Caves of Qud is a roguelike by developer Freehold Games released earlier this month after 17 years of development. The Codex has never really been a roguelike-oriented community, but Qud nevertheless managed to become an anticipated title among the genre's fans on the forum throughout its years in beta and Early Access. Or at least it was until a a couple of, uh, events in recent years marred its reputation. Some however pay less attention to such things, among them esteemed member buffalo bill who decided to write an extensive review of the game. Like other roguelikes of its type, Caves of Qud is packed with interesting features, but what makes it stand out is its Gamma World-esque post-apocalyptic science fantasy setting. It sounds like a good entrypoint for genre newcomers. Here's an excerpt from the review:


Read the full article: RPG Codex Review: Caves of Qud

[Review by buffalo bill]

Caves of Qud (‘CoQ’ henceforth) is an open-world roguelike RPG made by Freehold Games, and was released on December 5, 2024 after fifteen years of development. The only other release from this studio is a game called Sproggiwood from 2014, but Caves of Qud seems to have been their primary focus. As a roguelike in the traditional sense, this game features a top-down perspective, simultaneous turn-based action, deep mechanics, a great deal of player agency, procedural generation, and minimal graphics. I love traditional roguelikes like ADOM, and have been playing the EA version of CoQ for several years, so I have been looking forward to its full release for a long time.


SETTING

The game styles itself as a “retro futurist fantasy”, and clearly is inspired by tabletop RPGs like Gamma World or certain GURPS settings. It is set in a long-in-the-future post-apocalyptic Earth. Unlike the desolate post-apocalyptic settings of Fallout or Dark Sun, which depict uninhabitable and barren landscapes, in CoQ the natural world is thriving, and intelligent and non-intelligent mutant creatures have evolved to fill the void left by a nearly-eradicated humanity.

You frequently come across remnants of the old world in the form of ancient high tech gadgets (“artifacts” until unidentified), robots, and computers. Sometimes the computers and robots are worshipped by NPCs, such as pygmies (“Naphtaali”) who are led through the jungles by their chrome idol, or the Mechanamists who throw artifacts in a well or worship a deep-underground computer. Mutated creatures are everywhere, and often have strange abilities. For instance, the twinning lamprey (or the more dangerous trining lamprey) come in pairs, and killing just one of the pair causes a new lamprey to materialize near its brethren.

Among the mutated creatures are familiar genre staples like giant bugs and lizards and hyenas and frogs and baboons, but also stranger beings like boulder giants (“Cragmensch”) who hurl pieces of themselves at you and sometimes bleed gemstones, barbarous and often psychic goatfolk, Dune-inspired cyclopean worms which roam the desert, plants and fungi of various levels of intelligence and mercantile interest (the “Consortium of Phyta” faction is a group of trade-obsessed plants), quilled albino cave bears, a tree of somewhat-hive-minded crystalline leaves, and so on. By my count, the number of broad types of NPCs is sixty, with each broad type typically composed of many specific creatures with unique stats and abilities and behaviors. For instance, just the insects have twenty three specific creatures.

The faction system allows the PC to befriend or make enemies with anyone in the game. Higher reputation leads to less aggressive behavior by the members of that faction, and lower reputation leads to more aggressive behavior. Factions have holy places which they will not let you into without violence if your reputation is too low. The PC can increase reputation by performing the “water ritual” with legendary creatures, which involves offering that creature your water (water also serves as this world's base currency, and must be consumed to stay alive). You can also offer secrets in exchange for a gain in reputation.

You can obtain secrets, or ask the legendary creature to join you, or learn psychic powers, or normal abilities, or food recipes, or crafting instructions, in exchange for loss of reputation. Some secrets (like the locations of certain legendary items or the “Cradles” of some of the ancient titanic agents of the apocalypse) are almost impossible to obtain without trading for that secret from a legendary creature of a relevant faction, and sometimes it is very hard to increase reputation with that faction (I’m thinking of trolls in particular, which have exactly three legendary creatures in the game). Killing a legendary creature costs reputation with its faction and factions who like that creature, but gains reputation with factions who hate that creature. Like nearly all of CoQ’s systems, this system is quite deep and unique.


