The Fall 2023 Manga Guide

Inside The Tentacle Cave

What's It About? 

Deep in the tunnels of an abandoned mine lurks a demon that absorbs the power of anything it touches: the Black Ooze. When it consumes its first human male, it acquires both intelligence and ravenous sexual desire, much to the distress of a sorceress who mistakenly enters its domain. The heroes who seek glory and riches in these caverns are about to learn why monsters should be feared!

Inside the Tentacle Cave features art by Abi, story by Umetane, and character design by Fufukuro. The English translation is by Miki Z and lettered by Ochi Caraan. Published by Seven Seas Entertainment's Ghost Ship label. (October 31, 2023).


Content Warning: Sexual Assault. For mature (18+) readers only.

Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

Sometimes you have to appreciate the up-front honesty of some horny works. No buried lede, no slowly built-up-to plot twists; Just "There is a tentacle cave, you can probably guess what goes on in there, away we go." It frees you up to focus on the important things, like arguing the semantics of the fact that our focal beast here is a slime rather than a true tentacle monster. It also means you're getting gobsmacked right off the bat by some non-consensual slime time as the foremost fanservice facilitation, so if you aren't into that, you need not look Inside the Tentacle Cave.

If you do decide to take the plunge, you'll find the indulgence of that singularly slimy subject matter is pretty much all this book has. Much of the material is played for a much more "serious" spin on its salaciousness compared to something more cheeky and fun like Immoral Guild, but the Tentacle Cave still very much knows why you're here. The smorgasbord of sub-fetishes wrought alongside its primary penetrative vehicle means fans of this stuff are at least getting a variety of content with multiple characters. And there are even more vanilla indulgences, like a masturbatory segment partway through, which might be the closest thing to the character definition this manga gets into. But for the most part, it is not shy about most of this material's status as pure, gratuitous, gooey pornography.

That does mean the rest of what's Inside the Tentacle Cave falls into the flailings of what it does with the non-porny "plot" stretches in between all the pervy payoff. The purely descriptive bits of the slime's habits and pursuits at least have some interest factor in how they're narrated, like some fucked-up nature documentary. But the other bits that set up the doomed adventurers feel purely superficial, even as they don't usually overstay their welcome too long. Outside the indulgent fetish space, there is something odd about the askance reactions the book provokes whenever it introduces a named female character, and you immediately know the sort of fate they'll be consigned to. And anything that isn't an aggressive sex act is secondary as far as the art is concerned, with backgrounds, in particular, encompassing "cave" or "sparse." There are hints that the surrounding plot may pick up in complexity as this story continues into the next volume. However, given what we've already seen, I can't imagine it deprioritizing the other stuff too much. If you need some world-building, character-defining framework, however rudimentary, around your slime and/or tentacle porn to get the most out of it, you could do worse than Inside the Tentacle Cave. But it's also not the most distinguished example of a fetish sub-genre that's otherwise positively ubiquitous in this space.

MrAJCosplay

Rating:

This manga was horrifying. When it comes to reading media generally labeled as ecchi, there's always a question of how much it will show. Is this just a story about creating awkward situations for the sake of titillation? Or is there something more than just boobs and orgasm faces? I would argue there is…it just wasn't really what I was expecting, and I feel like it won't be something that many people would like unless you have a specific fetish or curiosity. I understand why this book is called Tentacle Cave, but it really should've been called "Slime Cave" because whoever wrote this has a slime fetish to an almost meticulous degree.

The primary foundation of the story is a slime killed some people in a cave and absorbed their knowledge, so now all it knows is capturing women and forcing them to orgasm over and over again. That sounds kinky, but then when you realize that the whole structure of the story is just to set up people that go into this cave to die and make the slime stronger so that it can continue to do terrible things to women, it ends up taking on a completely different tone from what you might've initially thought. This is like reading a manga adaptation of The Blob if the Blob also was trying to forcibly impregnate women and drive them crazy through constant orgasms. By the time I reached the end of this book, I was deeply unsettled as to where any of this was going because there wasn't a typical narrative progression style. The main narrative throughline of the entire book is that this slime is getting stronger the more people it kills, and we only find out about this because of walls of narration that assault your face on almost every page. It gets very overwhelming for a variety of different reasons. I'm unsure if I'll ever return to this series, but at least I can have fun letting my friends know that a story like this exists if that counts for something.