Caves of Qud (2024)

There is so much to like about CoQ. You can get immersed in this world and emergent gameplay stories happen all the time.

That being said, I dislike how many factions in the game are attacking player on sight unprovoked and how many enemies are there per location.

Mowing down 30+ enemies per floor interrupts and slows down exploration, quests and sense of adventure too much.

There is wanderer mode, which tries to address this, but it overshoots and 99% of living beings in the world ignore you.

I'd enjoy this game way more if there were 50% less enemies per location, allowing you to explore more and fight less.

Something about caves of qud escapes perception, at first. If you look at the website for it, the webpage will tell you of all the strange things you can do. Clone yourself, it says, and then cut off your clone's face, then wear your face on your face. Its peculiar, right? What kind of game has ever let you do such a thing?

Do you even gain any benefit for doing this?

The answer is, of course: sorta, but the +3 ego you get isn't really all that important in the grand scheme of things, unless you're attempting to make your life as an esper much more difficult. Better just wear a Dazzle Cheek, instead.

Caves of Qud is quite unlike any other game I've played, save for Nethack, which manages, I think, to live on in this game. Something about nethack I always adored was this sense that at anytime, no matter how much time you put into it, this game could surprise you, and I think this sense lives on in Qud. No, I understand that a lot of other old school roguelike-y games have had this same kinda sense about them, but they are often too bleak, too ugly, too demanding of my ability to come to grasp with their arcane systems. Caves of Qud manages to be both complex and simpler, too. Its not as technically complex as many out there, especially in terms of combat, but it feels like a world. Like an immersive sim, there were so many times where I tried to get around a problem in a way that I felt would work, and was delighted when it worked exactly the way the game had taught me it would. The game teaches you how to break it, and then, as a reward, it breaks you back.

Your enemies are numerous, and their tactics are underhanded. Galgallim are horrific entities that can stunlock you in place where you must watch helplessly as you die unless your quickness is high enough, a very tall task considering they're only just below 200 themselves. If you've already gotten a grasp on how to break the game, this isn't so bad. You can mostly murder everyone with the cool golem you make with your bear-monk allies, hide your 'friend' in there so that he doesn't die, blast the slave-nazis that run around calling themselves the good guys into bits with your cool Head-Asplode mind powers.

But even after you do that, the game, once again, breaks you back with the narrative. If you've gotten so good at breaking the game to get past its bullshit, you come to understand many of Quds inner workings, its history, the people and the places you come to visit. You climb in your robot with your 'friend', triumphant, and the two of you ascend up to the spindle, where you learn of the truth. Even in the game's little moments of victory, it is still crushing you beneath its heel in a way that I don't entirely know how to describe.

I don't really know what I could say about this game. I had been falling out of love pretty steadily with gaming for a long time now, unable to accept it. When I picked up this game, I played it obsessively for about 4 months. I couldn't stop. Nothing could compare to the journey I was taking, the adversity I was set up against, the determination to get past it, to calm the nephillim of the gyre, to talk to a ghost. This game is incredibly dear to me. It singlehandedly revived my enjoyment of this strange hobby i've had for so very long. It made me laugh, it made me mad, it made me cry.

Beating this game, learning all of its horrible and beautiful truths, was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done, and even if you don't like games like this, you should play it anyway. I can't guarantee you'll enjoy your experience, but you never know. Like one who's just seen an apple farmer's daughter, your next obsession could be flitting about behind the woodshed, shyly.

I love the world and the story of Caves of Qud. Even just finding old dusty books in caves deep underground, I'm always stumbling upon fascinating stuff or having peculiar conversations with sentient plants or other weirdos. It has a steep learning curve, but it's probably my favourite tile-based rogue-like. Also the devs are insanely active on this project; they've been updating and adding content every week since 2015. Insane levels of commitment. It's like some strange mutant cousin of Dwarf Fortress.

Who doesn't love exceptionally quirky roguelikes??

Most people.

But for the rest of us, there's Caves of Qud, one of those odd Steam snags I didn't expect much from initially but which paid off in spades!

