For the first hour I hated the game and thought about requesting a refund. The graphics are objectively the worst I've seen since playing Chucky Egg on the Acorn Electron, which was a game released in 1983. Your heroic character is rendered in exactly two colours, and I don't mean shades of two colours, I mean literally just two colours. And no matter where you go or what you do, you die of thirst or get killed by a dog thing with a sword, or a flying snake thing that breathes fire, or a desert warrior with a rifle.
In the second hour I was still pretty sure I was not going to get my money's worth, as the whole thing seemed so designed to irritate with one short-lived, doomed effort after another. But at least the stupid mistakes of the first hour were sidestepped, the controls were becoming more familiar, and now and again my character would at least complete a minor quest or two before being battered to death by a giant ooze or immolated by a fire-breathing pig somewhere below ground.
Somehow more hours went by and I'd learned enough to complete quests, dodge obvious traps, and fight groups of armed warriors without dying instantly. Gathering enough XP to level up the character gave a welcome boost to strength, or agility, or toughness, all of which helped me to survive, and allowed new skills to be unlocked, which gave me new ways to fight or avoid threats.
Afer dying many, many times in "Classic" mode, where death is permanent, I decided to switch to "Roleplay" mode so that if I died then I could reload from the last settlement I visited. That way I could progress through the main story even if bad luck or clumsly button pressing led to death.
Once you've got the hang of the controls, and of the combat system, and worked out how to avoid being outmanoeuvred when you're outnumbered, and learned to keep an eye on your water supply (which is also the main currency in the game), and settled on a combat style for your character, then you should fairly soon get into the groove and start levelling up pretty quickly. And each time you level up you do earn yourself a decent dopamine hit, because upgrading your core stats and unlocking new skills and mutations will turn you from a puny newcomer, who will die from a light scorching, into a formidable warrior who can take on hordes of assorted humans, humanoids, and all manner of other creatures.
In fact, pretty much everything about the gameplay is centred around upgrading yourself, your weapons, your armour, and your tools. If you're lucky you'll start off with some leather armour and maybe a bronze sword, but by scavenging and trading you can replace bronze with iron then steel, and gradually work your way up to flawless crysteel or (if you're very lucky) the finest and rarest zetachrome weapons and armour. You'll probably start off without any firearms, but after some time you'll find muskets and rifles, and from there you can work towards energy weapons such as light rails and spaser rifles, or heavy weapons such as flamethrowers and linear cannons. You'll have to make decisions when armouring and arming your character, as you'll often have to trade off armour value against dodge value, or penetration chance against raw damage, and many types of armour and weapons have interesting side perks not directly related to armour or firepower.
Along with standard weapons and armour, you can eventually acquire anti-gravity boots which let you fly, ignoring mêlée attacks from grounded enemies (but they don't work if you're underground). And boots which let you construct walls behind you as you move around, handy for trapping enemies or keeping allies safe from harm. And a geomagnetic disc which you throw at an enemy and it bounces off of several enemies before returning to you (works great with the morphogenetic modification, which attempts to daze all creatures of the same species in the current zone). And floating light sources which remove the burden of carrying a flaming torch in a hand which can be put to better use holding a weapon or shield. And forcefield generators to protect you from attacks, hologram generators to distract enemies, and scanners which let you identify complex artifacts instantly. Plus numerous other exotic items which give you new ways to fight and survive.
If you unlock the Tinker skills then you can buy (or find) data cards which teach you to apply modifications, such as making an energy cell radio-powered (causing it to recharge itself as you travel about the world), or making a rifle scoped (improving your accuracy with it), or making your long sword counterweighted (so that you have a greater chance of hitting an enemy with it in combat). You can also learn how to build reprogrammable recoilers which can be imprinted with a location anywhere in the world, so that you can jump back to it at any time (so long as the recoiler is given an energy cell with sufficient remaining charge).
If you play as a "True Kin" character (unmutated human) then you can visit a Becoming Nook to upgrade your body with swappable cybernetic modules you find or buy on your travels around the world, such as dermal plating (improved armour value), translucent skin (improved dodge value), penetrating radar (see everything within a few metres around you, including through walls).
