Caves of Qud

I am almost 50 and have played games my whole life. This is one of the best games ever made. I played ultima 5 in 1988 and this game harnessed the greatness of old with the rogue likes of new. Any game that lets you imagine out of game and makes the world around you disappear when in game is true art.

Got stuck in a trap, opened a spacetime vortex to portal out instead a creature of impossible strength came through it.
Created a clone to distract it while I escaped.
My clone shot me by accident and killed me.
10/10

I rarely leave negative reviews and generally prefer to give a thumbs up while explaining my dislikes. But in this instance I will do the opposite and give a thumbs down and try to find the positives.

Most positive reviews mention how "deep" this game and that is entirely true. They also mention the simplistic graphics and complicated interface which, somehow, add to the game ... which I explain as a kind of exagerated/added complexity that is not necessary, but becomes part of the charm of playing the game, learning at every step. I guess I'm nostalgic for that kind of experience, like when I played ruthless games on NES and SNES as a kid. "Tutorial" is a word I've heard for the first time decades after I started playing games, so I usually enjoy the painful process of learning to master a complex and ruthless game that requires you to start over and over again, until you "git gud" enough to beat it.

But the Caves of Qud have beat me. Many of you will say that 5 hours is not enough for me to have learned enough about the game to "get good 'nuf" to learn to beat and I would agree with them, since for the first 2 hours I really enjoyed dying every 5 minutes. Then I enjoyed the next 3 hours when I actually took the time to read a guide, learn how to pay close attention to everything going on around my character, actually "look" at everything and I've learned ways to fight creatures I should have died to until I got to higher levels ... and then just hit another glass ceiling that I could have overcome ... but I kind of was tired and made the mistake of not noticing the differences in the enemy I was fighting.

And this is where Caves of Qud breaks me. I played a lot of roguelike games that made me run through lots of hoops, dying and restarting a lot along the way until I either figured it out or got a lucky run, then died some more until I figured it out. Where Caves of Qud earns a negative reviews is that I was expecting different runs, in some ways, but the caves just make me go through the same hoops, on the same map, with the same quests ... every ... time.

I do not believe this game earns it's procedural generation because I really do not feel in any way that any of my runs were really that much different. Yea, I might get killed by the score of different enemy types I have encountered and it's a crap shoot wether or not the generation decided to put an impossible challenge in front me right at the start, which forces me to maybe find a different way of levelling up (and hopefully that one I can tackle) but that's not even what really bothers me with the game.

Nope, what bothers me is: every. run. feels. the. exact. same. Even when I encounter different monsters in different ruins ! Maybe it's the graphics, maybe it's fact that I do not have the patience to read some entirely home brewed lore with made up words that have no real given meaning and are just brushed on the surface without being expanded.

I really am not sure what my gripe with this game is besides saying that playing it feels like I'm trapped in groundhog's day, even though I have already tried every character (or are they classes ? I dunno) twice at least, trying to learn their differences ... without feeling much of a difference at all between different characters/classes. Even the choice of the starting world is a joke. It's a different village, always located in the same region of the map on a static map.

I feel like I was fooled into thinking this game had some replayability. I don't feel like it has much of that. Maybe I'll come back to it some day and "get the hype", but right now I can't say that I do.

I bought this game mainly to play on the Steam Deck.

I'll start with the negatives and mention that I refunded this game once but decided to buy it again.

First of all, the tutorial bugs out on PC. If you're playing with a mouse and keyboard, be prepared for the game to glitch—at least at the time of this review, on version 1.0.

Strangely enough, the process works perfectly on the Steam Deck.

Negative points for me:

I'm not a big fan of this type of setting, where the future feels more like fantasy. I would prefer a more serious tone, but I’ve managed to tolerate it.

I believe the graphics are part of the game's charm, but the UI is confusing. I think this is a recurring issue with roguelikes: they often have a lot of depth, but the user interface is always a tiresome learning curve.

I'm still figuring out some keys and buttons to get by. So far, it's working, but I haven’t yet experienced the freedom that many people mention. However, I have less than 3 hours of playtime, so that might change.

The music is terrible. Unfortunately, I found it repetitive and poorly composed, ruining the game’s atmosphere and overall feeling. I turned it off, and it was much better. Some areas lack ambient sounds, but when they’re present, the game succeeds in conveying a mysterious vibe and the atmosphere of an intriguing book.

Now for the positive aspects that made me repurchase the game, even after struggling with the PC interface and tutorial bugs:

The game works on the Steam Deck.