Set in the dilapidated world of Qud, CoQ begins by dumping you in a stagnant little farming village in a forgotten corner of a vibrant, post-apocalyptic world more reminiscent of a jungle-fied version of Dune than the usual Fallout clones. Armed with nothing more than a handful of loosely-defined quests to guide you, you set out to explore a vine-choked world of broken machines, gene-addled mutants, rampant hypertech, snarling kobolds, and Glob-only-knows what else. And as is the case with most roguelikes, you're going to die along the way. Pretty often, really. While the game is fairly forgiving once you get the hang of it, your first time exploring any new area is going to hit you with bizarre, unpleasant, and distinctly unfair modes of death (Protip: Don't attack the slumberlings), abruptly ending your 5, 10, 20 hour run with nothing to show for it but an entry on a high score screen no one will ever look at.

So why go back? Why play at all? And why the hell did I give this thing 5 stars? Because it plays on curiosity masterfully. The visuals may be minimalist, but they manage to evoke natural settings and sprawling compounds wonderfully, combining with the deeply unusual soundtrack to create a surprisingly immersive experience. Even more crucial though is the writing, which gives you tantalizing hints at what the hell is going on in the world in little drips and drabs, dodging the hazards of exposition dumps in favor of a playfully slow release of information. Everything is familiar, but uncomfortably alien, and I needed to know why.

If you enjoy the capacity for simulation of roguelikes, and want to see it used in pursuit of rich storytelling rather than strategic gameplay, Caves of Qud is worth a shot, particularly if you're fond of the squickier end of the hard sci-fi genre. With a massive world to explore, plenty of possible character builds, and a dev team that pumps out new content very regularly, it's a game that will keep you playing for a loooong time.

I've been playing Caves of Qud over the last couple days and I can say that it's one of the most fun, forgiving and unique rogue-style games I've ever played.

In CoQ, after building your character, you start off in this strange jungle village called Joppa. The place is a primitive mess; most of the denizens are strange hermits or mutants. There's wreckage and trash everywhere and apprehension in the air. It's a post-apocalyptic setting immediately reminiscent of Fallout 2 and yet it's quite different. In this game there's an overarching Day of the Triffids vibe. Everything has vines or weeds or mangroves all over it. The people are often half-tree mutants and half the creatures you fight are carnivorous plants. A hunchbacked hermit fellow gives you a typical starter quest "help me clear the nasties out of my cellar" and so the adventure begins.

Unlike any other rogue-style game I've played, CoQ takes a different approach to procedural generation. Instead of the entire game, quests, map, etc. being random, the world map is set as are the main plot quests. The dungeons, however, are completely random, along with enemies, drops, and pretty much everything else. This lends the game and interesting feel. It's random enough to give limitless replay value and yet the game is constrained enough so that it can provide meaningful quests, beautiful writing, rich characters and a cohesive world.

It's almost like an RPG-rogue. You have XP, a character sheet, perks, and inventory and skills. And it seems like the clunky controls familiar to most rogues have been abandoned for something simpler. The menus are very intuitive and there's only really 3 or 4 keys that need to be memorised, and you can press F1 at any point to refresh your memory on the keys or any part of the gameplay.

I think it's also a lot more forgiving. My first few characters died very rapidly but once I learned the ropes I was off on my grand adventure and now my character is level 10 and has survived for 6 or more hours of gameplay. The game rewards you for being careful and you're unlikely to die from random unfair OP traps or monsters.

If you like RPGs and a good story then I would recommend this game. Especially if you haven't played many rogue games, this might be a really good starting point. Like most rogue-likes the graphics are simple and tile-based. And yet the tileset is really unique and beautiful. The developers have obviously foregone graphics and focussed instead on the compelling gameplay and riveting narrative. I thought this would be just another dungeon crawl but instead I'm enjoying an experience on the level of Fallout 2. The descriptions, characters and places I've visited have hooked me. There are deep mysteries in this world and I am keen to unravel the mysteries of this world.

My first Caves of Qud experience: I thought I would just jump in the deep end and learn along the way. So I generated a completely random character. I spawned in the mysterious oasis town of Joba. I walked around for a bit, watched the weird hunchback farmers tending to their watervine plantations. I petted a cute purple cat that had a phosphorescent glow. I was approached by a strangely-mutated wise old man with branches growing out of his spine and eyeballs on his palms. I picked up my first quest, he said:

"Venture north into the wastes and kill the critters that have been plaguing the crops there."

Great! I thought to myself. This will be like the tutorial mission, killing a couple 1HP cockroaches.

So north I ventured and found myself in some mysterious jungle ruins. Immediately an 'ogre ape' approached me. I realised it was hostile, so I tried to hit it. It killed me immediately with one shot. GG! :D