The gameworld consists of a mix of handmade and procedurally generated locations. One issue I have with the game is the procedural map generation. Compared to some roguelikes like DoomRL or Infra Arcana, maps in CoQ sometimes feel a bit too random and relatively less interesting in layout. However, the procedural map generation is much better in plot-critical locations like Golgotha, which consists of a series of conveyor belts and different sorts of dangers as one descends, or Bethesda Susa, which has four floors that are always the same, and overall a unique feel in the gameworld compared to other dungeons. Most of the major cities are handcrafted rather than procedurally generated.


CHARACTER CREATION AND DEVELOPMENT

Character generation starts by offering a choice between True Kin and mutant. I'll talk about these separately. True Kin are members of the few remaining non-mutated humans who live in distant and closed off arcologies, like “The Toxic Arboreta of Ekuemekiyye, the Holy City” (members have bleed resistance) or “The Ice-Sheathed Arcology of Ibul” (members have cold resistance). Little is learned about these arcologies after character creation, but it is implied that they have caste-based social structures, and choosing specific caste membership (such as sword-and-board “Praetorian” or ego-focused “Priest of All Suns”) yields different stat or other benefits.

The main thing which distinguishes mutants from True Kin is that mutants can acquire mutations, whereas True Kin cannot (except through a highly convoluted and specific process involving a creature called a “Gamma Moth”, but this is not a strategy which most players will employ); and True Kin can acquire cybernetics, whereas mutants cannot. True Kin characters also start with higher stats than mutants, can use rare “Eater’s nectar” injectors to select an attribute to gain a point in (whereas the gain goes to a random attribute when mutants use this item), while other injected drugs have different effects on them than on mutants.

Cybernetic implants can be acquired at various places, and installed or uninstalled (though a few are permanent, like cutting off your legs to replace them with very fast-moving tank treads) at places called “becoming nooks”. These are computers left over from an older age, and which recognize only True Kin as appropriate users. To install a cybernetic implant, the PC must have a sufficient number of “license points” available. This number can be increased by spending cybernetic credits at the becoming nooks. Most cybernetics offer just a bit of utility—being able to jump further or see in the dark or gaining a point of two of dodge—but others are very strong, like the aforementioned tank treads or a “biodynamic power plant” which allows the character to power properly modded electrical items or a “giant hands” mutation which allows the character to use two-handed weapons with a single hand (including rifles, which is very powerful).

I must admit that I find playing with True Kin a bit less fun than playing with mutants. The eventual potential power cap for either mutants or True Kin is similar (i.e. ridiculously high—I’ll come to this shortly), but I find myself tending to use similar strategies over and over with True Kin, whereas my approach varies more when I use mutant characters. There are basically two normal (non-Gamma-Moth-cheesing) strategies for True Kin: guns or melee (though a grenade-based build could be interesting, but this is not something I’ve really played around with). While there are a variety of viable approaches using either guns or melee—for instance, with melee one could focus on axe-based cleaving and dismemberment, or use vibro weapons which bypass armor, or use cybernetic knuckles and massively high strength to punch enemies to death—the options for mutants are more unique and varied.

Mutants have access to mutations (of course). There are two sorts of mutant abilities: physical mutations and mental mutations. Mutants who focus exclusively on physical mutations are “chimeras”, and mutants who focus exclusively on mental mutations are “espers”. Chimeras have the option to grow a new body part every time they spend mutation points on a new mutation, which helps multi-weapon-using melee play styles (the “ball of limbs” build) but yields a pretty horrific body layout with hands and heads and faces of various kinds sprouting everywhere, including from each other. Even when I want to play a multi-weapon melee fighter, I tend to avoid this build, since it’s a bit too gross for me, especially since there are reliable ways to get lots of arms in more “normal” ways. However, this is just an aesthetic preference of mine (same goes for becoming a monstrously strong slug), and having a grotesque body will not negatively affect your character in-game.