It’s almost surprising that a game with such a confusing UI can work with so few buttons, but it does. It takes some time to get used to, but it’s very interesting, and the game manages to hook you in.

It’s engaging precisely because it’s so vast. Each area is a surprise, and the difficulty isn’t as absurd as RPGs from the '80s or '90s. It gives you room to grow, level up, and even abuse powerful skills to deal with enemies.

Not to mention the roleplay aspect—the game has checkpoints, which breaks the roguelike mold and lets you retry. For instance, I kept dying to a red bear, but by using a skill like "STAREDOWN," you can intimidate enemies into fleeing, giving you time to recover and land a few more hits.

While I’d prefer a less fantastical setting, the game works well regardless. Its unique graphical style and the curiosity it sparks make you want to keep playing.

I’m still new to roguelikes of this type. I’ve wanted to play CDDA, for example, but every version I’ve tried is buggy or has a painful UI. I believe Caves of Qud is a unique experience that’s worth it.

The price felt a bit steep, but most roguelikes of this type are similarly priced.

I recommend the game. I don’t consider it perfect, but it’s different enough to spark curiosity and is great to play while lying down.

And remember: it runs great on the Steam Deck!

Thank you.

Qud is weird. It's incredibly interesting, hugely random (yet strangely repetitive, as random generation often ends up being) and, for all its far future mutant and science fiction oddness, rather more traditional than it pretends to be. As in, it's powered by dice rolls and many classic dnd/roguelike mechanics and has graphics that hark back to 30 years ago.

The writing is beyond purple into the ultraviolet. As a stylistic choice, I initially liked it, but it quickly became so much background-cruft. Yes, yes, I'm sure it's exciting that that this item "gleams with nanothings sundered from the spacetime braid" or somesuch, but should I equip it? Oh, no clue? In a game where a non zero amount of things will kill you more or less instantly without warning? Off to the wiki I go for the information that wasn't accessible to me in the game, then. Even though I have an implant that specifically exists to identify artifacts for me....

The multiple ending story is far too long for traditional roguelike play, in my inexpert opinion, as you'll probably maintain a run for double-digit hours to get near the end. It's a shame that you can't reload earlier saves to experience the multiple endings, since there's no way I'm making another character to do so. I thought the collision of inclusive sensibilities and old testament references in a weird post future world was cool, not that the story does especially much with any of those things.

One thing worth mentioning is that this game wants you to break it, or even cheese it. There are dozens of ways of breaking the economy, and five or six different ways of basically becoming borderline immortal (not that the game won't randomly spawn enemies that will straight up kill even extremely strong characters without any warning -you have to look at everything you haven't seen before and consider "should I hit the bricks rather than find out why that thing has an "impossible" rating?" If you're not ending the game with a small army of clones of yourself or wielding enough weapons that you resemble a battleship, you're doing something wrong.

Now that I've completed the story, I feel like I've seen 90% of what it has to offer. For a world with almost infinite places beneath the earth, I don't feel the need to see any more of them, particularly. It was a lot of fun, and I'd recommend giving it a go if you think you might enjoy a combat-heavy, deliberately strange turn-based game.

I'm surprised to find myself writing a negative review. I thought this game would be right up my alley.

I picked this game up after playing a lot of Tales of Maj'Eyal. A friend recommended it as a similar game that they thought was better than ToME.

I enjoyed my first few hours of Caves of Qud, trying different characters and learning how to survive the first two quests in Classic Roguelike mode.

However, once I figured out my strategy and consistently made it past the starting area I found the rest of the world to be... more of the same. My overall impression is that this is a game with lots of breadth but, ironically for a game called Caves, very little depth.

The core gameplay loop is dull. You explore the World Map, descend into a procedurally generated cave, clear the cave of generic procedurally generated monsters, find some loot that's exactly the same as all the other loot you found in all the other procedurally generated caves, then move on to the next cave.

First, character progression is linear. The skill tree is exactly the same every run. You level up, and you add points to your Mutation powers, giving them a marginal increase in stats. This progression is the exact same, every run. There is no exciting or interest variance to this progression. You increase your stat points marginally with every level up, which marginally increases your combat abilities. Which leads to my next point:

This game lacks core elements that make Roguelikes engaging. There are no cool unique items or artifacts. Every run, you'll find the exact same bronze->iron->steel weapons with marginal stat improvements on the previous tier. Maybe one of them will be "painted" and give you +50 reputation with one faction or another.