Play instead as a "Mutant" and you're not welcome at the Becoming Nooks, but you can develop powerful mutations such as phasing (walk through walls), sunder mind (fry an enemy's brain from a safe distance), domination (temporarily move your mind into another creature's body and take control of it), multiple legs (walk and run much faster than usual) and multiple arms (four pairs of hands means you can wield twice as many mêlée weapons).
Also satisfying is learning the location of historic sites and then judging when you're ready to loot them of forgotten treasures. The further away a historic site is from your starting village, the higher the tier of loot you can find, but you'll also encounter more dangerous creatures, so you might decide that retreat is the only option on your first attempts. The rewards can be very pleasing, though, offering enhanced versions of high-tier weapons and armour, many of which offer you powers which normally require a mutation, such as light manipulation (illuminate your surroundings, and fire frickin' laser beams at enemies), or temporal fugue (create multiple copies of yourself temporarily to turn the odds in your favour during a difficult fight).
The game has a large variety of creatures, each of which belongs to a different faction, such as oozes, robots, birds, unshelled reptiles, Seekers Of The Sightless Way, and many more. When you start the game your reputation with most factions will be neutral, which means that only aggressive members of that faction will attack you but the rest will ignore you unless you cause trouble (which includes attacking their aggressive comrades). A few factions will start off disliking or despising you, which means that neutral and even docile members will attack you. By partaking in a water ritual with legendary members of a faction, you can boost your reputation with that faction, but this also usually upsets factions which hate that legendary figure, so you usually have to decide what's more important: reducing the hostility of oozes, or keeping unshelled reptiles on side. If you're foolish enough to kill (or cause the death of) someone you've bonded with via the water ritual, then you'll suffer a big hit to your reputation with all factions (even those you've never bonded with).
Reputation is important, so you have to be careful how you manage it. Some formidable enemies are difficult to deal with even in the late game when you're highly buffed, so it's often easier to boost your reputation with the most dangerous factions than it is to avoid or fight their members. Beside the water ritual, there is another way to boost your reputation: find a Schrodinger page and entangle good deeds into the history of the faction so that they view you more favourably. Very handy, but these pages are usually very rare unless your game run randomly features a lot of bookbinder merchants or legendary scribes. If you find a (fairly rare) bottle of metamorphic polygel you can use it to create an exact duplicate of a Schrodinger page so that you can boost your reputation an extra time. But metamorphic polygel can also create an exact copy of almost any item in the game, including powerful items found at historic sites, so you have to decide what is the best use for these rare (single-use) bottles when you find one.
What are not rare are books. On your travels you'll find bookshelves in numerous ruins and historic sites, and by grabbing the books and taking them to a librarian you meet early on, you can gain XP. The more valuable the book, the more XP you'll be awarded, so it's worth emptying every bookshelf you find and carrying the goods back to the Six Day Stilt to hand them over. But the books also hide a secret: some (a tiny percentage of) procedurally generated books contain half-clues to the location of a legendary pistol known as the Ruin Of House Isner, which is a useful weapon early on, and handy for boosting your Ego stat any time you need it raised. In the Early Access version of the game, it was a lot easier to find clues in books, but since the 1.0 release it has become much rarer for books to contain clues about the location of this tool of vengeance. (Make sure to read the "Recall story" when you find it.)
Some books are also useful for teaching you recipes, which let you mix specified ingredients at a campfire to give yourself a temporary boost to your stats, or temporary access to mutations. The recipe books are handy, but it's usually better to unlock the relevant skill and gain the ability to create your own recipes, so that you can compile your own collection of useful tricks. For example, a certain recipe might give you burrowing claws (dig holes through walls and tunnels through solid rock), and/or improved dodge value or armour value, and/or pyrokinesis (turn a 3×3 area into an inferno).
Extremely rarely you might find a book (usually at a historic site) which permanently boosts one of your stats when you first read it, or grants you a particular skill without spending any skill points.
