Caves of Qud

Fun to ♥♥♥♥ around, but actually progressing requires a wiki open in the background, and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around too much and wandering around will just get you killed because there's random procedurally generated dungeons hanging around with massive unkillable ♥♥♥♥ in them. Games should not require a wiki to actually progress in them.

I have been waiting CHINESE for a very loooooooooooooooong time!!!!!! When could I play it in CHINESE?!!!!!!!

Past the learning curve lies a vast expanse brimming with compelling tales and daring deaths. This game is good as heck.

Fungal infections ruin the game. You get fungal infections after being exposed to spores (nigh impossible to avoid) curing these is a giant pain in the ass and having fungal infections causes the faction who can sell you the book with the cure in it to go aggro on you. just stupid.

This is the greatest game ever made. The world building and story will have you reeling. The mechanics are fun, engaging, repeatable, challenging, deep, emergent. There has never been a game like this, and there never will be. If you haven't played this, you are missing out.

There is a pretty good game to find here. But it is buried under questionable design decisions. I played through the game once in Roleplay mode, which took me 50 hours. I don't know how you are supposed to do this in Classic mode. Probably through a lot of luck and trial and error. Anyway, here are the questionable design decisions: -Crippling permanent debuffs everywhere. They are so bad that I would just reload the game rather than deal with the fallout. If I was on classic, my run would be over or a lot less fun. You usually get those permanent debuffs by simply getting hit by the wrong enemy. Even if you know what they do, they aren't easy to avoid and you will slip up eventually. -Somehow even worse temporary debuffs I am especially looking at diseases. They are just awful. At the beginning, I didn't know that "itchy skin" or "sore throat" was the herald for some of the most frustrating time I have had in any game so far. After a few days, you get seriously sick. You will be unable to use your limps, be super slow, half-blind, or just straight up can't talk or properly drink anymore. Most of those, you can not reasonably ignore and keep playing. The game does NOT tell you how to get rid of them. You would think that if you come across a apothecary, he would be like "Oh my God, you are seriously sick! Here I have a book that can help you, if you are willing to pay me.", but no. Everyone ignores your very obvious disease, even if they are selling the book. You just have to look it up or by happenstance come to read it during one of your runs even though not many of those exist. Ruins my sense of immersion. That is the easy part. In order to actually cure your disease, you are sent on a scavenger-hunt throughout the entire overworld. I had to look up where to find the ingredients because, of course, no one is willing to tell you where to find anything that you need. You just have to know it yourself, probably by playing the game a lot. Even with the help of internet, it still took me 2-4 hours until I finally managed to cure one of my diseases and could get back to what I was doing. But during a run, you will probably get sick several times over. Especially since the main story practically forces that mechanic on you. Out of those 50 hours, I am confident that I spent roughly 15-20 on just wandering the overworld looking for ingredients to cure my diseases. And all of that was painful and boring and deeply unfun. If I ever play this game again, I just won't bother curing my diseases anymore and let my character die. It is not worth my time. A game making me feel like engaging in its mechanics is not worth my time is a grave sin. If a game is not fun, why bother? There are probably optimal builds that can avoid diseases easily out there, but that still doesn't solve the issue that for most characters, diseases are awful. I would recommend playing with some mod or cheats that just disable the diseases. I played through it for you and it is not worth it. It really isn't. It is a bad mechanic. Especially in the moon stairs you just get every diseases randomly applied to you all the time unless you are ranged. Just disable them. Speaking of strange design choices, -the story missions are kind of meh Most of the story missions are hell-bent on showcasing the worst parts of the game. There are some good bits like defeating an enemy that is invisible and some of the dungeons were pretty fun. But plenty of the hand-made dungeons are just unfun and tedious. And the golem quest is just an extended scavenger hunt. I came to despise fetch-quests in this game. The golem quest did not improve my opinion at all. The ending fight is pretty cool though, I enjoyed that. Speaking of the ending, I had no idea that it would just straight up erase my save. If I had known that, I would have explored the endgame area more. But there was a timer ticking down, so I felt compelled to complete the timer first and then come back for the rest. I am not going to spend another 50 hours coming back to this place. -the NPC interactions often don't make sense I have already mentioned the disease thing, which you should be able to talk with people about. But you also have traders who sell you artifacts for large sums of money, but they refuse to tell you what these things actually are. What kind of trader would do that? It makes no sense. If I wanted to sell something for a ton of money, I would tell the person exactly what this thing does so that they feel like they need this. The good bits: -The lore is pretty interesting -The procedural dungeon crawling is fun and engaging -The amount of unique abilities is impressive -The atmosphere is very nice -The pixel art is pretty If you want to have a good time with this game, don't bother with the story. Stay away from disease-riddled areas. Just level up your character and become OP.

Got a fungal infection that whispered secrets to me as I wandered about. Walked into a new tile and immediately was vaporized by someone offscreen. 10/10 would recommend.