I created Caves of Lore because of my deep love for RPGs. This project took me 6 years to make and I learned a lot about coding, art, and storytelling. If you reach the end then be sure to let me know! Caves has deep combat, classic-styled pixel art, and (of course) LORE! 📖
Modeled estimate, not a reported figure. How we estimate →
Every price cut of more than 20% we have observed, in each market that quoted one, with this game's chart position on either side of it. These are episodes, not a model: a sale is one event, and one event cannot tell you what the next one will do.
Reviews, worldwide (the counter carries no country): 0.14/day in the week to Sep 14 → 0.25/day in the week after.
For scale, across Steam · Top Sellers · Brazil over the last 30 days: the 26 chart moves that followed a price cut of more than 20% went a median of 7 places towards #1, and the 2,400 moves with no price cut behind them went 2 away. One store, one chart, one country — it is the only place we have enough observations to say even that.
Prices outside the United States have been collected since 6 August 2026 and chart positions since 19 July 2026, so a cut older than that has no market to compare and a market that joined later has no history yet. Nothing here is converted between currencies.
About
New Game Plus Mode
Caves of Lore is now updated with New Game Plus Mode, giving you more ways to continue, rebuild, and replay after completing the game.
After finishing the game, you can restart with bonuses from your last game or continue the game without restarting. New Game Plus lets you carry forward permanent stat increases, some memorized abilities and spells, previously unlocked traits, and equipped necklaces and rings.
You may choose to reuse your stats or re-roll them for a fresh approach while keeping permanent gains.
This update also adds new equipment options. Necklaces now have Resonance, which increases damage when worn with other items made from similar materials. Enchantments can now be destroyed, giving you more control over your gear and builds.
MY JOURNEY MAKING THIS GAME
I'm a self-taught solo-dev who built this passion project over 6 years while holding down a full time job and raising a family. I dedicated myself to work 5 minutes a day no matter what, and built the game piece by piece, not really knowing where I was going or how it would all end.
CAVES OF LORE
Caves of Lore is a turn-based, pixel-art, fantasy CRPG that combines elements of environmental exploration and character interaction with tactical, grid-based combat.
Fun and weird adventures await as you progress through a world full of monsters and humor. Hidden secrets and strange powers abound, allowing for a highly customizable party. Vast amounts of loot and treasure constantly increase your power, while dialogue, books and lore are waiting for those who want to be drawn into the world further.
Dark themes and ancient horrors don’t keep this game from remaining upbeat and funny, with a story that unfolds in unexpected ways. Tactical combat, endless magical item combos, and a vast array of spells, abilities and traits make for great replay value.
6 character capacity party, 65+ spells, 65+ abilities, 65+ traits, 50+ monsters, 40+ NPCs , 30+ quests, and 20+ areas to explore. Hundreds of items and tens of thousands of enchantment combinations make for all manner of powerful items.
Sums Steam only; GOG publishes no volume signal, so the true total is higher by an unknown amount.
| Store | Price | Audience | Score | Chart | Est. revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
SteamYou are here | $6.99−30% | 407reviews | 93% | — | $120.6K |
| $7.49−25% | 58ratings | 88% | — | not modelled |
Matched by title — a reused name can pair the wrong games. * is a critic aggregate. Prices and positions are each store's United States storefront; Epic charts worldwide. Audience and Score too, except Steam's, which is worldwide.
Engagement
Reviews
Themes across 49 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
Reviews
Score: 3/5 A poorly executed fantasy adventure focused on world building, humor, and JRPG combat in an evocative setting that lacks polish in many areas leading to frustration and boredom. Outside of the humor, as both the following are pretty self-serious, this reminds me of my very negative experiences with both Underrail and Outward. I’d rather player Final Fantasy Tactics or Darkest Dungeon for the strategy side, and there are a lot of choices for better stories in fantasy/apocalyptic settings, inside and outside the video game space. [b]The Good[/b] 1. Excellent setting. a. Seems to be strongly inspired by some tabletop RPGs, like the setting from The Forbidden Lands and a lot of the mechanics/design direction from Dungeons and Dragons, especially early editions. But the settings is clearly unique, a great combination of many of the things I love from both fantasy and apocalyptic settings. But also reminds me some of the parts of the Metro series, and Underrail, and LotR. 2. Good stylized old school art style/direction and animations. 3. Good to great music/audio/sfx [b]The Bad[/b] 1. Combat and JRPG Style a. The grid-based, turn-based combat is not good, but also not terrible. But it is the core of the game, going with the grindy JRPG style I hate. And it’s significantly outclassed by the quarter-century old Final Fantasy Tactics: b. Less precision for both movement and actions. No “undo” feature for misclicking. c. Less interesting options for combat actions and combat-related character progression. d. Some environmental visuals are disconnected from the mechanics. You can move through and stand inside walls/objects that should have collisions or blocked movement / impassable flags. Sometimes these structures/objects will prevent you from being able to attack when inside/beside them, but it is not clear how it works, and I’ve never seen an enemy unable to attack when near them. e. About the same overall quality and variety of movement actions in combat. It’s worse in some ways (FFT has mounts and verticality, CoL doesn’t let teammates move past each other) and better in others (vaulting, abilities/skills to attempt to move past enemies for flanking or getting to protected key targets). f. A bit better gearing, with significantly more gear slots with about the diversity of options for each gear slot. 2. Humor and Immersion a. Humor doesn’t land. Some immersion-breaking pop-culture references. Moderate amount of immersion breaking situations, technology, mechanics, and gameplay. 3. Questionable Design Choices, Especially Character Progression a. Agility stat is connected to mental resistance. b. No attribute points granted for leveling up. c. Small amount of skill points granted on level up, but most skill points also earned by using the skill in game, which leads to The Elder Scrolls issue of optimizing the fun out of the game. This implementation is janky/unpolished, but not an inherently bad idea. d. Magic has an excessive amount of mechanics/related skills/flags, making progression grindy and tedious. Many different magic schools with limited amount of useful spells each. Perks/Talents generally only affect one or two schools. Each spell is leveled independently of all other spells and magic stats. 4. Tutorial(ization) a. If you choose Tutorial, you start a new permanent game, but with opt-out tutorialization. b. If you choose New Game, you start a permanent new game, but with pop-ups for opt-in tutorialization. 5. Bugs a. Arcane Undertow skill has an inaccurate/bugged description. b. If a character leaves the party temporarily to do a task/training, they will inexplicably appear in the next combat encounter, and rejoin the group. If the player (and their party) leaves the area where the character who left the part is doing a task/training, they will inexplicably teleport to the party and rejoin.
