Caves of Qud

On my second play through and enjoying every second of this vastly complex, smart, wildly unpredictable game. Live and drink water siblings.

tons of fun, I haven't done the tutorial but the game is replayable as hell only notes I have is when your playing a mutant abomination it can be really easy to piss people off if you have AOE abilities. Sometimes dank acidic fart clouds makes people hate you go figure.

I enjoy this game best on the non-roguelike settings. Saves time and absolutely allows you to experiment and learn about the many fun dangers of the Caves of Qud.

You will never live stories like these ones in any other game.
Live and drink, internet stranger.

This game can be a trip. I lost my tongue while exploring Red Rock. After that, my goal changed from doing main quests to getting my tongue back. I wandered through vast deserts of salt, forests of trees looking to flay their victims, and I ended up wandering through a fungi forest. Parched and close to death, I thought it was all over. That was when i realized RNJesus does exist! Imagine my excitement upon finding a weeping ooze flowing nothing but fresh water. The water quenched my thirst, and lifted my spirits to carry on.
After, I ended up in a small village of talking plants and goats, governed by a very friendly albino ape. He gave me a book that listed every remedy to most ailments known in Qud. Elated, I set off to find the ingredients; a dram of cider, honey, and three drams of wine.
After finding all that I needed, I managed to cure my glotrot, but there was still the matter of regrowing my tongue. I kept exploring, leveling up by burning enemies to ashes along the way. That's when I encountered a legendary crab. The combat ensued. I spammed my laser. A few turns later, the crab turned to ash. Behind it was a little blue chest with a limb regenerating serum in it. Finally, my journey could continue. I regrew my tongue and continued through the main quests.

Then I got brutally murdered defending a bunch of genius pandas from racist (speciest?) cyborg templars.
Anyway, 10/10 I love this game. The lore is great! Every run is unique in its own way, the world is vast, and you can befriend sentient walls.

As a huge roguelike, Dune and Book of the New Sun fan, this game feels like a gift from god. Paid full price on Steam and don't regret a single cent.

awesome game with immaculate vibes. i feel like I've barely scratched the surface so far

Very cool atmosphere, kind of reminiscent of Dune. If you want to play the main story I'd probably recommend RP mode since the permadeath can be very annoying in this particular context. Though generally I think it's great. Very deep, I've barely scratched the surface, but I've been really enjoying it.

This game ruined other games for me.

Game mechanic genius, everything has functionality. Its lovingly hand crafted in the right places, and has the most well done procedural generation I've experienced in other places. The difficulty is just so perfectly tuned. The sense of exploration, the atmosphere, the music, the lore, the story, the enormous potential for character builds, the enormous variety of solutions to progression, the progression itself, the charming graphical style, the poetic descriptions... HONESTLY, the EVERYTHING! Caves of Qud has everything.

I'm still running into new things; items I've never used, encounters I've never experienced, secrets I didn't know, character build ideas, you name it. It literally has endless re-play. Even the main story quest has creative ways to be replayed. I do not know if I will ever be sick of it.

The biggest flaw Caves of Qud has... is it shelf appeal. It gonna get overlooked for its tile based graphics and initial clunkiness. I had difficulty trying it at first.
But if you:
- Like hardcore/difficult games (especially traditional rogue-likes)
- Enjoy and respect text based games
- Like creating interesting character builds in sandbox games
- Can push yourself thru something that might not initially click

You will be rewarded with a game that ultimately ruins other games for you. Caves of Qud is that good.

I feel like I have barely scratched the surface after 112 hours played, and have loved it. I highly recommend spending the 45 mins to an hour to familiarize yourself with the systems and then everything will begin to make more sense slowly. Fantastic game that is addicting and highly punishing while rewarding you for out of the box thinking

All the frustration of a classic roguelike, but turned up to eleven. The character I just lost had extra legs, and extra arms growing out of the extra legs, and every one of those extra arms was holding a battleaxe. Unfortunately, so did his evil twin who killed him. I'm not even mad.

The game is fun and is the type of game that should be right up my alley, but the emphasis on it being a super hardcore roguelike with next to no save options even when you turn on the quick save option (Which is broken and does not work properly) just makes the game not fun to play. Might be fun for some, but I don't like to lose hours of gameplay because the game lacks a proper save function. That kind of stuff is just a major waste of time and turn off for me. If they had a more RPG friendly mode that let players just play the game like a normal RPG with proper saves then I could see myself liking the game more, but as is even when you choose the normal adventure mode it relies too much on the hardcore element. You may not lose your character when you die, but you will lose hours of progress if you don't constantly back track to a town so the game will save.