Mutations are fun and varied, and lead to very different playstyles. To just list some physical mutations: there are acid- and sleep-gas-producing mutations which allow the character to turn into a walking gas chamber (the acid gas mutation was buffed at some point to not destroy items, which makes this a completely viable strategy most of the time), multiple legs to increase movement speed and max encumbrance, flaming or freezing hands/feet/face, photosynthetic skin which increases quickness and regeneration but requires you to bask in the sun, electrical generation which charges up over time and can be discharged on opponents or used to power modded electrical items, wings, multiple arms, mega-fast regeneration (even of chopped-off limbs, and eventually chopped-off heads), two hearts for heightened toughness and extended sprinting, “triple-jointed” for heightened agility and chance for activated agility-based abilities to have no cooldown, phasing to a different dimension so that no non-phased creatures can attack you, etc. It is usually best to focus and build your approach to combat around a few of these physical mutations by spending your mutation points on them. Every five levels, you have the opportunity to “rapidly advance” any of your physical mutations by three levels, which can also take that mutation past its normal maximum level.


Mental mutations allow swapping bodies with another creature, or controlling their mind to turn them into a subservient slave, or shooting laser beams with your mind, or directly sundering the mind of an opponent (this can lead to “psychic battles” when you use this ability against another psychic and you both have the mental mirror mutation, which reflects psychic attacks back at the attacker), or teleporting yourself or others, or creating warps in space-time which are portals to random locations in the game world (including potentially dangerous locations), or temporarily boosting one of your physical attributes very high, or spawning a cluster of dangerous mutant plants, or clairvoyantly seeing a distant portion of the map, or moving “back and forth in time” to create many copies of yourself who can fight along you temporarily, etc. Let me describe one mental mutation in particular which I find clever. This is the “precognition” mutation which allows the player to “look into the future”. It creates a savepoint when the mutation is used, and the player plays on from there. At any point while the mutation is active, the player can revert back to the savepoint. The player can also automatically revert back to the savepoint when the PC is killed, and the game asks if you would like to revert back to the beginning when the active period is over. I find this a smart mechanic in a traditional roguelike which doesn’t allow for saving or loading (more on this in a moment), since it incorporates saving before potentially dangerous encounters into the gameplay.

The mutation level of mental mutations goes up automatically with character level and a high ego stat, which generally makes it more rational to buy new mental mutations with mutation points rather than invest them in individual mental mutations. Such a character would eventually have a huge array of powerful psychic abilities. However, this approach comes with a cost: psychic glimmer. Glimmer accumulates as psychic powers increase. It causes the servants of Ptoh (one of the “big bad” guys, though it’s complicated) to notice you and to send extradimensional psychic hunters to assassinate you. They will sometimes randomly spawn when you enter a new map, and can become extremely powerful when your glimmer is very high. While I like the attempt to make psychic power come at a cost, I haven’t liked this glimmer mechanic ever since it was introduced. I eventually find the battles with psychic hunters a bit tedious, and would have preferred the devs to implement a different balancing mechanic. For those who don’t like the glimmer mechanic, there are mods which remove it.

The game was originally built as a traditional roguelike with permadeath and a single save slot which is destroyed when the character dies, but additional options have been added. These include a fairly normal RPG experience with saving and loading at checkpoints, and an adventure/exploration mode that is even easier. My preference is the traditional roguelike with permadeath, but players who don’t want to feel like they’ve wasted an enormous amount of time investing in a character only to be one-shotted by a random turret or whatever may prefer the version with saving and loading.

The final step of character creation is allocation of points into the following attributes: strength, agility, toughness, willpower, intelligence, and ego. Strength affects carry capacity and bonus on penetration value (PV) for melee weapons. PV is a number which is rolled against the defender’s armor value (AV). The mathematics is a little complicated, so let me quote from the wiki. Hopefully this gives you some idea of the complexity underlying the systems of this game.


With the exception of natural weapons like horns or cybernetic fists (and some other rare exceptions like the fist of the ape god, if you manage to find and kill the ape god), most weapons have a maximum PV which can be reached with a sufficiently high strength. Better weapons have higher max PV. Extra PV is valuable because weapons can penetrate to hit multiple times if the PV is high enough, which makes no-PV-cap weapons very valuable for high-strength characters. Some weapons, like vibro weapons and a few ranged weapons, do not have a PV, and instead penetrate exactly once upon hit. This is valuable for low-strength characters, but vibro weapons generally do not allow the same damage potential as high-tier weapons with PV.