There are no interesting encounters. There are few types of random events. Primarily:

Stumbling upon procedurally generated ruins that contain procedurally generated books that are full of procedurally generated gibberish.

Stumbling upon a procedurally generated Lair that has a purple text NPC from a random faction who you can 'purchase' procedurally generated 'secrets', conscript into your service, or sells a 'unique' item(read: gives you +1 to a status point).

Conscripting the NPC will give you a bunch of +/- to various faction reputations and and they follow you around like a pet. That's it. No further interesting interactions. No quests. No unique dialogue.

My final major issue with the game is the procedurally generated lore. I was excited to get into the game's lore, but quickly lost enthusiasm after reading 9 pages of meeting minutes from the Wardens and realized that the 'lore' is all procedurally generated purple prose gibberish that reads like it was written by a lawyer. I continue to skim the books to see if there's anything new or interesting, but am disappointed each time.

tl;dr: A wide range of shallow features and poorly implemented procedural generation. Go play ToME, it does pretty much everything Caves of Qud tries to do, but better.

Step 1: Make character
Step 2: Wander around
Step 2a: Die by some random animal
Step 3: Make character
Step 4: Wander around
Step 4a: Die but you're not sure how
Step 5: Make character
Step 6: Be confident that THIS is the time you'll make some progress
Step 7: Actually make some progress
Step 7a: Die seconds later
Step 8: Make character

Hard to get into at the beginning, but it hooks you after few hours. Very strong "just one more turn" vibe. Also - I have never played traditional roguelike that plays this good on controller. If you are looking for this kind of game for Steam Deck - there is nothing better.

This game is largely what you put into it I feel. Depending on your interests, this can be a deep lore experience into a sci-fantasy world, or it can be a thrilling "make one misstep and it's all over" rogue-like, or it can be a complex character building game in the mold of D&D, or it can be all those things at once even.

But you don't HAVE to interact with the lore, play it with only 1 life, or pay a ton of attention to crafting the best possible character either. There's a ton of options to craft the game experience you want. The genius of this game is that you can do, or not do, a whole range of things and still have a really enjoyable time in this game.

I will say this game is probably more fun to people who are willing to "roll with the punches" so to speak, and are willing to do things on a whim, and try to not have the same run, but better, every time. This game practically begs you to try new things you have not done before. But it still provides enough structure that not every play through has to be a wild ride into the complete unknown, and that there's still an amount of predictability if that is what you want.

Up to you what you choose to get out of this game.

I'm so happy that at 42, games like this can still draw me in and keep me playing until 3am if I'm not careful. Qud is very hard to put down because there's always something else juuust around the corner. The world is unique and fascinating and deeply entwined with the games mechanics. Truely wonderful! Live and drink!

Sometimes I lose perspective on everything that exists beneath all the layers of Qud's procedural generation and mechanical intricacy and capital-g Gameplay—I gradually stop suspending my disbelief until I realize I've been autoexploring every screen from a bird's-eye view and instinctually hotkeying through all the main-quest dialogue trees I've seen a hundred times and passively watching the numbers roll up with little regard for narrative context. Once I have that realization, I crack open whichever of the rare in-game books with non-generated, lushly-written text I've acquired most recently—it's almost always one I've never found or read before—and within a paragraph (or stanza) or two I'm fully back in it. I'm back to reading the dialogue, the character descriptions, the item descriptions, the location descriptions. I zoom the camera back in and move my weird character around the environment with intention. Once I'm back in that mindset, paying attention to what Caves of Qud really is, the spaces left between the astonishingly beautiful, complex, mysterious worldbuilding and the dense game systems and the just-abstract-enough visuals and (of course!) the writing are bridged by my imagination and I remember that this is pretty much the best game world ever—and what a treat it is to get to explore it, a slice at a time, through the lens of some of the most compelling roguelike and RPG mechanics out there.

Sincerely, I want to like this game. But I don't. The setting seems interesting and the mechanics might be fun but I've purchased this game twice now and have refunded each time. I can't seem to find the fun. Not saying that this game is bad! Clearly, a lot of people really like it but I just can't seem to grok the fun. Don't mind the low fidelity of the graphics but I do mind how difficult it is to just navigate the UI. I am constantly doing things that I didn't mean to do. That's bad UI design. Picked the game up again when 1.0 came out thinking that these issues had been addressed but they haven't. Just not my cup of tea.