I'll probably get clowns from the hardcore players, but that's fine. I'm just not into the super hardcore roguelite the Dev went for.

The controls, menus and basic systems are also more complicated than they need to be. Which I can forgive if the gameplay is solid, but for me the game just doesn't stick the landing.

Extremely in-depth, turn-based, true roguelike. The included aspects of procedural generation combined with a set overworld, as well as near infinite items to find and powers to unlock make this game very fun and replayable. The learning curve can be a bit tough at first but well worth it as this game has much to offer.

A gem of retro top-down exploration games with indulgent strata of lore a la classic text adventures. You can cook up some truly outlandish character builds and the world of Qud will welcome you with open arms, or other limbs, possibly too many appendages for your comfort level. Embrace the complexity and absurdity!

I have played for six hours consecutively and the furthest i've made it is to level four. This game is fantastically complicated and demented. Seriously, I love it.

Not me, 20 hours into a game, heading back from my first dungeon with two pairs of shoes on my four feet and a brand-new stinger, getting eaten to death by a giant amoeba but immediately wanting to play again.

I had never played a game like this before, and it filled a void in my soul that I didn't even know was there. Right when you think you've outsmarted the game, the game throws a crazy twist at you, and you have to rethink with even deeper strategy. Would recommend to an old guy (like me) who loves to sit and think through things.

At the time of writing this review, I've hardly even scratched the surface of Caves of Qud despite just about 50 hours in the game, and I suspect this will join the ranks of Factorio for me in my pantheon of indie games that I've spent way too much time playing.

The way this game works, is you create a character and try to take that character throughout their unique variance of Qud as far as they can in sort of a sandbox way. You can choose to follow the main quest to completion to see the story through, or you can just explore the world, get into trouble, and try to break the game through abusing its mechanics. You can also just spend your run trying to be as goofy as possible, such as in this video where they turn their character into a door: https://youtu.be/nvHjZ9fy5b0?si=leYjoCfYAEJ-gdpF

The game offers a TON of freedom with character creation.

If playing as a Mutant, you get to choose your selection of various physical and mental mutations that your character will begin the game with, as well as a "calling" and a spread of attribute points. Your calling is essentially a background for your character, which influences the items you start with, your starting reputations with the various factions, starting skills, etc. - sort of like a class in other RPGs.

If playing as a True Kin on the other hand, you don't choose from mutations as, being True Kin, you are a rare unmutated human with a pure genome. Instead, you choose a starting cybernetic with which you augment yourself. Lastly, instead of choosing a calling, you choose a caste, which serves (mostly) the same purpose, except your caste is from one of three "arcologies", which ultimately just means the arcology your caste is from decides which unique piece of cybernetic gear you can choose from to start with.

In either case, the number of different "builds" and ways you can play your character makes for practically endless replayability, true for any (good) rogue game, but what I personally find even more interesting about this is that, due to Qud's deep gameplay systems, your build doesn't end at how you deal damage.

If you play as a mutant, you can use dominate mind to forcefully take control of another entity and play as that entity for the duration of the ability. You can use all of that entity's abilities, see their inventory, their stats, etc. You can use dominate mind on a merchant, and make that merchant drop all of their wares for you to pick up and then sell back to that merchant for money. You can use precognition before you attempt to dominate mind, to allow you to see into the future and retry if you mess up the first time. One of the achievements in the game is severing your own face, then wearing your severed face on your face. This is a proper sandbox game, that gives you enough tools to fully interact with the world.

In my opinion, this game is fully worth your time and money at the $30 asking price. If you're on the fence, I recommend just going for it.

Live and drink, watersib.

After a short period of confusion and acclimatization to the systems of Qud, this game is one of the best RPGs of all time. One run you're a psionic egoist eating minds and encountering extra-dimensional assassins while melting turrets made of strange flesh with congealed light from your mind's eye. The next you're a party of mutant knights who's fellowship is built on artificially induced love and mental domination. Maybe a master tinker with translucent skin, a gun rack implanted in your back, and a prosthetic arm that can fling 3-D printed knives 2 at a time.
You will not find this kind of experience anywhere outside of a TTRPG.