Agility assists the dodge value (DV), which is distinct from AV, and affects chance to hit in ranged and melee combat. Most armors in the game prioritize either AV or DV, and high-AV armors generally come at a cost to DV. This can sometimes be mitigated by modding the armor. Toughness modifies regeneration rate (again, the mathematics under this is somewhat complicated) and HP. Most other stats have diminishing returns above some value and a soft cap beyond which further increase is pointless (usually at 32), but toughness always rewards higher attribute values. Willpower also affects regeneration, and shortens cooldowns. All activated abilities have an associated cooldown period of n turns. For mutations, the cooldown is often (but not always) shortened as the mutation increases in power. A willpower of 32 maximally shortens cooldowns. Here’s an example: the “temporal fugue” ability which temporarily copies the PC has a cooldown of 270 turns at willpower 9, and a cooldown of 40 turns at willpower 32. The math gets more complicated when cooldown length is also affected by the mutation level (for temporal fugue, only the length of time that the copies exist is affected). Player speed can also affect how many actions they perform in a turn, which affects cooldowns relative to the number of actions you do.

Intelligence determines how many skill points are gained on level up, the ability to spot hidden traps, likelihood of properly identifying (and not breaking) an unknown artifact, and pathfinding for NPCs. The pathfinding effect is quite minor, and only affects extremely low intelligence NPCs by having them more likely to path through penalty-causing terrain. Abilities are distinct from mutations, and grant various advantages, like being able to go longer without eating or drinking, or attacking more often with off-hand attacks (you always have a single primary attack limb, and others are off-hand), or weapon-specific-skills like axe skills which allow for cleaving AV or dismembering opponents or a special charging attack. All abilities have a minimum attribute requirement which must be met. The biggest reason to invest in intelligence is not for the increase in skill points (I generally find that I have more than enough skill points even with no intelligence investment), but rather to hit the minimum threshold for the “tinkering” skill. This is the crafting skill of the game, which lets you break down components, repair your gear, build items, or mod existing items. Crafting in this game is less tedious than in many others I have played, since most items (and “scrap”, which is junk) can be automatically broken down into generic “bits”, which are used in crafting recipes. The crafting interface is also fairly good. Many of the craftable mods and items in the game are very powerful, so a high intelligence build is viable.


Ego affects barter prices, the chance to convert NPCs to join you when using the “proselytize” skill, and gives a bonus to the level of mental mutations. Barter price is generally not so important, since there are many ways to break the economy. The exceptions are some rare items which are astronomically valuable and which may be annoying to find ways to barter for, such as metamorphic polygel or some liquids. Proselytizing NPCs in order to get their stuff can be used to powergame, as you can clone vendors who tend to sell cloning draught over and over again as well as other useful liquids, but is not crucial. Ego is most important on mental-mutation-focused PCs, for reasons I have already mentioned.

COMBAT

You should build your PC around the main approach to combat you will use. For instance, a “gas chamber” mutant should probably prioritize willpower and perhaps toughness so they can stand there spewing out toxic gasses and not worry about getting one-shotted or having to wait for a cooldown. An axe dismemberment build should try to have a sufficiently high strength, decent toughness, decent agility, and perhaps focus on getting more biological or mechanical arms that can hold more axes, along with multi-wield skills. All builds can benefit from intelligence—the aforementioned axe build can benefit from gloves called “precision nanon fingers” which increase the percentage chance for passive abilities to trigger, including dismemberment chance. This chance gets higher if the gloves are modded to be overloaded, and even higher if multiple pairs of gloves are worn, which is possible with multiple arms gained through a mutation, robotics, or a late-game floating item recovered from an ancient apocalypse being.

All characters benefit from having an escape ability of some sort. Unless you permanently body-swap to another creature by dominating its mind and having your original body killed in a single turn, all PCs have access to the sprint ability, which temporarily increases movespeed and is often necessary to escape threats (especially in the early game). However, this is not always a viable way to escape, especially if you are cornered in a dungeon. There are several other options: teleporting away, phasing to another dimension, forcing enemies to swap positions with you, jumping away, chucking a grenade, etc.

The combat (and world in general) progresses according to a simultaneous turn-based system which should be familiar to anyone who has ever played a traditional roguelike. All actions—both of the PC and NPCs—occur simultaneously, with the player entering commands at the beginning of every turn. There are separate values for move speed and quickness, as well as a value for the energy cost of actions which affects how much of a turn it takes to do an action, and these values all interact each with each other. I find this system nice for single-player RPGs, but Qud allows you to have NPC followers, and micromanaging their actions can be a bit tedious. The UI for this is not so bad, but it is an inherently annoying process in this sort of turn-based system. This is one reason I tend not to acquire NPC followers very often, and when I do, I let them do whatever they want rather than micro-managing them (though it is a viable build to acquire as many followers as possible).