Deep, immersive, always more things to discover. Unmissable for fans of roguelikes.

Caves of Qud is a sprawling testament to the boundless potential of speculative fiction. Its post-apocalyptic world brims with surrealism, where the remnants of ancient civilizations mingle with vibrant, alien landscapes. With its evocative text and superb pixel art, it crafts a universe that feels vast and alive, leaving much to the imagination. Qud thrives in its contradictions, blending the grotesque with the beautiful, the known with the unknowable, inviting us to lose ourselves in its mysteries.

The narrative develops through discovery. Every ruin, faction, and cryptic fragment of lore is a piece of an ancient puzzle. You are not a hero destined to save the world but a ripple in a larger, uncaring ecosystem. This indifference challenges the player to navigate a world where survival is its own reward, and curiosity is often met with chaos. The result is a strange and unforgettable experience that only Qud can deliver.

At its core, the game’s simulationist design is a marvel of complexity and freedom. You are given the tools to shape your character with a staggering array of mutations, cybernetics, and abilities, encouraging endless experimentation. The procedural generation ensures that every run feels unique, while the systems shaping combat, exploration, and interaction create moments of genuine surprise and emergent storytelling. NPCs form alliances and rivalries, environments can be manipulated in ingenious ways, and the world’s logic opens doors to clever experimentation.

Even failure in Qud feels meaningful. The roguelike structure doesn’t punish but teaches, turning every death into an opportunity for growth. Yet, it’s not a game that holds your hand. It dares players to embrace its depth and intricacies, rewarding knowledge, patience, and adaptability.

After more than a decade of development, Caves of Qud arrives at its 1.0 release as a triumph of artistic vision and design philosophy.

Finally, it would be remiss not to highlight its remarkable original soundtrack. Its hauntingly atmospheric compositions are not just an accompaniment to the adventure but an inseparable part of the experience, amplifying and completing it perfectly.

/!\ Caves of Qud is a great fit for the Steam Deck; it has been my steadfast companion on every trip for a couple of years now. "NATIVE" on ProtonDB.
https://www.protondb.com/app/333640

i still feel like im in about as early of days as it gets here but this game is gradually just replacing my entire mind. it's just sliding right into the place where my mind usually goes.

How Caves of Qud goes:
1:Start off thinking THIS time I'm going to make it
2:Die in some idiotic way
3:Rage quit
4:Log back in 5 minutes later because I can't stay away
5:Repeat

Jesus Christ. I held off on buying this because I thought it looked a bit too complicated. It is, but it enhances everything about this game.

I struggle to verbalize why this game is genuinely brilliant. Few games respect the player as much this one does- irl knowledge is almost a meta-currency in this game because once you figure out how to break it in a few ways there is no going back. Unfortunately you can no longer freeze dry magma (RIP lava economy you are sorely missed) but the physics/liquid engine allows for all kinds of similar shenanigans. I can rave about everything in this game- from the insanely atmospheric soundtrack, to the incredible writing and lore but what makes Qud truly special are those "HOLY FKING SHT YOU CAN DO THAT??" moments that ensue once you start putting the puzzle pieces together.

In 2016 I purchased this game in early access, because I was playing DCSS (Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup) at the time. I believed it would evolve into something great, unfortunately it never reached the expectations I had for the game and in 2024 (8 years later) it feels like a chaotic mess of really sophisticated simulations paired with poor design choices.

I'll elaborate; in this game you can go anywhere, talk to anything, make a genuine friendship with a plant who hates fungi, all which is exciting. Unfortunately the game also suffers from extremely poor signalling, causing you to either alt-tab to the wiki every 60 seconds or fly recklessly through the world not engaging with any of it's admirable depth. I spent more time trying to work out if the creature I was talking with was a procedural generated NPC or the main-story quest given. The combat is fun, but it also suffers from poor signalling and some enemies which may seem trivial can kill you very quickly.

Long story short, save your money and play Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup first.

Caves of Qud isn't just about playing a character; it's about becoming a part of a living, breathing world that reacts to your actions in profound and often unpredictable ways. It explores the delicate balance between individual agency and the forces of fate, and the realization that even seemingly small choices can have far-reaching consequences. Caves of Qud represents the power of player choice in a truly dynamic environment. And for a game that initially looked like a messed up Excel spreadsheet, it's astonishingly immersive and draws you in like no other.

