izigame.me

“Worldbuilding”, as a conceit and prerequisite to telling stories is a big, often extraordinarily stupid, thing these days. Everyone is gunning to create a “universe” or a “setting”, and this typically manifests itself (if you’re lucky) in the form of breathless exposition or contextually inappropriate text/audio dumps. People stick to the narrative conventions the medium has traditionally used and they sometimes do a good job with that. However, the sheer insufficiency of most settings becomes really stark when juxtaposed next to a game or story that evinces a real sense of genuine, substantial creativity and that contrast becomes even more obvious when a game has the narrative chops to sustain the effort expended on making the world interesting. That is fucking hard to do and Caves of Qud does it, big time.
Caves of Qud is one of the most impressive games ever written in this regard. The world the writers imagined is truly substantial. It feels organically constituted, a place the player character can genuinely occupy. It isn’t a sandbox for the PC to play in and it isn’t an aggregation of tropes shamelessly cribbed from better media and flattened into something consumable (Starfield). It is very difficult to write about the distant future, and most writers end up just reproducing something someone else has done or carcinizing into another 40k story. This game distinguishes itself in this regard with a wonderfully realized hyper-distant future characterized by a sort of eternal Anthropocene, where posthuman endeavors over the course of millennia result in a profoundly alien feeling planet that retains distant and immediately legible connections to the familiar (Qud itself, for example, is probably the Middle East and North Africa after eons of monumental projects).
Caves of Qud’s writing is, instead, in a long tradition of syncretic speculative fiction you might call, insufficiently, call science fantasy. Qud’s world will feel fantastically engaging and fascinating to you if you’re a fan of Heavy Metal Magazine, Joe Haldeman, the titans of SF from the midcentury like Niven, or – and this is what I think really distinguishes it – if you have an interest in history and worlds that possess their own plausible, consistent provenance. It isn’t because the game is specifically historically informed in the traditional sense (you can’t go to Jerusalem…well, it isn’t called Jerusalem), but because the world was written with a nearly unprecedented level of self-referential historicity baked in. Qud, out of every game I’ve played except maybe Kenshi, does the best job presenting the player with diegetic clues that help you to understand the fantastic diversity of the world's immense history.
Over the course of your first run, you will learn about the political system of the Sultanates and observe their social-technological decay as you plumb the ruins of hierarchies past. In Qud, the overwhelming physicality of the past surrounds and informs everything in a truly wonderful way via things like graffiti on ancient walls, well-worn books, snippets of dialogue from sentient trees and plants, and so many other compelling encounters. You’ll encounter factions that are derived from previous civilizational patterns, remnants of metahuman or alien projects that flourished on earth after the collapse of the sultanates. You’ll slowly come to understand the way these ostensibly totally inhuman creatures are actually human continuity, and you’ll start asking yourself all kinds of questions about their origins, goals, and (perhaps most interestingly) about the world outside of Qud, both on earth and among the stars.
Your character will grow from a weak little bitch cowering at the sight of a baboon to a six-limbed chromatic God-being wielding inconceivably powerful weapons, face(s) covered by glittering masks, spitting fire, ice, acid, or even condensed normality at your foes. The sense of contextualized power growth is unmatched.
I’d also just like to acknowledge the tremendous mechanical complexity and generosity here. I have never played a roguelike before. I don’t like the genre. Caves of Qud understands that people like me might still be interested in the rest of the experience, and offers a checkpoint mode with optional quicksaves, in addition to a debug menu roughly equivalent to console commands, and it doesn’t bitch at you for using them. It understands you’re going to eventually break the game and revel in it and respects that.
Mechanically, I’ve never encountered anything like this. There are a dozen or so liquids, all of which turn into gases at certain temperatures. There are different armors and materials and creatures and walls and furniture and grenades and gas pumps and rocket launchers and chainlasers and pneumatic jackhammers and cloning draughts and mechanical wings and I could literally go on for hours just listing all of the different engaging things that manifest themselves in this game. You can dig down or to the side (if you’ve got claws, a pickaxe, or a jackhammer). You can fly over things. You can teleport. You can drop something’s temperature so low it freezes, then coat it in plasma to freeze it even harder (or do the same with fire). The complexity of the interactions between different things like temperature, substances, weapons, projectiles, character abilities, and countless other components are frankly staggering. It is completely nuts that someone managed to make a game like this and, more than that, make it work. And work flawlessly it does – I have only encountered one serious bug that blocked progress in any way in my 100 hours, and it was something that I could easily circumvent.
I have a lot more to say about this game. It deserves to have a lot more said about it. I haven’t been this engaged by a game in years. I’d put Caves of Qud on an extremely short list of all-timer games that anyone who enjoys science fiction or fantasy needs to play all the way through at least once – I’d only recommend Morrowind and Kenshi in this way to other people, and it is considerably more accessible than those (by modern standards, at least). Regarding questions about the interface, I actually think it works fine. It took me about 10 hours to get used to but eventually I was manipulating my gigantic absurd inventory with ease. Either way, though, the developers have been working super hard to put together a much more aesthetically pleasing and mouse friendly UI, which might even be implemented by the time I post this review.
I’d also like to add that I’ve only tried one type of character using one of the two starting archetypes, a Truekin. I’m at the very end of the main quest, but still haven’t encountered even 2/3rds of what the game has to offer. I haven’t engaged with the mutation system. I’ve never switched bodies with a sludge and then wandered the earth looking for wine, acid, water, primordial ooze, warm static, cider, honey, gel, and a bunch of other liquids to suck up into myself until I become a dreaded and powerful Pentasludge. I haven’t engaged with the followers system. There are literally hundreds of possible character avenues that I haven’t even touched and I still feel like I underpaid by a huge proportion.
Finally, one last thing: Qud could easily be multiple games. There are a dozen mechanics that could easily be standalone indie games that people would happily pay for. The last stage of the main quest alone could be a $20 simulator on Steam and nobody would blink. Paying full price for this game is a fucking steal.
I can’t recommend this enough.