Caves of Qud

after dying to the first enemy i saw for the first many runs, i got the hang of it and started seeing why it's so well reviewed.

"After it broke me, I broke it" -The Wandering Munk To call this unbroken, perfectly balanced, awe inspiringly brilliant metaphysical physical masterpiece a game is almost insulting. Want nostalgia of classic games? Play this. Don't want the nostalgia and want something new? Again I say play. This game is an oxymor0n is an oxymor0n wasn't an oxymor0n. This review was written after 10 hours of gameplay on steamed ham, than 5 hours on here and 6 hours of reading what I'm just calling VERY deep lore found in the game file folders.

Seriously. This game is hard. It's fun, it gives you freedoms, but be warned, you cant enter this game like you would minecraft. You can play the game your way once you've played the game the way the game wants you to. It is fun though.

The learning curve is steep, the game is ruthlessly hard, and you must use your imagination as a graphics card. But that's par for the course among rogue-likes and this one is truly worth the effort. The character creation is extremely open-ended. There is 2 main type of characters: mutants and human cyborgs. The cyborgs are more powerful right out of the gate and allow you to learn the game with (some) ease. Once that's done, the mutants allow you to make: * an horrifying spider person wielding two 2-handed great-sword * a carnivorous hedgehog person who digs through walls to get behind a nasty laser turret * a coward who use his two heart to run away while his uncanny regeneration replenish his hp * a psionic gunslinger who keeps legions of giant leeches at bay with a force bubble And those are only the highlights of the 30~ amazing hours I had building characters, growing attach to them, and watching them die swarmed by sentient crabs. You might be starting to understand that the setting for Caves of Qud is... well a little weird. That's the best part. The game has a mix of handwritten content and lore, but also an impressive world-generator to make sure even the lore will be different each time. Not only is there generated villages and dungeons, you'll get to search the jungles of Qud for tales of the Sultans and their powerful artifacts. I could write more, but it has been a joy to discover this game for myself. It will probably keep my interest for a long time since the development is still going. Updates have been plentiful and there's a big one right around the corner. Some older reviews mention that the mods are locked to the steam workshop, but there is a workaround that works these days: steamworkshopdownloader(.)io

I made a scorpion frog man with 5 hands, 2 heads, and 4 legs. He was a whirling dervish of death. Great game. Almost infinite customization.