Beautifully crafted game... not for everyone

• Simple Artstyle
  
• Some of the joy of the game is the reading
  
• You will die and lose a lot of progress
  
[*] You kind of just have to try things without being told about it

Kinda surprised I haven't made a review of this game yet, but it's as good a time as any to share this story with 1.0 releasing last week.

In my most recent game, I started as a Truekin and went about things as normal. On my travels, I found a strange, ancient, metal bug-creature that was randomly walking around cloning whoever it bumped into. Using my skills as a Truekin, I talked to the creature and convinced it to follow me. Sensing an opportunity, I took it down a series of staircases I had created earlier in the run using an ancient drilling device that led ~40 floors beneath the surface to meet a merchant I had found there.

Now in this game, as you go deeper beneath the surface you encounter stronger enemies and better loot, and the same logic is carried over to merchants. The traders you find 30+ floors down have some of the best equipment in the game for sale, but getting there can obviously be difficult and they have a fairly low chance of carrying the really choice items, like polygel. You can check back every now and then when they restock their inventory, but even if you save their location to a personal teleporter to cut down on the trip, it can be pretty tedious and is still a rather slow way of gathering the items you might want.

However, traders don't restock their inventory in some kind of simulated way, after a certain amount of time every merchant npc just automatically receives new inventory items that materialize from the void. Therefore, there can be as many merchants in an area as the area can fit, and they would still all independently restock their full inventory every few days. Now, any Joe-Shmoe who's seen the Sseth review (which is probably most of you) can likely see where this is going. By using cloning drought (or in this case, letting the metal bug do its thing) on the merchants you find underground, you can create a clone of the merchant, giving you another chance of someone stocking the good stuff.

However, what you wouldn't know from watching the video is that Sseth's method was disgustingly inefficient. Cloning drought isn't particularly easy to come by (unless you use the polygel/waterskin trick, but that requires a few drams of polygel, which is also rare and has a bunch of other more immediately useful applications) and is very valuable regardless, so just using it to clone one merchant at a time is a pretty resource-intensive and slow way of building up your merchant harem. If you truly want industrial quantities of high-level merchant items without investing too much, that's where the metal bugs (which are actually called Clonelings, which I'll be calling them from now on) come in!

You see, while Clonelings technically also need cloning drought to clone people, they only need to be supplied with a single dram (the same amount that can be used to make one clone manually) to make 40 clones. Heck, they usually even come with a good ~20 charges of the ability for free when you recruit them! Though to maximize this you should recruit them as soon as you find them and hurry to the location of whoever you want to clone, as they tend to wander around wasting their charges on random npcs, even after they join your party.

Because of this, it's also best to get rid of anyone else in the same area as the cloning target, (such as the guards most merchants have) as the Cloneling will chose them for meaty 3D-printing just as much as your intended npc. Given the most obvious way to accomplish this removal, I would also like to mention that npcs who's faction doesn't hate you (and factions usually don't care about murder unless it's someone famous) will forget about being in a fight with the player if you move to a different area a few times. Be careful using this pacification method though, the target will still chase you and could end up in a different area with other potential cloning targets if you're not careful. If you have the drilling device I mentioned earlier, a good tactic is simply to use it to create staircases beneath you, then take out the merchant's guards and quickly descend 3-5 floors. When you come back up, the merchant will have likely only moved a few feet and have forgotten all about the earlier tomfoolery.

Using this method, I created 200+ clones of the high-level merchant using a mere 5 drams of cloning drought, completely filling the center of the cave we were in with merchants lined shoulder-to-shoulder. The rest of that run was mostly spent screwing around on the surface and teleporting down every now and then to my personal mall, where I traded the junk I scrounged up top for about 5-6 drams of polygel (which, since I haven't actually explained yet, allows you to copy any item in your inventory) that I then used to copy and shoot up eater's nectar, an incredibly rare drug that permanently increases one of your stats every time it's used. I could definitely have been getting even more polygel per trip if I tried, but honestly 200 clones was kind of overkill as keeping track of which identical merchant you've already checked the inventory of is basically impossible and checking 200 inventories per trip is a pain regardless.

Anyway, the fact that the game even allows you to do stuff like this sort of speaks for itself. I would highly recommend it to people who like games that encourage exploration and experimentation to understand their mechanics, while giving players the freedom to use and abuse said knowledge as they see fit. For people new to the traditional-rougelike genre, (like I was when I started) I should also say that the game's controls and UI are at least relatively comprehensible for a newcomer. They're by no means straightforward, but compared to some of the calculator-tier control schemes the genre is home to, they're not too intimidating. Heck, I haven't actually played the game since they updated the UI a while back, so it might even be somewhat approachable now!