I'm drawn to the build crafting, having plenty of (functionally distinct) starting configurations for your character. Not familiar enough with the game yet, but at some point trying to optimise character starts and set them up quickly seems like will also be good fun.

Caves of Qud is a wonderful game, but my expectations were too high. Other reviews get into the positive aspects of this game, but I found very few people talking about how much is randomly generated. There is a main storyline, and several areas and dungeons which are hand-crafted, but they make up a small portion of the time I spent playing this game.

While there are lots of wonderful ideas with faction relations, the wide array of items, and the lore to the world, I think all of these good ideas are hurt by leaning on random generation. Improving Faction relations is entirely dependent on the random people you may (or may not) find, and their random relationships with the factions. The wide array of items is great until you've found your 100th trade item and can't find a merchant to buy anything worthwhile from. The lore is great but the stuff you find outside the main story is mostly small inconsequential details, which are randomly generated themselves and don't really have any useful applications.

I look forward to further updates to the game, but I think it is over-rated at the moment, with way too much filler.

Probably the best roguelike I have ever played. It's a real roguelike in the sense that nothing is unlocked between runs, other than a larger understanding of the game. The lore and atmosphere of this game is nearly unmatched. A lot of love has been put into it.

You will encounter wise talking plants and incomprehensible ancient beings. You can grow extra arms and fight your way through with a half dozen swords, or you can use psychic powers to manipulate the world, and anything in between. The systems in this game offer incredible flexibility and opportunities for creativity.

There's a hugely fleshed out world to explore and experiment with. Underneath the simple graphics which may be understandably off-putting (it was to me at first) is what has become one of my absolute favorite games. And despite the initial impression, this game manages to still be far more immersive than you would expect. The characters, descriptions, sounds, music, etc, come together brilliantly. The lengths of what is possible is genuinely remarkable. You feel like you're really uncovering a wonderful and expansive post-post-post apocalyptic world.

As a recommendation for new players, spend some time on "journey" mode rather than "classic" mode. If you jump into classic mode first, it's easy to get frustrated because you may end up dying in a couple of minutes each time. This could encourage you to drop the game before giving it a real chance. Journey mode gives you the space to make mistakes and try things over again without a full reset of the map. It gives you the space to feel more comfortable taking risks and experimenting to learn the game's systems.

Somehow it seems deep, yet it doesn't scratch any itch.
A sandbox with no motivation to play.

Maybe just not for me. I want to like it, but nothing feels really consequential or like it matters at all.
Fighting boring, talking boring, quests boring.

Pretty sure I just exploded a beetle and caused it to become a door.

11/10.

perfect game.

7/10. It's okay. It offers a lot of gameplay other games simply can't (available due to its ascii and text based nature), but overall it's still a very limited "rpg" sandbox. The basic gameplay loop will be auto-explore grinding until you get to the next part of your knowledge-puzzle, dying, then auto-explore grinding back up to that point and improving.

Very unique experience for what looks to be a pixel/text-based game. There's quite a massive learning/difficulty curve in the beginning, and It's normal to be lost. Once you get past that point, the game is very fun and also very challenging. There's a lot of content and weird mechanics to learn, and even some very interesting strats and items in the game that changes everything. That also means that you have to pull up the wiki on the second monitor to understand what some items/skills do, which is usually the case. There's also a lot of different ways you can start to make your runs unique, and it can get very out of hand once you get things going. Also you need to have an imagination to make the most out of this game, since the pixel art may be a little confusing. It gets better if you treat this like a adventure book, DnD style game. There's just a lot of things in the game that you might find out more and more each playthrough which makes this game very fun.

This game is a classic roguelike with a unique art style that can be confusing at first, but once you get used to it, it sucks you into the world they have created. The developers are dedicated to constantly improving the game, and with a small but growing modding community, it has become one of my favorites.

Absolutely incredible game. I tried it a few years ago and couldn't get into it. With the new UI and 1.0, this has quickly become one of my favorite games of all time.

Excellent game for a selective group of people. Definitely wouldn't recommend this to most people, but it's a great game!

14 hours already and i've only booted up the game three times. makes me think of pixel dungeon meets dwarf fortress. haven't been this hooked on a game in a long-time, and i know i've only scratched the surface of this.

9 Hours in, and I can already tell this game is something special I'll enjoy for hundreds of hours to come. The lore and the setting are evocative and intriguing. Character progression, and the level of customization in terms of abilities, itemization, and leveling progression are incredible, and interact with other game play system in really clever and transformative ways. Even the UI feels sleek and well thought out!

