 | 5.1 mil | Suppressed — a miss barely stirs the yard — and thermally sighted. |
| M107 SOLVER | .50 BMG Raufoss | 4800 | 14× | 2 | 4.4 mil | Ballistic computer paints the solution in the glass. Two rounds, and the wall is not cover. |
SIDEARMS
| Pistol | Price | Damage | Rate | Magazine |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sidearm | — | 34 | 0.34s | 8 |
| Heavy Frame | 1400 | 58 | 0.46s | 6 |
| Machine Pistol | 3000 | 22 | 0.10s | 20 |
THE WEEK
Seven operations. The complication is what makes each one different from the last.
| Day | Operation | Place | Rounds | Complication |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GLASSHOUSE | Kadur Basin | 3 | None. Learn the wind. |
| 2 | DRY CREEK | Mesan Flats | 3 | Heat haze over the flats. |
| 3 | LANTERN | Ubek Quarry | 3 | The mark works from a roof. |
| 4 | HALFPENNY | Tarn Crossing | 3 | They backtrack the shot and come up the trail. |
| 5 | SILVERPOINT | Kesh Reservoir | 2 | Two rounds, and he moves faster. |
| 6 | LONG SUNDAY | Anvil Pass | 2 | Both, at the longest range yet. |
| 7 | LAST LIGHT | Kadur Basin | 2 | Both. The man who signed all the others. |
RANKS
Scored on confirmations, clean single-shot days, accuracy and what you left behind.
| Rank | Title | From |
|---|---|---|
| S | Ghost | 9000 |
| A | Marksman | 7000 |
| B | Shooter | 5000 |
| C | Rough | 3000 |
| D | Loud | 1200 |
| F | Burned | below that |
VERSION HISTORY
- The valley was being drawn as vector art into a 419-pixel-wide buffer and then blown up two and a half times, which is why it looked like cheap flash animation sitting next to the cave. Out on the perch it is now painted straight onto the canvas at full size — every edge, every figure and every frond at the real pixel count.
- It is somewhere hot now. Limestone ridges with the bedding showing through them, a dry wadi across the basin, a stand of date palms, gravel and thorn scrub running back to your own ridge, a power line down the road, and a minaret and a dome on the far shoulder of the valley. Five times of day, from first light to a khamsin blowing dust.
- The compound is mudbrick rather than grey rectangles: flat roofs with parapets and merlons, water tanks, a satellite dish, deep-set windows, awnings, a gate, a sandbagged watchtower, pickups with cabs and wheels, fuel drums. Some blocks are whitewashed, some raw concrete.
- Every surface has a sun side and a shadow, and the shadows are cool because they are lit by the sky. Everything being shaded with the same warm brown was most of the reason the whole scene read as one flat colour.
- People walk the yard behind the wall now instead of standing on top of it, and there are more kinds of them: three builds, robes and fatigues and jackets, chest rigs, slung rifles, scarves and beards — all independent of the coat and hat the dossier names, so the yard is full of different people rather than one figure recoloured eight times.
- Five rifles, and the difference between them is not a bigger number in the same column. Muzzle velocity changes the holdover and the drift; the MK11 is semi-automatic; the L115 shoots flat enough to ignore most of the wind; the SRS-9 is suppressed so a miss barely stirs the yard, and thermal; the M107 has a ballistic computer and does not treat a mudbrick wall as cover.
- Rounds actually drop and drift now, and the reticle finally tells you what to do about it: a true milliradian grid at any magnification, a chevron on the ladder at the holdover, a tick at the wind, and a dope card under the tube reading the same numbers. Scoping in also starts at half the rifle's magnification rather than 1.6× — a scope that leaves the target four pixels wide is not helping.
- The wheel was registered as a passive listener, so every notch scrolled the page the game sits in as well as changing the magnification. It belongs to the scope while you are behind the glass now.