Every now and then, i have moments where i question if my interest in the potential and power of video games has really ended. It might sound silly, but as every year passes by and video games keep getting commercialized into ridiculous levels of monetization stupidity, the budgets keep ballooning non stop while many studios close down and as a result many publishers stop taking any kind of risk to do anything interesting and just release slop until the whole industry collapses (which to be frank we are almost there, at least with AAA games).

But then you get games like Caves of Qud out of the blue, which in theory aren't supposed to exist but there are still enough people out there who have this unique timely, human spirit of persistence, ambition and desire to reach and connect with everyone, to share something special and inspire others. I got Caves of Qud during it's early access phase, and while i'm wary of those titles, this is one of those games that neatly fit the whole format, the amount of equal dedication given by both the devs and fans is astounding really!

Imagine this wieldy mix of a universe ripped straight out of old 70's pulp Sci/fi and sword and sorcery novels mixed with Dungeons and Dragons all the while offering the witty, dark sense of humor of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy. It's one of those games that while i don't always play, i regularly go back to just tinker around with even if it's for a couple of minutes. It's the kind of game that fills you with so much inspiration and joy because i think it benefits from having such a simple but unique graphical style that they're able to pour over all of their work into making a game so flexible, filled with vast amount of different play styles that it feels so overwhelming sometimes, but it's still worth because it's one of those few games that even if you're not playing it, will already have left an long last imprinting on your subconscious and soul.

The perfect game for a hungry mind. Live and drink.

While this is certainly a very deep game, it is also mostly just a very random and empty game for people who understand how random generation works.

The complete lack of character animation when moving, in addition to a very obtuse control scheme, make exploring the world very painful and unsatisfactory. I also feel that a very large portion of the content is literally just markov-chain generated random snippets of text, sometimes not even with grammatical or semantic consistency. (The sultan was a 'babe who held a "rhythmic moment in time" in each hand' ...?)

I got shot at with a bazooka by a potted plant who was offended that I was bringing fungus into their town. I escaped with my life, and the fungal infection on my arm started whispering me the secret locations of legendary good dogs as a consolation. I love this game.

I spent 4 hours just trying to get a handle on things, and failed miserably. The UX/UI is beyond overwhelming (especially if you do not have experience with the types of notation used in tabletop D&D games, which I do not), and I found myself haphazardly switching between keyboard and mouse controls, with neither feeling comfortable or intuitive. I made it years as a designer using fiddly graphic design programs before I had to learn as many keyboard shortcuts as this game wanted me to learn in the first hour.

Determined to get the hang of things, I doubled down and decided to read some guides in the hopes that I could pick up some tips, but just as many players seemed confused and offered information that may be outdated as it applied to versions before 1.0, or represented a very niche strategy that was more for entertainment value. As it was, I just kept dying over and over and over--and not in a fun way where I felt motivated to try again. I'm very comfortable with permadeath in roguelikes such as Hades, Dead Cells, and Rogue Legacy 2, but the Classic mode of Caves of Qud is so unforgiving it felt more like playing a Dark Souls game. Even in the Roleplay mode where I would respawn in town, the repeated dying was more tedious than fun.

Before Caves of Qud, I had never attempted to return a game in my many years of being on Steam, so I wasn't aware that 2 hours of playtime is the limit for a refund. So if you find yourself struggling and aren't enjoying it, you may consider noping out earlier than I did at 4 hours. My two requests for a refund have been rejected, and this whole incident has eroded my trust with using Steam as a platform in the future.

That said, I really applaud the developers for creating an extremely large and complicated game. It's actually breathtaking how vast the gameplay possibilities are, especially when considering that they explicitly support the modding community. I really hope this game finds its community, and I have no doubt it will be loved for years to come. It just isn't for me.

A beautiful, strange, wonderful world to explore. Amazing music, superb writing. Caves of Qud is the greatest traditional roguelike ever made, IMO.

When you tell someone the story of how you died in Caves of Qud, you are still playing Caves of Qud.

Trained a sentient sludge to follow me

Grew the sludge until it became powerful enough to inflict random status effects to anything it would attack

Sludge attacks a legendary enemy, randomly procs the "In Love" status effect causing him to fall in love with me

The sludge, jealous of our newfound love, proceeds to murder us both

10/10 would do the sludge love triangle again

I'm sorry but these kind of games (also Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld) "create stories" like mid-2000's web based plot generators. "A [pack of rats] entered [your bathroom] and [ate] all your [toilet paper], so now your [adopted] [daughter] is [afraid of rodents] and [wont] [eat cheese]". Haha so rnadom, so unique - I mean, sure... but that level of storytelling is juvenile at best and AI-generated slop at worst.

