Caves of Qud is a part of a current wave of commericially available Roguelikes, and for a genre that traditionally has been seen as free games that might seem a bit weird. Make no mistake, Qud is worth the asking price - in fact, I'd go as far as to say that it's worth more than that. This is a game which will give hours upon hours of fun gameplay, despite the tough nature of the game. Mitigating what might set in as tedium in other games, when restarting after dying (as it continues the RL tradition of permadeath), is the character creation. When creating a character, you have a myriad of different choices to make, with mutations ranging from a stinger that has a chance to hit enemies to the ability to take over another creature's conciousness and use it as a second body, essentially. The game itself plays like other Roguelikes, but abilities are given by mutations etc, which allow you to do a range of things. It's a satisfying RPG-style system. As mentioned previously, Qud is a Roguelike, so some people might not get along with that. The tiles are nice, but some may find it lacking graphically. I'm fine with how it is, as it's more of a game where you imagine what is being represented, so the graphics are simply there to convey information. For what Qud is, the graphics are nice and work - it looks nicer than just pure ASCII. All in all, Qud is a wonderful Roguelike which is worth every penny, and will provide plenty of hours of entertainment