If you're playing as a mutant then eventually you'll probably have gained enough mental mutations and a high enough ego to boost their strength to a decent level. Every level you have in any mental mutation will count towards your glimmer: the degree to which you attract the attention of esper hunters. When your glimmer gets above twenty you will occasionally find, on arriving in a new zone, that Seekers Of The Sightless Way are waiting for you, likely with hostile intent. If you let your glimmer exceed forty then extradimensional esper hunters will be added to the mix, and the higher your glimmer grows the more likely it is that an ever-larger horde of powerful hostiles will be waiting for you.
If you keep boosting your ego and your mental mutations until your glimmer exceeds 250 then you'll arrive in about one in five new zones to find that there are five esper hunters waiting for you. If they also have an entourage of thralls then this can mean the zone is jam packed with two-dozen powerful enemies eager to fight you. While you can usually handle them, this can make it difficult to actually focus on the goal that drew you to that zone in the first place. It gets particularly messy if an esper hunter horde appears when you have something critical to do, such as discuss business with a legendary character or collect a relic from a historic site, not least because some of the espers' mental mutations can lay waste to large portions of the zone. Esper hunter hordes are also quite capable of killing your golem in the late game, if you don't guard it carefully, so they are a menace even when you've become too powerful for them to best in combat.
If you want to avoid esper hunters, you can deliberately limit your mental mutations or your ego stat. You can alternatively start the game as a chimera mutant: only able to gain physical mutations, never mental mutations. Or play as True Kin, who don't gain mutations naturally (only via cooking recipes and legendary armour) and thus are less likely to attract the attention of esper hunters.
Fluids also play a big part in the game. Water is the main currency, and if you run out of fresh water while travelling then you'll start to die of thirst. But usually while travelling you'll bump into merchants or at least other non-hostile travellers who are willing to buy the scrap and loot you've found, so once you've got past the tricky early stage of the game you can normally avoid dehydration. And, later in the game, you gain access to recoilers, which let you instantly transport yourself to a specific friendly village, so it becomes even rarer to find yourself truly out of options when water runs low.
More problematic fluids can also be found all over the world. Deep caves may be filled with lava, which will ignite you and destroy your armour and equipment if you wade through it or if you fight great magma crabs up close. Acid will also harm you and your gear, and besides existing in natural pools you'll also have to beware spitting slugs and oozes which spew gobs of acid at you from a distance, or leak it all over you when you defeat them in mêlée combat. Certain unpleasant fluids will make you sick, or rust your weapons and armour, or apply a totally random effect to you, and it's wise to avoid these even if it means digging a tunnel to create a safe route around them.
The most interesting fluids are the rarest, and most valuable. Sunslag can be drunk to boost your quickness; cloning draught can be used to clone yourself or valuable merchants; neutron flux has various uses, but can boost your armour permanently or crush you under the weight of a thousand suns depending on your luck; and warm static can turn anything into anything else, like a giant randomizer, which can make it a last resort escape option if you find yourself in melee combat with something you cannot handle: simply pour a drop of warm static on the enemy and they'll turn into something random, most likely something much weaker (though there's always the risk they'll turn into something even worse).
Chefs and kippers and ichor merchants sell a variety of fluids, most of them less exotic such as wine, cider, sap, oil, and honey, and all of the various fluids in the game have their uses to one degree or another, not least when creating meal recipes which give different benefits.
One of the most irksome events in the game is when your character falls ill or gains a fungal infection, as these can really impede your character and can require quite a bit of work to cure. Fungal infections are particularly easy to contract, as simply being near a mushroom when it puffs spores will give your character "itchy skin" and from there it's very likely that one of four fungal infections will develop. A random body part will take on the fungal infection, and that body part cannot be equipped with armour or equipment while the fungal infection remains, which can harm your combat survivability.
But each of the four fungal infections does at least bring some odd benefits: one type will whisper secrets (locations of useful things in the world) to you; another will grow valuable mushrooms which you can sell or eat; another adds a decent amount of armour value but also reduces your dodge value and quickness; and one simply spews fungal spore when you're attacked, which can rapidly cause a lot of nearby creatures to become similarly infected, which can then mean they infect other parts of your body, which rapidly becomes a real nuisance.
Other unpleasant diseases include glotrot, where you tongue rots away and you become unable to talk, and you suffer severely while haggling with merchants. And ironshank is either a curse or a blessing depending on whether you're happy to trade a lot of movement speed for a lot of armour on your legs (much less of a problem if you have the multiple legs mutation).