In combat, you have many options, and environmental interactions can be important. For instance, water can be frozen or vaporized, and vaporized water is very damaging, so builds which rely on ranged fire—e.g. flaming hands, a flamethrower, a heat gun, thermal grenades or pyrokinesis—must be somewhat careful around water. Some liquids vaporize into toxic gasses that can cause different sorts of disease or poisoning if inhaled, some cause you to slip if you walk on them and can interrupt melee charges, others heal you if you are standing in them, some hide creatures, etc.


It is important to not get surrounded by enemies in combat, and to try to maintain a viable escape route if you don’t have teleporting or phasing, and to keep an eye on your health (which refills fairly quickly outside of combat). Some of the combat encounters sometimes can be a little challenging if you are underleveled, and using all of your abilities and the items in your inventory and paying attention to environmental effects can be useful in those circumstances, rather than relying on the same combat approach over and over again.

A gripe I have with the game is that most combat encounters eventually become not so challenging. While I admit that even in late-game, you can get lazy and make a mistake and get beheaded or eaten by a star kraken or turned to stone or have stats permanently drained or be rocketed to death by a chrome pyramid, this is all avoidable if you know what you are doing and are moderately careful. I imagine that many people who don’t play roguelikes of this sort may still find mid- and late-game combat challenging, but players who know this type of game may find that the combat becomes too easy as your character acquires god-like power levels (around level thirty). The only consistently dangerous end-game enemies for me are mirror bugs, which spawn from mirrors and which reflect damage back at the attacker. These are very deadly for some builds, especially the aforementioned gas chamber build which depends on AOE damage and cannot precisely control which enemies get damaged. When using an AOE-focused character like this, I always run when I see these bugs. Anyway, lack of late-game challenge is not such a unique problem—it is very rare for an RPG to pull off late-game challenging combat.

OTHER MECHANICS

Even though this is a kitchen-sink sort of game, none of these systems feels poorly thought out or incomplete. The many years of development time with massive amounts of player feedback have produced an extremely rich game with many, many really excellent gameplay systems. These include mechanics for getting infected with diseases or funguses and for curing these infections, for cooking, and for how heat or cold affects characters and objects.

The diseases in the game are glotrot, which eventually rots your tongue out to prevent communication and make barter prices max out; ironshank, which gradually decreases your move speed while also awarding AV; and monochrome, which causes the game to be displayed in only shades of grey. The first two are caused by the black ooze liquid, and the later is caused by the bite of an adiyy (a kind of insect). The cures are found in a book called the Corpus Choliys, copies of which can be randomly found around the world, and a guaranteed copy spawns in the inventory of the ape mayor of the Kyakukya village. That village also has a notable side quest inspired by Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now. The diseases can be very annoying, and it is advisable to cure them as quickly as possible. The cures are randomly generated in the Corpus Choliys. To cure glotrot, you must drink a mix of three random liquids from a flaming canteen to cure and then administer an ubernostrum injector to regrow your tongue. To cure ironshank you must drink gel mixed with a random liquid over several days. To cure monochrome you must drink a random liquid and then detonate a flashbang grenade within vision range. There is also a cure for fungal infections in this book which involves eating a random worm creature and then using a spray bottle to spray a mixture of gel and a random liquid onto the infected limb.

There are four types of fungal infections, which each confer advantages and disadvantages. They are fickle gill, which causes spores to be released when you are damaged; glowcrust, which gives 10% cold resist per body part infected and causes you to grow “luminous hoarshrooms” which can be eaten for temporary healing, light emission, and cold and heat resist; mumble mouth, which gives a small chance per body part infected to learn new secrets when entering a new map; and waxflab, which increases electrical resistance and decreases heat resistance. They all also offer AV, and increase fungi reputation by two hundred points while also decreasing Consortium of Phyta reputation by two hundred points.

