Caves of Qud

Caves of Qud has easily become one of my favorite games and I place its complexity and amazing gameplay up there with Zomboid (personally even above it). If you can look past the art-style (some people really care about visuals), its an incredibly DEEP game featuring procedural world generation and thousands of ways to play. The game is incredibly complex, has a ton of lore, different builds, playstyles, challenges, etc. I don't know many people that have actually beat the game and they still love it. With ~170 hours at the time of writing this review, I haven't even gotten past the second or third main mission with the basic start. It is very much a knowledge based game, you're going to die, a LOT. But each death will teach you something new about the world and you will be more cautious about it next time. Qud can be incredibly unfair at times but with enough knowledge and creativity, you can unfair back and break the game in some pretty fun ways. You can pretty much do whatever you want if you can think of it and, if not, there's a mod for that. My biggest recommendation is to play the game how you find most enjoyable, not the way its "meant" to be played! Don't like permadeath? Turn it off. Wish you could save a bit more often? Turn on the save scum (quick save) feature! Just want to explore the world and build? Get some mods and play in the role-play mode. Create your perfect character and experience the weird world of Qud. Per tradition of reviews, most people share their favorite random but cool experience they've had. Here's mine: I was playing as an artificer/grenadier and explored a random cave that had plenty of mines laying around. I found some cloning draught (extremely op) in a vial and put it in my pocket. I also happened to have stepped on a mine and blew up :) However, according to the event log (order of events is a bit fuzzy), I blew up, died, and the vial shattered which ended up cloning me as it fell on my body. Qud gave me control of the new me and I was able to loot my old body and continue my adventure (I blew up a few steps later because I was greedy instead of just leaving the cave).

This game is not merely obtuse, it is actively hostile to anyone trying to learn how to play it. Like an onion, it has many layers, and they will all make you cry. It is also captivating, mesmerizing, some sort of ur-rpg that escaped containment. This game's original perma-death mode feels like a tremendous mistake, but it has an actual playable game mode with saves and checkpoints, and playing it feels like inventing the stick or the wheel, and using it to commit history's first murder.

Caves of Qud is certainly a unique experience, and parts of it are interesting, but, ultimately, I would not recommend it. [list] [*]The game prioritizes being esoteric over actual fun or playability, much to its determent. The writing is mostly just word-salad used to describe fairly mundane concepts and abilities tend to over-promise in their descriptions things which could not be achieved in gameplay. [*]Visual clarity is lacking in areas like damage numbers, easily accessible/accurate descriptions, and in-game qualities of entities. The way angles are handled is entirely inconsistent, which makes ranged combat break. [*]The control scheme feels like an attempt at recreating Vim, but lacks power or usability. Buttons and actions often lack a label of their mapping, meaning you have to constantly look controls up in settings or online to make use of the system at all. [*]Dying is very easy, which is fine, but the game itself lacks the fidelity to make these deaths seem fair or understandable, even looking back. I've died numerous times from things like the game failing to pause when an enemy attacks during a rest, causing my character to instantly suffer dozens of attacks before I have a chance to react. [/list] The game does not have much to offer beyond novelty. For the right person, this game might really really click, but in light of all the glowing reviews I've seen and as someone who, on paper, should love this, I'd warn you to temper your expectations.