If you are looking for a deep, rich, open-world sandbox RPG experience which still has a lot of tailored, well-crafted content for you to sink your teeth in—and you are willing to meet the game on its terms; as the retro graphics might put some players off—Caves of Qud provides an RPG experience unlike anything else I've tried before.


First time playing a Rogue-like RPG

In my top ten games of all time. Amazing writing, art, music, and ambiance. Absolutely wild roleplay/build potential. In my first (mostly) complete run I started out with a stun rod barely able to take down the easiest of enemies and ended up as a four armed gunboat/cyborg, mounted with phase cannons, each firing of which took the power grid of a small nation and caused an instant brownout, all the while barely being held aloft with dozens of antigravity spheres. If this sounds remotely cool to you, play this game. It takes a bit of time to sit down and just learn the controls/ui, but once you do it's absolutely worth it. It's clearly made for mouse/keyboard, but the Steamdeck controls are also surprisingly usable if that's your preferred mode.

I bought it because I like procedural, roguelike and turn-based game genres, but nevertheless the first impact with the game was quite strange. I was not sure whether to play it or refund it. Finally I decided to give it a chance and... it is damn good. Even the graphics, which sound rough at first, are extremely functional for the game .... and I love the style of the menus so much.
Caves of Qud is another game that demonstrates that huge CPU and GPU power is not essential to play well and have fun.

If you like the genre, buy it. You will not regret it.

this is literally the best game I've ever played. in what other game wold you be running around as a ball of limbs cutting apart everything you see, or maybe strolling through an ancient tomb as a cybernetically enhanced human flying in the air with a force field around them while obliterating everything in sight with your 4 laser cannons attached to your back.

seriously though, if you enjoy deep lore, difficult learning curves but super rewarding gameplay you need to get this game, the steep price tag is definitely worth it.

The game has a very interesting postapocalyptic setting and gives you lots of freedom. You can play as a cyborg with an implanted gun rack on your back, holding 4 sniper rifles at once. Or you could play a teleporting esper mutant. Not sure if your combat plan will work out? No worries! Just use precognition and decide that everything that happened was just a bad dream if things go badly.

Fantastic. Takes be back to when i was playing Nethack on a used laptop instead of doing the reading for class.

Befriend a glow crow and ask him to come with me. He brings his friends including 3 Dawngliders. My face when I suddenly have my own militia.

Go one square over on the world map instead of walking over a few screens. Get mobbed by goat men and die. my face when i realize I could have just turned on fly and probably survived. Oops new character

First time I died because of a crocodile, 2nd time due to a mosquito.

Now on my current playthrough, I had fungal infections, sore throat, got my limb cut off. Met a six arm ape and have him as companion. Got buried alive and then got swallowed by a giant clam. And still have a long way to go before I can finish my adventure.

I don't usually review things, but with the number of hours Steam is telling me I've put into Qud since 2017 I definitely owe it to the developers to post one. I'm not sure what is left to say about Qud that hasn't been said already at this point, but as a lapsed gamer it has single-handedly made me reconsider what games as a medium are capable of and renewed my interest in games. I wouldn't expect everyone to walk away with that experience necessarily but a big part of what makes Qud great and my go to rec for almost anyone with an interest in games or science fiction is the way it respects your choices of how to interact with it. Want to ignore the deep literary (often profound or hilarious) bits and descend as deep as you can into the earth? Totally fine and very fun. Want to just chill and bypass the brutal permadeath where you're likely to get one shot or permanently lose most of your limbs in many areas? That's also okay, no shade. Despite everything the game does, it lets you pace yourself and doesn't inundate you with grasping all of its systems and lore at once, by assuring you that you will die anyway. Often, IMO, difficulty in games today can lead to over focus on the meta in ways that ultimately limit the player's sense of freedom, but Qud's systems are designed to be broken and the sheer number of tools at your disposal to do this is actually staggering and creates a sense of player creativity that I think is very rare in gaming. It really makes the role playing elements of the game feel iterative, something that even many "infinitely replayable" games can struggle with. This isn't even considering the way that Qud weaves its hand-crafted set pieces and narrative with world's procedural generation that makes every run unique but still intentional. I want to 100% it as it also has the best implementation of achievements of any game I've seen, but even at this many hours I don't feel especially close.

