Caves of Qud
Platform: Steam Deck
Time to Complete: DNF - 100+ hours
Date Beat: DNF - will return!
Difficulty Played: Classic and then Roleplay
Personal Difficulty: Caves of Qud is the most unfair bullshit that I have ever played but I loved every minute of it.
Favorite Thing: The uncanny emergent gameplay that is the result of almost everything being random.
Most Hated Thing: Honestly I hated the very thing that made the game great - death truly did lurk around every corner and it was frequently unfair and unexpected.
Grade: A+
I was recommended this game by Peter, a long-time friend from the traditional tabletop RPG space. I'm not sure exactly what drove him to recommend this game to me, but it was such a good recommendation. Maybe one day I will beat this game. Hell, maybe one day Peter will beat this game, as he admitted to me that he had not done so himself.
I put over 100 hours into this game, starting with about 20 hours in the permadeath "Classic" mode, where I learned the harsh lessons about life in on the surface and subterrains of Qud. I switched to Roleplay mode - which allows you to set checkpoints in villages and other safe areas - but alas I still did not "beat" the game. There does appear to be a central quest, and I did make adequate progress on it, but it was really difficult. I still died a lot, often times still losing two or three hour chunks deep in a quest-related dungeon (curse you, Bethesda Susa!) or becoming lost because I missed a not-so-obvious sign posted entrance to a place.
Fundamentally the game tests your ability to read and pay attention. It does not hold your hand. While it's not quite on the scale of say, Morrowind (where you keep a journal and a map and are expected to navigate on your own), Qud still feels like a place that genuinely requires exploring - moreso because outside of a few staple named places everything else is random.
This is a great example of how to do worldbuilding in a traditional RPG - not everything has to be planned and accounted for. The random nature of the sidequests led to some great moments, and the game's faction system, in which you can be loved or hated by entire groups of animal species, villages, factions, or individuals, contributed greatly to my enjoyment.
I suppose I should talk about what Qud is. It's a CRPG like the old school Rogue. It's a step above ASCII art with minimal graphics. The setting is some far flung future where civilizations have rose and collapsed on top of civilizations and occasional technology is present. Your options for player characters are mutants and cyborgs, each with their own quirks and abilities. I spent the majority of my time as Newar, the multi-limped regenerative warden with the ability to fart out sleep gas, a convenient means of escape when non-mechanical enemies are around that also made some of the escapades into dungeons with robots more dangerous.
The core gameplay loops revolves around conserving water (which is also the game's currency, and has weight in an encumbrance inventory system) while traveling overland and through smaller grids to discover places, raid dungeons, eliminate enemies, and resolve quests for NPCs. It sounds simple, but there's a variety of mechanisms (getting lost, cleaning your tools/weapons/self, a fungal infection system, and a secrets system, to name a few) that creates a game that is as complex as it is fun.
My other favorite part is probably the faction system. I once was so favoted by the mechanimists (a sort of Warhammer 40k Adeptus Mechanicus like cult) that I was able to persuade their central religious figure to join my party. Imagine walking around with a pope that can do magic. He has an annoying yet helpful habit of creating forcefields around you and also enemies, which means waiting for the forcefield to drop before you can damage them. He also has a spell that sets things on fire. Occasionally he would combine the two and create an immolation chamber on enemies. One time he burned another figure in my party to death and I was blamed for it, becoming hated by the Wardens (a sort of guardsmen guild that keeps villages and towns safe), meaning that it was on sight whenever I wandered into a new town.
I don't know how to close this review. It was as fun as it was difficult. I didn't beat it, not even close I am afraid, but I will definitely be returning to Qud in the future.
Live and drink.