Diseases can be cured (if you wish) but it requires finding a copy of the book which describes remedies for diseases, and then following the (randomised per run) instructions to mix up a cure and apply it to yourself. This can be amusing in itself, but also a real pain if it become necessary while you're in the middle of trying to do something else.
The main story quests are the same in every run, so there is a definite structure and story arc to the game. But the historic sites, and minor villages and ruins are randomised in each run, as are the minor merchants you find at the Six Day Stilt, and around the world map. Combined with the large number of choices you have regarding mutations, cybernetics, weapons and armour, there is plenty of amusement to be had from several playthroughs (I've completed the game six times). Even after several hundred hours, I was still encountering things I'd never before noticed or appreciated fully.
And within each run there's enough chaos to make sure you can never be certain how an encounter will unravel. Tongue tyrants and bloated pearlfrogs can suddenly drag you from one side of the zone to the other with their long, sticky tongues. Walking into a giant clam will instantly transport you to another giant clam in some other zone. Dreamcrungles can zap you into a waking dream, where you suddenly take control of another random creature anywhere in the world and must survive long enough to wake peacefully, or permanently lose a point from your willpower stat. And on the subject of permanent stat loss, bat-like saps should be destroyed before they get anywhere near you. Spacetime vortices can sweep you or your followers up and drag you to some random place mid-fight. Temporal fugue can create copies of you (or enemies) which turn a simple fight into a chaotic ruckus. Some legendary weapons create a clockwork beetle each time you hit an enemy with them, so you can quickly amass your own clockwork beetle army which follow you around and swarm your enemies. When you want to gain reputation with a hostile legendary creature, you can jab them with a love tonic and turn them into a lovesick follower, which works great unless you forget to dump them somewhere before they snap out of it, at which point you have a hostile water-bonded creature attacking you without warning. And when you meet The Alchemist he's just as likely to sell you exotic fluids as he is to panic and blow up the whole area by flinging a dram of neutron flux at the ground.
Possibly the most chaotic of all is fighting the mighty plague titans known as Girsh Nephilim. Each of these titans is quite a formidable foe, with a lot of hitpoints, elevated stats, and the ability to emit an irisdual beam which is basically a laser attack made up of several beams firing in multiple directions simultaneously, forcing you to step aside or get seriously cooked. To make things worse, one of these titans confuses you whenever you have her in your line of sight, making it extremely difficult to fight her and dodge her irisdual beams.
But the worst of all is the seventh titan: Starformed Ehalcodon. If you're crazy enough to fight this titan then be warned that Ehalcodon has wings, and quantum fugue (a more powerful form of temporal fugue), and also hatches mini girsh which reflect the irisdual beams, so that not only do you have to dodge powerful airborne mêlée attacks from multiple directions, you also have to somehow survive almost the entire zone being criss-crossed with irisdual beams that lay waste to almost everything. Even with a seriously formidable character, you're likely to have real trouble if you choose to take on Ehalcodon.
All told, there's enough randomness and variety in Qud to keep you amused for quite some time, and things are rarely straightforward or boring.
Despite being in development for eighteen years (but only getting a 1.0 release this year), the game's size and complexity mean that there are still some bugs. The game would often hang when I was trying to exit it, which didn't cause any harm but was somewhat irritating. And sometimes things would break, such as being unable to puff Klanq spores despite the fact the requisite fungal infection was still in place, which made it difficult to complete the associated quest (and also a rare Steam Achievement).
Cybernetics frequently stopped working and needed to be uninstalled and then reinstalled, which requires a trip to a location with a Becoming Nook. This was mostly just a frustrating diversion, but at times it was a real pain, such as when your Biodynamic Power Plant cybernetic would stop producing power, leaving all of your "jacked" energy weapons and tools completely powerless and forcing you to find energy cells for them, which completely defeats the benefit of the cybernetic. And Penetrating Radar would often refuse to work the first few times it was installed, in the worst case requiring the game to be exited and reloaded.