I have to comment on usability too: the earlier UI had its charm, but the UI overhaul in the lead-up to 1.0 release is a big QOL improvement and I'd encourage anyone who may have been put off by the UI in an earlier version of the game to give it another try. And I'm just amazed how well the game plays and controls on Steam Deck, I really didn't think it would work but it's better than keyboard.

I know this review is scant on details about the game itself but I believe these are best experienced first-hand and it's better to go into the game at least somewhat blind. Anyway, as many others have said, Qud is a singular achievement and is well worth its price and your time. Live and drink!

Qud, it hits different. Whatever you're expecting from this, you're probably right but also so very wrong. There is so much magic hidden in this game. I think this is my first review ever, so yeah, it's that worth it.

Caves of Qud is a masterpiece of digital manipulation—a game so densely crafted it will convince you that your hundreds of hours spent within its systems represent meaningful experience rather than elaborate entertainment consumption. You will love it precisely because it respects your intelligence while quietly consuming your time. Its greatest achievement isn't its complexity but how it makes you complicit in your own obsession.

I've always been enamored with classical roguelikes and thier complexity and aesthetic. But I don't like PLAYING them. I hate my progress resetting when I die, and I die a lot, because I like trying before I think on occasion. But with this game's new mode, which provides save checkpointing, I've finally found a classical roguelike I can really get into and enjoy. And enjoy it I did!

The gameplay is excellent. There are builds. They get crazy when done right. Really what I love in every RPG. But this one truly has enjoyable things in it. Mutate yourself! Install cybernetics! Stack on quasi-metaphysical relics! You also don't want to miss any of the writing or descriptions. The author of them has a beautiful and unusually evocative way with words I could never replicate. I love the graphical style, too.

Now, don't get me wrong. It's not an easy game still. It IS a classical roguelike. I've achieved a minor victory, but I haven't managed to get to the endgame content and win in a major way yet. But I soundly think that I enjoyed this game and I will enjoy it many hours to come. It's really something special with a lot of love put into it.

It's impossible to really capture the depth and breadth of Caves of Qud in a mere few sentences of a review. The world is vast and full of wonders to discover, the combinations of character builds and equipment are practically uncountable. You can be an ape , a turtle, a crow, and that's just the premade characters! I really don't know how to convey just how many and how wildly varied the possibilities are, this could easily be the last game you ever need.

Great character creation-Amazing world building-Incredibly interactive systems-THE best Roguelike or RPG you could ask for- 10/10

I've played a lot of traditional rougelike games and there is nothing like Caves of Qud. Caves of Qud forgoes the normal fantasy setting for a post apocalyptic world so far in the future that it feels truly alien and unique. While having depth that rivals any of the greats in the genre, I think most players will find this game's learning curve to be reasonable. Having a static overworld map and a few "hand made" locations, a majority of the game is procedural. This includes an entire history that is unique to your current game. A great feature is the ability to play without permadeath...this game will respect your time. Of course, you can go all in on classic mode and get as many "one and done" runs as you desire. Don't let the minimalist graphics fool you, they are beautiful and compliment the gameplay perfectly. You can play this game with keyboard, mouse or controller (or a mix of these). The devs should release this on as many platforms as possible (they will get my repeat business). Without a doubt a 10/10 game.

Caves of Qud is a masterpiece. I have played 22 hours and I feel I barely touched its surface. But also, different from other expansive and complicated games (e.g., Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, all of Paradox games) I do not feel that I am missing out on something or that I need to read the wiki every moment.

Playing Qud feels, in a way, like reading a book. The simple graphics leave so much space for my imagination to think about what I am seeing, without having to be imposed by the developers.

For anyone who gets frustrated playing the game even in Roleplay, I recommend the mod Campfire Checkpoint which allows one to save progress more often. This is particularly true important if you do not have that much time to play and don't want to keep losing progress...

It's very inconspicious game. One you can easily overlook when scrolling through Steam. I did that initially. On the first glance, it's nothing interesting. Just a roguelike with bizzare world. But oh my God, what a world it is. Filled with most peculiar creatures, odd factions and character building options that will make you question your sanity. The further you delve into this cave (pun intended) the more hooked you become. And the best part is, it can be not a roguelike. I play it as a rpg, with saves done when I leave safe places, and I'm having a blast.
What I love the most about the game is that it's YOU who writes the story here. The plot and narrative are minimal. So it's up to you to create narrative behind the events on the screen in your head. It's almost like playing tabletop RPG, only the game master is a computer.
In my most recent run I'm 6-handed, winged desert scorpio with a beak and 3 eyes. Oh, and there's an unholy orb I ripped from an underground demon's corpse floating around me. Fun!