"A [diabetic] [troll] attacked [you] so [you lost an arm]" is not character development; it's just word salad.

The game's systems might be interesting but the way some people sell it as a "a story / world / histories generator" falls really, really short.

Caves of Qud represents the pinnacle of roguelike game design, offering unprecedented freedom through its deep mutation and cybernetics systems. Unlike other games with limited character options, every choice in Qud meaningfully impacts how you'll interact with its rich, dynamic world.

The game's unparalleled simulation depth creates an interconnected ecosystem where every object, creature, and faction reacts naturally to your actions. Your choices ripple through the world in fascinating ways, creating emergent narratives that feel organic rather than scripted.

What truly sets Qud apart is its reward for creativity. Other roguelikes might let you fight a monster or run away—Qud lets you clone it, trade with it, learn its secrets, or even convince it to join your cause. This depth, combined with its brilliant post-apocalyptic setting, ensures every discovery feels meaningful and surprising.

I honestly don't have enough time in this game to give it a fair review. I'm putting one out now on its release day to help the algorithm. Nonetheless, I do want to say that it is to hardcore "anything can happen" roguelikes like Nethack what Rimworld is to Dwarf Fortress. That is to say an *extremely* dense game of myriad possibilities that can look daunting, but does a surprisingly good job of tutorializing and introducing you to how it plays. Also unlike a lot of the hardest hardcore roguelikes, it has a Roleplay mode which creates checkpoints when you arrive in towns. This is as approachable as something this dense can be. This game has been at least 15 years in the making, the least I can do is support it on its first day out of the womb.

I've never reviewed a game on Steam, but I feel compelled because the developers asked. They deserve it.
Qud stands on its own as a roguelike, RPG, and video game.
Qud stands on its own as a work of fantasy and science fiction.
Qud stands alone as a work of art. You can't play the Mona Lisa, but you can play Qud.

Brian and Jason, thank you. Your game is a major achievement of the human imagination. My life is better for it. Live and drink, water-sibs.

O game of dream, of endless deep.

A world as ancient as the stars, where the sands of eternity stretch ever onward. Qud is a place where existence itself hums in every crack and crevice, where each moment is a fleeting glimpse into the unknown. It is a journey that winds through cities of chrome, deserts of salt, jungles of rot and caverns deep with secrets.

The game world breathes with sentience, its every ruin and creature a reflection of the forgotten past. Here, the fabric of time is thin, and every step is a dance between memory and possibility. The mysteries of Qud unfold like a dream that never ends, inviting the player to explore, to fight, to question and to discover, never quite knowing what lies around the next corner.

O Glorious Shekhinah! Praise be upon your symmetrical perfection. Father among Fathers, bringer of chrome, may your light shine like the ageless stars!

To traverse the endless stratas and ever-expanding parasangs of Qud is to experience existence itself—bizarre, beautiful, chaotic and endlessly surprising. A game unlike any other, where the journey itself is the reward.

Live and drink, water-sib. You are becoming.

I was fifteen years late to the party but glad I won't miss the 1.0 launch. Live and drink.

Simply the best roguelike rpg I’ve ever touched. Procedural generation can be a double-edged sword: too much and it makes a game feel soulless and arbitrary. Where Qud massively succeeds is perfectly balancing proc genned elements with handcrafted content to create a stupendous and dangerous world.

I have to single out the unwaveringly distinct voice of the writing as a high point - every single enemy description, item description, heck even descriptions of usually mundane objects like rock walls and plants fairly drip with atmosphere. Qud is an ancient place and you are a tiny creature rattling around inside of it.

For a game with such depth and complexity I found the new tutorial extremely helpful for getting into the fun of the game.

The prominence of permadeath in a game that supports such long playthroughs (40+ hours) does give me pause - it’s very bold, and I’ve found myself unable to resist savescumming at a few (ok fine, many) moments. But that’s ok!

This is a once in every 10 years sort of game, one I’ve found myself unable to put down, thinking of as I fall asleep at night, cooking up strategies and priorities. The price may seem high at first glance, but I assure you it’s worth every penny. I can only hope we see more of Qud past the 1.0 - I would like to live here a long, long time.

