Thoughts on Caves of Qud
After many hours and many dead characters, I completed the final step of the main quest in Caves of Qud (CoQ). Staying up late, watching the credits roll just after midnight, it made me feel the way no other game ever has before. Lonely, agoraphobic, invigorated, nervously euphoric, in general sad to see the whole thing over with. So the very next day I created a brand new character and started another run to see everything I had missed. CoQ again accomplishing something no other game has made me want to do, especially a roguelike. So indulge me while I tell you why Caves of Qud is such a unique game, not only in the roguelike space but also for gaming overall. And why it’s a game well worth your time and investment.
The most immediate reason is that this game respects your time. The very first choice you are asked to make when starting a new game is whether you’d like the game to be played in roguelike mode where once you’re dead your run is over, roleplay mode where you can make checkpoints in towns that you can continue from if you die, or exploration mode where most things are neutral to you and you get more exp for exploration and social interaction. Basically, what level of investment would you like to have in the game? Any way you choose, the game is quick to pick up and play. On a basic technical level, the game starts up quickly, with a very short time between launching and getting into the game. No half hour introductory cutscenes, no obligatory unskippable tutorials designed for people who have never played a game before, just one brief popup to start that tells you where you are. Then you’re off and exploring.
As a dad with vanishingly little free time, I can’t thank the developers enough to consider and implement all these different ways to play the game. For a long time, the trend was to make your roguelike more ‘hardcore’ than the last, with potentially dozens of hours in a run wiped out in seconds. For many, including me in #FrogComPosBand, this is the way roguelikes had always been played and enjoyed. But after the dozenth time dying two levels away from the final boss due to some obscure reason, it saps some of the enthusiasm to keep playing. Here, CoQ gives you not just a few ways to play, but a myriad within several different entire structures of gameplay.
I bought CoQ something close to 8 years ago in early access, before the main quest was even complete. The game was still dynamite then, despite lacking the final layers of polish applied in the meantime. I picked it up because I have always been a fan of roguelikes and one with a setting as strange as this was irresistible to me. After playing in the early betas, I gave it a rest for many years. But I started back up not too long after they released the full 1.0 version. So much had been added! An entirely new UI, quests and refinements across the board. An incredible value. I’d read it had been in development for over 17 years in total. The systems feel so refined, the world so lived-in, the texture unmatched. The disparate array of explanatory and descriptive text allows your imagination to fill any gaps that remain from the relatively simplistic tile-based visuals.
Let me get deep into the weeds on item descriptions here, because I absolutely love them. They are one of the reasons that this game won a Hugo award for Best Game or Interactive Work. For example, when looking at a carbide dagger, you get the following text, “Salt and scars form a comet’s tail along the azure blade edge.” In-game, it’s just a dagger, but such a poetic description sets the imagination spinning. Alternatively, take the description for a canvas folding chair, one of the items in the game that doesn’t have as definitive a purpose but adds its value in decoration and world-building, “Jointed wood and knit watervine make a moveable wharf for the ass.” Happening upon this bit of text made me laugh out loud, something that rarely happens even in games intending to be funny.
Both items serve a purpose besides their mechanical uses. The dagger’s text alludes to the world as a worn and dangerous place while the chair’s lets you know that not everything is so serious in its delivery. I mean, you get achievements for killing yourself in unusual ways here. But this type of texture only adds to the charm as well as giving a contrast between moment to moment survival and quieter periods of trade and respite. You get the feeling from both items that this world has been around long, long before you came into it and will remain centuries after you are gone.
Which brings me to the setting. There have been plenty of interviews and articles on the game that let you know one of the creators’ big inspirations for this game was Gamma World, a 70’s tabletop RPG featuring many similar elements to CoQ. What has been less publicized is that the two main devs spent years establishing the world as a homebrew setting for their own Gamma World campaign. That is one of the reasons I think everything feels so lived-in; when people spend literally years fleshing out landscapes and rivalries before any code is written, the result is both a mechanically interesting and narratively complex world for the player to experience. With every parasang visited in game, the player begins to feel the weight of all those years and history, even though some of the details happen to be generated at runtime.
