Caves of Qud

(Review of the Steam version) This one is the best thing that has happened to the roguelike genre in the last decade (along with Cogmind perhaps). The game oozes atmosphere. It brings you into a post-apocalyptic age with mutants, robots, weird beasts and lots of background lore, where water is so precious it is the main means of exchange. You'll need some hardcore survival skills to manage. There's crafting, artifacts, mutations, cybernetic augmentations, books, psychic abilities and a very nice cooking interface with recipes that give temporary traits. The controls are easy to use and well-polished (for a roguelike) and you'll constantly find something new to explore/scavenge/kill/eat. The world is open and consistent, you can literally travel overground from one edge of the map to the other and return underground. The interface is not as underwhelming as, for example, Dwarf Fortress, and it comes with a nice tileset as well. For the more amateur players, permadeath can be disabled from the settings and you can save/reload just like in other games. The game still has a way to go before it gets finished, and the main quest stops abruptly at some point, but even now it offers a fairly complete roguelike experience, much more than other complete roguelikes. Impressive writing, very atmospheric sound track, state of the art procedural generation and a mystic post-apocalyptic world setting that someone should write books for make this a game that no roguelike fan should miss.

A warm thanks to the many members of the Merchant's Guild.

You may have come here because of a recent Sseth video that praised the game. That video is suprisingly still up despite the fact that the devs decided to re-dox Sseth and his friend and more importantly his parents. The devs are bad people.

Game runs well (Linux). DRM free gameplay. Mods are easy to install. At least today (2023-11-22), the Steam workshop allows anyone to download mods without an account and without paying Valve. Rate limiting by Valve may still apply. May change at any point in the future, so download mods while you can, and upload them somewhere responsible.

Caves of Qud is a fine enough concept. A largely non-graphical roguelike as a sort of a throwback to games of the elder ages. The problem is in the execution; it is unwieldy like Akalabeth while having no reason to be so unintuitive. Multiple pane interfaces are nothing new, but the means by which Caves of Qud has done so among other decisions has left the mind rather boggled at the poor interface design choices, even within the implementation of the stylization. Consider if you would the visually similar Dwarf Fortress. When you sit down and actually LOOK, a lot of it is easily intuited and recalled. The main thing that is kept to mind is that Dwarf doesn't go making up words except for small elements, like instruments. Another thing is that these graphics, they're both too simplistic and noisy. Which I realize is a strange complaint, but consider if you will these many screenshots and try to tell a lay person what is going on in each of them. I can't even locate the PC in most of them. Graphics aside, a lot of things about Caves are hard to figure out. The stats, the actual objectives, where anything is to relation to anything, and so on. Maybe things will develop into something better but I wouldn't hold your breath.