It provides an enjoyable experience for a while, but for the sort of game its trying to be (a supposedly infinitely replayable roguelike) I find myself being left disappointed. Here's a couple of my main criticisms: There is a weird lack of balance in character creation, you can choose between Truekin and Mutant. Mutant gets access to mutations, and Truekin gets access to Bionics. In the early game, bionics are rare, hard to install, and not super powerful even when you get into nitty gritty combinations. Mutations are powerful, but somewhat random. In the late game, bionics can give you access to a couple of things mutations can't, and you can eventually break the game enough to get mutations on your Truekin, and the inverse is not the case for Mutants (barring body-swapping shenanigans). So basically the trade-off for Truekin to Mutant is having a higher top end build for the cost of a (significantly) lower starting point. EXCEPT for the fact that you can completely outscale the game with any build anyway due to my next criticism. The game feels as though it is designed to be broken by the player, which is typically a fantastic feeling in roguelikes, hell, that's the whole reason to play a lot of them (like Noita or Catacylsm). You find a random combination that opens up the harder and more exciting elements of the game, which in turn lets you find more random combinations, etc. etc. Except once you learn CoQ, you will realise that you can break the game relatively early in the exact same way every single time, resulting in almost identical top-end items, and worst of all, the actual method of doing so is CRIMINALLY BORING. The method I'm referring to is using cloning solution to make an infinite trader farm with for Polygel. You can spend 5-10 hours doing this and beat the game from the inventory menu rather than engaging in anything approaching risk/reward. You can tell players 'just don't do it then' until you're blue in the face, but when this is how newer players are told to break the game every single time they ask for advice, they do it, and then they immediately lose the run they grinded for 10+hrs to achieve because they didn't learn certain fundamentals, don't be surprised when they close the game and leave a bad review. Even for experienced players, this is just the most efficient way to get to achieve anything you want in the game. So yes, it's a trap, but it's always going to be a tempting one until they decide to actually do something about it. I brought this up to a dev in their discord when they patched a similar but far more interesting (imo) exploit that allowed the same thing but with less tedium, and they accused me of being 'hostile' because I disagreed with their patching one without the other, and more or less ignored the point I was making in favour of the least charitable interpretation they could muster. That brings me to my final criticism: the development. I have been following this game for quite a while now. All I've seen are bugfixes. I see no indication that they understand or are willing to fix the core of the game, because they act to positive criticism with hostility. It can be fun, don't get me wrong, especially when you're learning the game. But had I known all this going in, I don't think I would have purchased the game.

Short version? You have a choice: you can play it like Skyrim, as I do (I don't have the willpower for the other option... yet...) OR... You can play it, like Rogue, the game that defined the genre of Roguelike, where death ends each run. Long version? the game is both simple and complex. You're given a lot of tools and options which you'll gain access to via character creation options, shops, drops, level ups, quests, and reputation point purchases. and that's just scratching the surface, each run has procedurally generated maps, items, certain mechanics, among others, to add a little bit of flavor for successive runs. This game is truly a testament to the power of imagination and building on a strong, foundational legacy. genuinely, kudos to the devs for putting together such a rad game.

I love Caves of Qud and after putting time into a single Roleplay Mode file (3ish years) I finally beat the game and got my first ending! The world building and writing is top tier. Getting a full understanding of this worlds lore is truly a reward worth seeking, my friends. Sit down and accept the offer of a Water Ritual Bond. Enjoy unravelling the games inner meta and simulation to eventually break it. I also recommend the Rogue Like mode though that is the true challenge. A true survival game in a world that feels alive. I don't know what else to say but I feel like I could ramble on with how neat Caves of Qud is. Check it out for sure and of course, Live and Drink.

TL/DR Great and ambitious game, but it feels very time-consuming and exhausting. I felt as if I was giving more than what I was being given. Difficult to deal with for someone with a strong FOMO (fear of missing out) First of, this is a complex and amazing game for what it tries to do. Overall lore is fun to uncover, conversations are interesting, exploration of the world map feels great to me. Where I get confused, is just how time-consuming it is to learn and keep track of subtle mechanics and systems and lore and such. There is so much information constantly and it feels exhausting to figure out what is important and what isn't, because my god there is so much trivial information. Dying often teaches you barely anything as so much is based on randomness. I do like having some control in my games, but this one I felt that most of what I was doing/planning was attempting to prevent random bad situations from happening rather than curiously exploring and building a character. There's a bunch of combat options and actions you can do, but really they are mostly lackluster when you consider the effort and planning required and how you might just get utterly destroyed. I have one run that is going well, and I just kind of gave up from being tired and knowing it will end badly no matter what I do because of things I haven't seen/learned yet. I was playing a build I don't really like, but it worked well and let me advance. Classic mode (permadeath) seems the be the intended mode, but there's a lot of design decisions that I don't understand for a permadeath game. Roleplay is great though. It might seem as if I'm making this game harder to enjoy due to my own choices, but when given too many modes and information I simply get overwhelmed as I'm trying to understand intended experience and figure out everything. It's my FOMO talking even in games. If you have time and are willing to delve into a new world and probably get annihilated for a while, then by all means play this. If you're kind of a completionist and explorer, you might want to go with the Roleplay mode.

qud is gud

Everything everyone has said about it is true; if you enjoy exploring systemic complexity or a truly breathtaking worldbuilding effort, this game is for you. So good I bought it on Switch as well.

only reason to own a PC