The disadvantage of having a fungal infection is always the same: you cannot equip items on the body part that is infected. This can be very annoying if it is a hand slot, but might be worth the trade off if it is e.g. an arm slot. Characters with the regeneration mutation are immune to fungal infections with no investment in the mutation, and immune to all diseases at mutation level five. Like most systems in the game, the fungal infections can be powergamed: there is a special item (the “n-pointed asterisk”) rewarded for an obscure side quest, and which can significantly increase the AV and elemental resistances granted from fungal infections. This is the best “normal” way to get a massive AV. There is another way, but it involves cooking with an extremely valuable liquid derived from a neutron star while having precognition active, in case the star liquid implodes on you.

Cooking is also potentially exploitable, though it is a mechanic I have played around with less. Your character must eat to survive, and suffers penalties as they become more hungry. However, this is not a serious attrition mechanic like it is in some other roguelikes, since you can always refill your hunger meter by cooking a random meal at a campfire. The more involved mechanics emerge when you invest in the cooking and gathering skill, which allows you to harvest or butcher ingredients, and to select them for use when cooking. These ingredients have many potential effects, some of which are very difficult to obtain in other ways. For instance, damage reflection effects. You can also use cooking to temporarily cover up weak aspects of your character. For instance, cooking sun dried bananas temporarily grants the psychometry mental mutation, which allows you to learn how to build artifacts of a certain complexity.

The mathematics underlying temperature effects are a bit complicated. As a creature gets colder, the creature’s quickness decreases. This is offset by cold resistance. Here is a quote from the wiki:


There is also a formula for determining temperature change relative to ambient temperature if you are covered in a liquid with a cooling multiplier, for instance if pouring water on yourself when you are on fire. Above a certain heat, nearly any object or creature will set on fire, and fires can be actively fought by beating your hands on whatever is on fire, or creatures can roll on the ground. There is also a temperature at which any object or creature can be vaporized. One of my most powerful builds is a heat-focused character. Creatures with elemental resistances can have their resistances lowered if they have the “coated in plasma” debuff, which can be caused by firing a sparser rife at them. Along with reliable ways to cause heat damage, like the flaming hands mutation, this allows me to eventually kill any creature in the game. Heat damage can be further increased with an armor item called a “thermo cask” (or the more advanced “high-energy thermo cask”), which increases heat and cold effects dealt. This item can be modded to be overloaded, which increases heat and cold effects dealt even further. This is just one example of a way to use the game mechanics to eventually become quite powerful.

PLOT AND WRITING

The writing is overall also quite good. It captures the weird futuristic/fantasy vibe they are going for. There are several hand-written books and other texts throughout the game which are actually fun to read, and the item and creature descriptions are detailed and creative. Most dialogues are pleasant and sometimes funny, with a few exceptions I’ll describe. Some might not like the over the top writing style, but I find that it fits the atmosphere of the game well.

Though I have mentioned some little issues with procedural map generation and lack of late-game challenge, these are quite minor compared to my major complaint: the main plotline is essentially linear. Given that the game offers so many options outside of how the main plotline progresses, it is quite odd that there are no branches or alternative paths to take to progress the main plot. This does not mean that the player can make no decisions whatsoever with regards to the main plot. You can progress however you wish through the various main plotline dungeons to accomplish the goals you are given. For instance, when trying to secure a plot-critical location called the “Spindle” for the “protagonist” Barathrumite faction—the quilled albino cave bear technologists—you have several ways to achieve this goal: through violence, extreme friendship with the Consortium of Phyta, or diplomacy, and various ways to do the diplomacy. But the major events always follow one another, and you are required to work with the Barathrumite faction.

I assume part of the reason for this has to do with the dev’s resources. Implementing branching narratives with alternative main questlines and attendant dialogue and other scripts is time consuming and difficult. However, there are plenty of good RPGs which have an essentially linear main questline—as I recall, betraying the Vault in Fallout (many people’s paradigm example of a non-linear game) leads to game over, so you are stuck with them as allies until ending the game by destroying or allying with the Master and his armies. So, while it would be nice to see alternative paths available to the player, it does not ruin the game that they are not available. There are several options in the endgame, some of which may be affected by some optional things you chose to do or not do prior to that point—though I am not completely sure about this, since I have only finished the game once so far.

