Exploring the unknown is one of the greatest joys of any RPG. Getting to delve into ruins full of unspeakable horrors or scouring the streets of magical cities is like being an archaeologist of a fictional civilization, cataloging wonders never before seen by human eyes. If that’s your idea of a good time, Caves of Qud is for you.
It’s been a long journey to Caves of Qud’s December 5 release. The game is 15 years in the making, having garnered thousands of fans and an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam since entering Early Access there in 2015. At the end of the road to its 1.0 launch, Caves of Qud is a sprawling, frustrating, incredibly compelling roguelike RPG that could take players just as long to fully experience as it took developer Freehold Games to make it.
The short, but utterly inadequate, description of Caves of Qud is that it’s a roguelike of the opaque, old-school variety, mixed with the kind of deep simulation found in games like Dwarf Fortress. While that’s all true, what makes it incomplete is that it leaves out how deeply bizarre the whole thing is.
From the very beginning, Caves of Qud wants you to know that it’s absolutely not messing around. At character creation, you can choose to play either as a True Kin — one of the last surviving non-mutated humans — or as a mutant native to the world of Qud. Simple enough, until you’re asked to consider where your character is from and their place in that society, along with which of the dozens of mutations and cybernetic implants available they’ll start with. Multi-limbed centaurs, teleporting androids, and beings that exist partially outside of reality are just a few of the options open to you. Then you begin, dropping face-first into the village of Joppa (or one of several other randomly generated starting points, but you really should start in Joppa the first time you play).
There’s really no easy way to get started in Caves of Qud. If you’re not already deeply into its style of roguelike, its interface alone will probably take hours to fully comprehend, and that’s between making peace with the local dog people and running for your life from flying whales deep underground. Part of what makes it so bewildering is that most of the game is procedurally generated, from the level design itself to the history of its world. Even that is actually backwards. With each playthrough, Caves of Qud generates a new history of events, and the world you play in shapes itself around that story.
Another reason why Caves of Qud can be tough to get into is that Qud itself is a brutal place. Telekinetic assassins and interdimensional eels lurk around every corner, ready to lay you flat in an instant. You can be permanently injured or infected with alien fungus and just have to deal with the consequences from then on. In the game’s default mode, falling in battle means restarting the entire game from scratch.
So why would anyone want to play Caves of Qud? Well, a lot of people probably won’t. Even as someone who’s enjoyed the game in Early Access, Caves of Qud’s unrelenting randomness and propensity for destroying everything you’ve worked for in a split second can be frustrating. But pushing past that frustration is unendingly rewarding when you find yourself unearthing treasures from a lost civilization and using them to negotiate disputes between battling factions of mutants or convince a high-level enemy to become your sidekick instead of beating you to a pulp like it probably ought to. The joy of Caves of Qud lies in using it to tell a story that’s yours alone, and that would sound more fantastical than any dream if you ever tried to share it.
That’s not to diminish the story that’s already there. Caves of Qud is an incredible mishmash of ideas, with science-fantasy shades of Dune and the tabletop RPG Numenera mixed with Romantic poetry. Its writing is florid in the extreme, and everything from merchant dialogue to descriptions of mundane items can be as engrossing as any prose I’ve read in a video game.
In recent updates, Caves of Qud has also become considerably more beginner friendly. There’s an in-game tutorial now, and a 20-minute introductory video from publisher Kitfox games. Its user interface was overhauled earlier this year, making it easier to read and interact with. As of its 1.0 launch, its robust main quest is now complete, providing a nice framework to guide you through the game’s inscrutable world. Fortunately, none of that has diminished Caves of Qud’s miraculous complexity, just made it easier to get to the good stuff with perhaps a few jellyfish-induced restarts along the way.