Media
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Price dynamics, follower growth, revenue and sales trajectories with interactive tooltips
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Genres
Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English
Hours played at review time, across 49 reviews with recorded playtime.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
Holy long time playing. I blame it on the secrets. Psssst, it's a secret that this game is pretty fantastic. Flows and feels fine! Snuffleupagigglepop
Do you like exploring? This game has it in spades! There's so much to dive into and explore. Lots of great loot, quests that unlock new things, great depth of builds. I just love pushing deeper and deeper into new areas and finding new places and secrets and loot and monsters. It feels like there's a ton to do. Really enjoying it!
I really wanted to like this, it's so close to being a game I would like. It's similar to the Ultima 4/5 kind of thing that I like a lot. It has smooth motion rather than "acting grid based" while still actually being grid based so things make sense, as a modernization of the type. It does a bunch of stats and things in a way that has scope to be interesting. Some parts of the inventory UI work great. The graphics are mostly clear what's going on. But then unfortunately in other ways it fell flat in a way that caused me to realize, hours in, that I wasn't really enjoying it. It's not even easy to put my finger on why. It's like a confluence of little quality of life things that piled up. The item sorting feeling unpredictable and not being 'sticky', e.g. sorting new items puts new items at the top, but then when you pick something up it's at the bottom, and you can't *reverse sort* by new to get an order that would stay consistent. The combat never really feeling like it's any different from any other round (except a few types being "run away and kill from a distance" which is its own kind of annoying when your main guy is melee). Slow to appear hovertext for tips. Other things not having hovertext at all and there not being any explanation (an entire item being "leather resonance 3" that seems to depend on you also having other leather items equipped, but what does it being 3 rather than 0 *do*?) Everyone sharing the same ability/trait list so you end up either all being the same, or mixing it up by arbitrarily choosing worse stuff for some of your team. Leveling stuff up being done by repeating the task a lot, which is boring in real life, I don't need that property replicated in a game. The map clearly showing things that are mostly annoying (ore that you don't have the equipment to mine) and not showing, or unclearly showing, things you actually want (where is the entrance I came in from?!) Weapons having different types of damage but nothing ever making it clear what does increased/decreased damage to who. Mana that recharges slowly so you can just stand around, or you can camp, and there's no apparent cost of doing so, so why not just recharge it instantly out of combat for the same effect without making the player press buttons for it. No way to mark on the map "a guy here gave me a quest" so when you complete a quest if you don't remember where you found the guy who gave you it, you're in for a boring search through some already-explored areas. I genuinely *appreciate* not having an arrow telling me where to go to complete a quest, but I want to be able to *tell myself* where to go to complete a quest. I guess I could go really old school, like I did in the days of Ultima 4 and 5, and write notes on paper, but if we're going to improve things by not walking in a grid pattern we should also be doing other modernizations like maps you can write on, or your characters knowing on your behalf "this symbol that you in-game learned means whatever, when you see it again, your character knows it's that symbol and what it means without having to have manually have drawn the symbol and written down what it means somewhere." I feel bad about giving a "do not recommend" to what is clearly a passion project with a lot of hard work gone into it, and that does a lot of things I like, but I sadly can't recommend a game that also does so many things wrong. When a game makes me go "ugh I'm not actually enjoying this, I should quit", it can't get a recommend.
Игра по сути собой представляет, что то наподобие Icewind dale только на современный лад. Я прошёл игру от начала до конца. Приближаясь к концу игры, я всё больше и больше раздражался и закончил её только чтобы напомнить себе, почему ♥♥♥♥ надо внимательно выбирать на что тратить своё драгоценное время. На каждое хорошее решение разработчика приходится по 3 отвратительных, причем не важно касается это : истории, боёв или загадок. Эту игру имеет смысл брать только по крупной скидке, что бы пройти первую 4 часовую главу, единственную по настоящему интересную и самобытную.
I set some controller preferences and entered the game. The preferences I'd set weren't working, and I could find no way to escape back to the game menu, I was stuck in the beginning combat. The Esc key did not work. No key I tried worked. Game refunded.
:- )
Одно из лучший рпг, которые играл, супер просто, примерно чуть хуже Drova, но Drova шедевр 11/10. Тут 10 секреток из 10.
好玩，爱玩，一直玩
Fun, well built old school right. Checks ALL the boxes. Story, character progression, ect.
Selling now
See how fast this game is selling right now — estimated copies and revenue per day from recent review growth.
Players by region
Where this game's players are, estimated from review languages.
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| $1.1K | 11 | 100% | $4.99 | |
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| $239 | 3 | 67% | $2.99 | |
| — | 0 | — | — |
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| $120.5K | 457 | 55% | $9.99 | |
| $120.6K | 425 | 84% | $14.99 | |
| $120.5K | 335 | 91% | $9.99 | |
| $120.5K | 506 | 46% | $9.99 |