- The file photograph is a long-lens surveillance frame — waist up, three-quarters on, with the coat, the hat, the beard and the scarf you will be looking for, film grain, frame marks and a stamp — rather than a small passport crop.
- There is something else in the cave now — eyeless, pale, too tall, with your torchlight coming back out of the sockets. It watches from down the passage and screams away if you close on it. Getting that close unlocks Not Alone.
- The cave mouth opens onto the country you are about to be shooting into — sky, the far ridge, the valley floor, through a ragged lip of rock — instead of blowing out to white. The glare now only takes over in the last stride, the way your eyes actually do it.
- New audio engine. Everything routes through a convolution reverb whose impulse response is generated for the space you are in — 1.35s and dark underground, 3.4s and sparse out on the ledge, with discrete early reflections for the walls that are actually close to you.
- The rifle is now four layered elements: a clipped transient, the muzzle blast, a low body you feel rather than hear, and the crack running away down the valley — followed by brass bouncing on stone. Measured, one shot rings out over three seconds.
- The report of an impact travels back to you at the speed of sound, so at long range you watch the mark drop about two seconds before you hear it land.
- The bolt is four distinct movements instead of one rattle; the pistol, breathing, footsteps, drips and rockfall were all rebuilt the same way.
- The week is now seven named operations with places, standing intelligence on each subject, and a handler. The briefing is a mission card rather than a dossier row, and messages come over the radio with squelch and a sender.
- Cave rework: wall tops ride on smooth noise so the roof dips and swells like rock instead of running dead level, the same value shades the face, and dust hangs in the light with water coming off the ceiling.
- Ambience is per-space and the wind you can hear on the ledge tracks the crosswind you are actually having to dope for.
- Tactical pass on the whole presentation. The hand-drawn lettering is gone; everything is now set in a monospaced technical stencil, so a readout like 0.0 M/S sits where it should instead of drifting as the digits change.
- No health bar anywhere in the game. Damage is a red vignette that stays out of the way while you are fine and closes in as you are not, and the compound noticing you reddens the frame rather than announcing itself.
- The rifle is drawn as you would actually see it with your head off the stock: strongly foreshortened, ocular bell near the camera, barrel tapering away, with a magazine, bolt handle, cheek riser, pistol grip and a hand wrapped round it.
- Everyone in the game got real proportions. The men coming up the trail now have shoulders, a gait, helmets, plate carriers and a carbine on a sling, and a hit reads as spatter instead of a red silhouette. The sidearm is a pistol with a slide that cycles.
- The cave mouth frames the perch, and the cave itself keeps its grain up close — close rock samples the texture a second time at higher frequency instead of going flat.
- Readouts no longer double up or sit under the gun: range and wind are etched on the glass while scoped and only in the corner while not, and the loadout moved out of the rifle's corner.
- Cave layout tidied: the passage is fully connected end to end with no sealed-off dead space.
- Fixed a white band across the top of the cave view when head bob moved the horizon.
- Rebuilt from scratch. The old build was a raycast corridor with a scope bolted on; this is a seven-day contract structure — cave walk, ledge, one shot, and a week of escalating conditions.
- New vista renderer: the valley is drawn through a virtual camera with yaw, pitch and pixels-per-radian, so magnification genuinely resolves detail rather than enlarging texels. Ridgelines are sampled per screen column so they stay smooth at 8x.
- Real ballistics — crosswind drift applied over the whole flight, sub-second time to target, and a hit window that matches the drawn figure exactly.
- Breath holding, rifle sway, bolt cycling, and a limited daily round count.
- Four rifles and three sidearms bought between days, and a letter rank at the end of the week.
- Pistol defence on days 4, 6 and 7 when the compound locates the perch.
- Desktop only. Holding a rifle steady at 900 metres needs a pointer you can move a hair at a time; the game says so on a touch device rather than shipping controls that cannot do the job.
- Initial catalogued version: first-person raycaster, cave corridor, scope-in target shooting.