By which I mean that CoQ brilliantly intermeshes the yin and yang of procedural generation and handmade content. Again, two counterexamples. One of the more innovative uses of procgen here is in the sultan system. In the world backstory, Qud was ruled by a succession of sultans. The game generates their name and significant events that happened in their lifetimes and then sprinkles these details throughout the world for you to encounter in the form of various statues, painted items, and historic sites. You might learn which sultan won a battle against baboons and recovered an artifact associated with the incident. If you find other pieces of lore you can sometimes find the location of the historical site that houses the relic, at which point you can travel there and try to find it. This all happens organically through your experience in the game world, without an NPC having to point out any of this to you.
At the other end of this spectrum is a hardcoded quest that has procgen elements embedded within it. Warning! Spoilers abound, ye who enter here! In the village of Bey Lah, an artifact important to a tribe of insular deer-people has been stolen. One of their exiled members exhorts you to try and help them out, so you go to the hidden village, which is revealed on the map only after agreeing to the pariah’s pleas. There are various clues to be found and deer-people to talk to there, after which you can attempt to put everything together and accuse a likely suspect. The trick here is that in every new run of the game the clues, hints and even culprit are dynamically generated, never the same twice. Who you accuse and why determine the fate of the village, for better or worse. But the real genius here is that while there is a log of clues and evidence you can consult once you find them, it falls upon you the player to interpret the evidence that corresponds to a particular suspect. Again, no quest marker telling you to go here and do this specific thing. You can miss evidence and clues and be led to a logically inconsistent conclusion. To its credit, the game accounts for all of this and will happily let you doom the villagers to disease or install whoever you like as village leader.
My final example of the push and pull of procedural generation vs handcrafting is a small but significant one. In various ruins you can recover books, most of which amount to a single randomly generated sentence. Some are books are the same every run, such as the Canticles Chromaic or Aphorisms About Birds, but some books contain several pages of randomly generated text. Within that narrow subset of ruin-gleaned treasure there exists a secret I honestly feel bad spoiling but it illustrates the degree of thought put into this game so perfectly that I can't help but talk about it. So, in perhaps one or two of those longer, random books you might find a phrase like, “... 9 parasangs east of Grit Gate, where I hid it…” mixed in amongst all the other Markov-chain gibberish. If you decide to follow these seemingly random directions and search diligently, you might find the incredibly rare and deadly pistol, the Ruin of House Isner. Like so many things in the game, it has a short and sweet story associated with it that you can read if you successfully recover the item. And that story is so evocative it makes your curiosity and your determination feel extremely well rewarded. As do so many other systems in the game!
The mutations and cybernetics systems allow such a wide range of possibilities in gameplay, which is one of the reasons I couldn't help myself and immediately jumped back in so quickly after my first successful run. Just to try things differently, to see more of the world, to benefit from past experiences. Yes, I should get out of the way if an enemy has a big red line coming out of them, showing where an attack will land on the next turn. Yes, it turns out I can be decapitated too, just like the enemies I've been inflicting it upon previously. Certain mutations can entirely prevent late game instant death scenarios entirely; if you are a double-headed mutant, you might be able to survive a decapitation.
Ultimately, the combination of these narrative, gameplay, and procedurally generated systems add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. You'll find an item, dozens of hours into a run that will completely change the way you approach the game. And it will happen over and over, through artifacts scrounged from chrome ruins or a hint dropped by an NPC that will let you see events in a new light. The mechanics prod you toward the narrative, which make you seek out new areas, which introduce new mechanics and hint at new secrets to discover. The game confidently transcends its roguelike roots into something so deep and embracing that even calling it a top-tier RPG makes it feel like an understatement.
Play this game, it's incredibly accessible, incredibly deep and incredibly rewarding.