Pretty cool game, so much depth, and confusing as heck. Perfunctory review, though it's been kind of cool seeing it evolve over the years. Definitely worth picking up if you have the hundreds of hours to spare to fully see what it's about.

An incredible masterpiece of a true roguelike. A very unique alien world that is filled with excitement and exploration. It's a ruthless violent world, but if you persist, learn, live, and drink, it will reward you in ways very very few games can. I've played the gamut, Rogue, Nethack, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and so forth. Nothing has felt more like a true labor of love than this game.

Be a cybernetic cyber samurai, a 10 limb monstrosity, your favorite X-Men, or more. I haven't ran into a game that does open world truly right like this. It's also one of the few roguelikes where permadeath doesn't bother me. And if it does bother you they put in multiple types of modes so you can get the full experience tailored to your tolerances.

Normally I could write up details on each aspect of a game and why I love it, but unlike other reviews I've given I just want to keep playing more instead.

I really like Caves of Qud so far, it trutly is a love letter to old-school text-based games, packed with so much detail and depth that it feels like you can get lost in it forever—if you’re up for the challenge. The game throws you into this strange, post-apocalyptic world full of mutants, robots, and bizarre factions, where every choice you make shapes your story in unexpected ways.

One of the best rpgs i've ever played, endlessly detailed, with absolutely wonderful world building and writing. I keep wanting to make new characters to try out different combinations of abilities. And for once, an rpg with no useless stats, all are incredibly good to have.

And all of my 330 hours of playtime has been on my first proper character, and i'm still not done with that playthrough. It's just endlessly fun to explore this world, and be a part of it.

Caves of Qud is a roguelike that I have followed for more than 10 years at this point. It ticks all the right boxes for me, indepth systems that you learn more and more as you play the game. Graphics and Music that set a mood that not often is found in roguelikes or most other games.

The complexity can be a bit overwhelming for newcomers, I would recommend anyone starting out to try out the Roleplaying mode as it will alleviate some frustration. Classic Mode is my persoanl preference however.

I spent an hour creating a character, thinking about interactions between mutations. Spawned in, moved one screen over -- evil twin spawns and instantly slays me.

Game of the year.

I absolutely adore this game, a wonderfully deep true rougelike experience! Plays surprisingly well on the steamdeck, after a few extra keybinds and I honestly prefer the experience to keyboard. I strongly urge all my friends to give this gem a go. Live and drink.

Game is very fun with only a bit of clunky-ness here and there with things like looting or heightened hearing stopping the auto explore because you detected a enemy through several walls.

Walked into some lava deep underground, lost my only light source. Wandered into a glass wall and broke it, walked in and started freezing to death because they built a room just to keep a clone of some guy permanently frozen and now i can't move as i slowly die. Detonated 2 thermal grenades on myself to get unfrozen but i also free the clone, who is hostile and my chances to beat him are rated "impossible". Escape him because for all that power he can't see in the dark either, and i have good hearing so i can detect nearby enemies even if i can't see. Its a unique game.

Hard to describe it as anything other than "Best of its kind."
Any of its few problems can be modded out, and the game sees consistent support.

The community seems to suffer from PTSD but that aside this game is brilliant, well worth your time and money.

Amazing open-world roguelike. Allows for a large amount of freedom in character creation, gameplay, story and quest decisions, and overall approach. Really great.

My only complaint is that it's totally viable to make a character build centered around growing a party of strong companions- it's a super fun way to play but also incredibly tedious. It currently functions basically the same as companions in Fallout 3/NV, except there isn't a real companion cap. So you can have as many companions as you want but you have to manage them individually through dialogue-esque menus. You also do not have fine control over their equipment or stat progression. You can only give them items to hold and they will equip what they think is best.

This is honestly holding the game back a lot in my opinion. Hopefully it can be adressed with some kind of centralized party management UI in the future. There is not really even a good mod solution.

Live and drink!

Tried to get into the game but I felt clueless after getting lost in the first dungeon and the devs don't seem to nice. Might be worth it if I put more time into it but it just doesn't seem like the game for me.

I have tried on multiple occasions to get into this game, but I just haven't ever enjoyed it. I typically enjoy roguelikes a great deal and bought this based on how highly praised it is, but I just don't see the appeal.

Ridiculously good RL, best RL I've played so far. It's extremely addicting.
Very unique with tons of interactions, abilities, quests and loot like you've never seen in games before.