Caves of Qock might be the bastard offspring of troon pedophiles huffing their own farts for too long, and naturally people that agree with their politics are quick to defend these aspects of the game by minimizing the role of them, but in my estimation it's a shit game on a more fundamental level. I'd go so far as to say that most "roguelikes" fail to live up to the legacy of Rogue, barring a few examples that did carry on the tradition.
The original design is a shining beacon of sleek minimalism with a gameplay density that makes it addictive and infinitely replayable. A single dungeon you descend into, there's not even a character creation screen, and you are immediately launched into it. That single dungeon changes with every playthrough and so does the encounters with the monsters. The further you stray from this very simple design and go Richard Garriott with it, adding an overworld, or faction systems, storyfaggotry, and other garbage that is a drag, you gradually move away from what made the permadeath and replayability design even work. Added complexities like randomly generated quests are parts that quickly get old, or a sludge of lore and history that is shuffled around each time but contributes almost nothing, if anything, to the gameplay.
I agree that the procedurally generated dungeons feel a bit samey and illogical but the hand-crafted ones like [...]
Most of the major cities are handcrafted rather than procedurally generated.
Eventually you get shit like this, the whole point of Rogue was to provide a fresh dungeon each lethal playthrough and now the dungeons of this garbage are static. Because it was so unforgiving Rogue wasn't overly long and is beatable within a single session, if you're lucky, the setup of the game is harmonized with the mechanics. Since Qaves of Quck is attempting to be a Morrowind, as the poster above stated, for degenerates instead of the metaphysically inclined, they eventually realized that the design just wasn't suited to this long-form dime-a-dozen exercise in worldbuilding and some grand storyfaggot narrative, rather than hyperfocused gameplay originally attached to it. As the review states...
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.
This isn't an issue limited to brain damaged leftists fetish inserters, even Tales of Taj'Mahal strays too far into sloppy design territory if you ask me, and you should, because I actually played and liked Rogue, the eponymous game of the genre. The best games stick to the core concepts of that first game,
Frozen Depths did a great take on the format with the added danger of freezing to death,
Infra Arcana did Lovecraft justice by making the monsters something you'd want to avoid and having the character go mad, both games follow the same barebones skeleton, you're thrown into a dungeon to find something at the bottom of it and the tension of getting to that goal, and all the permutations of that journey, are enough to make you want to keep playing.
Quckold of Qoom is by contrast very sloppy. For example there is a crafting system stapled on, not because it is some big focus of the game or really adds that much, it's just more busywork, like how all modern games use crafting systems to waste your time. Or the cooking system, which doesn't seem to contribute much either. The irony is that starvation isn't as big of a threat as in a real descendant of Rogue, or Rogue itself, quoting the review:
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.
So even if the devs weren't extremist LGBTQ+ jihadis that hate the human form and hired some pedo I'd still write off the game for this reason alone, that it totally missed the point of the almost arcade like experience of Rogue and the devs spent 15 years making something entirely pointless and bloated that adds nothing to the genre, because their furry erotica lore and systems for the sake of systems were more important to them than good game design. I spit on this game and those that have low standards enough to enjoy it.