A different issue is that the Barathrumites are incredibly, annoyingly twee. I hate them with a passion. Any option which would allow me to join any other faction would be preferable to working with this faction (something similar goes for the Mopango faction, but you are not forced to ally with them, and they are very peripheral in the game). The problem with the Barathrumites is that they are supposed to be cute. Frankly, it is disgusting. I hate the infantilization and Disneyfication of culture that has been forced on us for decades in nearly every medium. Regardless of the dev’s stances on gender or race, the cuteness of the Barathrumites makes me desperately wish I could join the mutant-hating Putus Templar to destroy them. I will also mention that there are occasional moments in the game where the political views of the devs become apparent—the aforementioned Mopango are disabled non-binary anti-hierarchical cutesy good guys who have a bunch of purely expository dialogue about gender that is very annoying regardless of your stance on gender—but these moments are rare and fairly easy to ignore. As I said, the much worse problem is that the Barathrumites are annoying as fuck and central in the main plotline, and this largely has nothing to do with politics.


That’s the bad part of the plot, but overall the plot is interesting, well paced and well written. More and more about the history of the world is revealed as you progress, and it is a cool history.

SPOILER

What starts out as a few simple errands to investigate an animal eating the watervine and decode a strange signal for the local kook (if you choose to start Joppa) leads toward the machinations of a possibly malevolent cosmic being “Ptoh” to free itself from its ancient imprisonment and a return of the apocalyptic beings which seem to periodically destroy civilization. There are allusions to philosophy and mathematics and mythology woven throughout. Even the aforementioned twee-ness of the Barathrumites sort of becomes forgivable. So far as I can tell, it turns out that their elder is aware that ancient aliens are about to end all sentient life, and as a consequence the elder escapes in a starship from an orbiting space station you ascend to via space elevator in the endgame. The very end of the game left me with an unsettled feeling as it shifted forward one thousand years, and all of your actions are distant events in history. The overall theme of the game is related to the inevitability of change, so it sort of makes sense that the change-resisting Putus Templar are the primary antagonists (though I nonetheless would prefer an option to side with them).

END SPOILER

The devs made an effort to not have all the quests be simple fetch-quests, though many of them essentially amount to that. Quest highlights include an aforementioned quest to secure the Spindle for the Barathrumites; which can be resolved in a variety of ways; a side quest to find out who stole a sacred item from the hindren of Bey Lah which involves collecting evidence and a logic puzzle based on that evidence (though there is an annoying element to this quest: the hindren move around the map quickly, and you must talk to them to acquire evidence, but the game does not tell you who you spoke with—it can be very frustrating chasing them all down and finding everyone you haven’t spoken with yet); and a quest to facilitate a crystal leaf entity to leave the tree-collective and join with the psychic hunters who are controlled by Ptoh (or stifle that leaf entity’s desire, if you choose to do so). Even fetch quests are fairly interesting, though, since the dungeons they send you to are the most interesting parts of the world.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND

The graphics are adequate. I would personally prefer an ASCII version with less clutter—sometimes the screen is covered in visual effects (though these can be turned off) and sometimes the background sprites in the jungle or in Sultan dungeons or the moon stair can make it a bit hard to figure out what is going on—but the tiles are not bad. Of course, as a 2D game, it looks better than e.g. Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, etc., but in general, if you care a lot about “awesome” graphics, you should probably stop playing computer games and go watch movies instead.

The sound is great. The soundtrack is phenomenal. The UI is functional, the controls are intuitive and easy to adjust (and the game supports mouse and gamepad for degenerates who don’t want to play keyboard-only). There is also a tutorial.

SUMMARY

This game is very good. I love Codex favorites like Underrail and Age of Decadence, but in my eyes Caves of Qud is a better game in many ways (though they are not directly comparable, especially Age of Decadence which features a branching plotline very centrally). If you do not play this game because you are offended by the devs for one reason or another, you are losing out on playing one of the best RPGs of the last few decades.

This game offers a wide range of character builds and gameplay options in a highly detailed and unique Gamma-World-esque setting. The learning curve is lower than similarly complex roguelikes due to a well designed UI and a tutorial. A range of game settings are available, from a traditional roguelike experience with permadeath through a normal RPG experience with saving and loading to a more exploration-based experience. The game may be difficult for people new to roguelikes of this sort, but may be a bit too easy for some experienced roguelike or tactical RPG players. The graphics are adequate and the soundtrack is excellent. Caves of Qud should appeal to fans of ADOM or Fallout (1/2).