Caves of Qud offers incredible depth no matter where you look in its vast world, constantly rewarding your curiosity and care.
You find yourself plopped into a hostile world as you start this game. Not that everyone is out to get you, but more that the planet is indifferent to your survival. There are dangerous things just about anywhere you go. Lush greens overtake ancient ruins and shattered cities where you can starve to death or die of thirst. You can step into a town and have a drink of water with the wrong person and find that everyone hates you all of a sudden (which I did within minutes of starting the game). You will need to be careful if you’re going to survive.
But what does “being careful” even mean if you can make everybody hate you by sharing water with the wrong person? One of the first things that struck me about this game was its unexpected consequences over things I carelessly did. I had another drink with someone else and irritated an entire faction (Trolls), creating trouble for my future self that I never intended. Your actions as you explore the game have some meaningful consequences that reshape your story for this playthrough, and finding out the many, many ways that people, places, and actions would intertwine showed such an incredible depth to the world that I had a blast just doing things to see what would happen.
All of that is enriched by some fantastic writing in Caves of Qud. The simplest conversations are deftly written with grace, depth, and humor, adding further delight to just stopping to talk with someone and seeing what they would tell me. It feels so impossibly rich and rewarding to do just about anything in this game – the writing, the in-depth ways things interact through story or systems, and just seeing the buried history of the world – that you just want to see everything. And with this much to see and do, I feel it would take years for you to appreciate it all.
Caves of Qud is available now on Steam.
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