Beautiful game, both innovative and loyal to the traits that distinguished the cult classic roguelikes from the forgotten .exe files of the wide web.

A Steam review hardly does it justice.

An excellent game from start to finish. Very fun and the loot loop is addicting. That being said, for God's sake play it on the wander difficulty if you're starting out. Perma-death can get very frustrating given how quick this game is to kill you.

This is likely one of the best video games I have had the privilege of playing over some odd 25+ years of playing video games, I whole-heartedly recommend it!... to its intended audience.

That is the short version, however, I think the long version is important here, because that comes with MASSIVE caveats. There are MANY people for whom this will simply not be an enjoyable game, no shade to them, and if that's YOU, I don't want my glowing review to trick you into bashing your head against a wall trying to enjoy something you won't. This is NOT the game for you if:

- A unique, new weird and biblically-inspired writing style that isn't always immediately accessible without a dictionary in arm's reach would be more annoying to parse for you than it would be exciting to read.
- Spending hours carefully RPG-grinding together a character with unique rare gear and unlocks only for them to perma-death as is normal in a Roguelike would make the experience more frustrating than engaging.(ALTHOUGH they have non-perma death options)
- Staring at an art-style that is quite literally just one step up from ASCII art in its rudimentary depiction of.... everything doesn't have a sense of charm for you.
- If the amount of information you're asked to absorb up front feels like too much, even after you are dozens of hours and/or deaths into the game.

These are just part of how this game works and they're traits that for many are outright never fun, to which there is no fix for that. If none of that drove you away, buy this game immediately. It is simply that good.

This game single-handedly sets a new bar for procedurally generated WRITTEN content, with every item description, random book, or colorful individual you meet managing to have genuinely descriptive, witty, and sometimes thought-provoking things to say or see held up by writing that somehow manages to highlight the human touch present in the prose even when that prose is being randomly assigned to new stories or new purposes on a new seed. A lot of the game leans on an unchanging sub-set of characters whose dialogue and questlines are not randomized, but their presence does not make the writing *around* them that lacks that anchor feel notably weaker in comparison, which feels like outright lunacy. It just shouldn't be possible to do this, but I have borne witness.

This goes wonderfully in hand with the art style the game landed on, where simple pixel depictions that lack a sense of true size or scale (every creature and object, no matter how big or small, occupies 1 tile within the grid, even though some are clearly massive) are given that scale by textual descriptions that take advantage of relatively simple representations to paint detailed *life* into every creature and object. Everything from a basic semi-auto pistol up to a otherworldly cherubic guardian of lost tombs is given a loving, thoughtful rendition in text to make sure your mind is filling in blanks up to the limits of your imagination.

The mechanics of this game are simple to summarize, but their depth is not. It's a turn-based RPG not unlike many you've played before, with a D&D-ish set of stats, XP, leveling, skill trees, abilities, and bonus stats from equipment and the like, but its the granularity to which these have been executed that excites, here. Everything from gaining (or losing!) limbs of all varieties, undergoing full physiology transformations, becoming a plant or fungi, reconstructing yourself with cybernetic enhancements, developing psionic abilities... There are nigh endless outcomes of the character creation and question process; a common outcome for more than a few players has been winding up a *sentient, walking door* upon their adventure, and that's not even *that* weird of an outcome.

Then you realize that *every single creature in the world* is also operating under the same fundamental stats and abilities system, realizing that some of the enemies you wander into are subject to the same levels of complexity that you are. Simply Stunning.

If it feels like I've been vague despite having a lot to say, its because I have. I did benefit a lot from going into this experience blind, and only starting to look up or learn about things within the game in more detail *after* working my way through my first couple of encounters with them. I'm trying to pass that benefit down if this review happens to be what finds you into the game as opposed to simply watching someone stream gameplay or something.

But seriously, if you got this far, gave this barest review this much time, you should already be playing this game. Just pull the trigger, you will not regret it.

If you have a short attention span, this game is not for you. If you love completely immersing yourself into a game, throwing yourself headlong into the mechanics and lore, this game IS for you.

Now go forth and venture.. into the Caves of Qum.