The simple graphics can also hide dangers, especially when a pool of lava or acid is not visible because some item happens to be on that tile and the rendering engine simply draws the item and gives no visual clue to the fact it's swimming in danger. You usually get a warning before you step into a dangerous liquid, but hammering the movement keys quickly means you can easily disregard such warnings and wade into lava or acid without meaning to. Stacked items on the same tile also make it difficult to rifle through them without using the "Nearby Items List" pane which is off by default (if I recall correctly). And if you drop gear deliberately (or have it snatched out of your grasp by a dastardly Pulsed Field Magnet) then the item won't even be visible if it shares a tile with something deemed more important, such as a doorway, which makes it easy to lose track of the item completely. Given the limitations of the graphics engine, I'm not sure how these problems could be fixed.
My chosen key mapping (to allow left-handed mouse) placed the "move right" action under the 'N' key (on my Dvorak keyboard layout), which meant that any time my character moved due east (right) on the world map and discovered a place of interest, the popup dialog which asks "You notice some ruins nearby. Would you like to investigate?" would frequently be dismissed when I habitually hit 'N' again, and there's no way to remap the "say no" action. In the end I found myself exploring from right-to-left to avoid this problem, so another nuisance rather than a disaster, but still a bit irksome.
Also, something which could in theory be easily fixed: the damage and effect indicators are drawn right on top of the creature being affected. If you're slugging it out with a formidable opponent, the fight can last some time, and you will inevitably start hammering the attack button to move things along quickly. But this means that you actually lose sight of the opponent under a cloud of indicator labels such as "-33", "-7", "dazed", "stunned", "remains stunned". With some enemies, losing sight of things is dangerous because you won't see that they're about to make an instant kill action if you don't step aside. It would be nice if the game could be tweaked to move these labels aside so that they never block your view of your character and your opponents.
Shooting at and around corners is also frustrating. Due to the way the game calculates gunfire trajectories, attempting to shoot at something which is in a corner tile is pretty much always a waste of ammo. And firing around corners more often than not just means you hit the wall right next to you.
In addition: automatic pathfinding can be bizarre; the user interface would often render in a broken fashion after a few hours of continuous play; busy zones with a lot of combat between factions would bring the game to a crawl; the inventory category buttons constantly move around and make it hard to find the one you want; and gun targeting often starts by selecting a random non-hostile creature even if a hostile one is visible. All of these are pretty lightweight, but it would be nice if the game's developers could fix them up.
Note that a few things which initially feel like a problem can in fact be smoothed over by taking a good look through the options and also the advanced options (hidden by default). For example, if you don't want automatic exploration to be halted just because of some trivially feeble hostile, you can configure this so that you ignore hostiles below a chosen level relative to yours. And if certain types of notification bug you, you can probably find an advanced option to turn them into lines in the message log pane instead.
Caves Of Qud won't be for everyone, but if you like the sound of a turn-based, quest-based roleplay game with main story quests and numerous side quests and amusements, then give it a try. You might hate it the first hour, but then go on to play it for six-hundred hours anyway.
The graphics are initially a punch in the eyes, and their basic nature does sometimes make it difficult to work out what's going on. But once you get over the shock of a graphical trip back to the 1980s, the graphics do have a lot of charm. I particularly like the hexagonal crystal realm of the Moon Stair, and each biome and habitat does have its own distinctive aesthetic, despite being made up entirely of one-colour and two-colour tiles.
The soundtrack does a great job of adding atmosphere, with a sweaty sounding theme for jungle areas, and a deep, menacing, ascendant theme for the dangerous Moon Stair zones. Despite playing for hundreds of hours, the soundtrack never felt like it was getting in the way or boring with repetition, as it fits so well.
The character dialogue and item descriptions are saturated with interesting and unusal writing styles, some of them tricky to comprehend fully at first, but this adds a real sense that you're exploring ancient and hidden realms.
The side quests are very simple, but offer XP and amusement while you wait for the main story quests to become available (and survivable). And the main story itself is amusing, and scales up to suitably world-changing dimensions, taking you all about the world and beyond, and offering you several choices as to how you want to bring the tale to an end.
All told, Caves Of Qud has kept me amused for six-hundred-and-thirty hours across six playthroughs (two of them in Early Access without the final chapter). It has heaps of variety, plenty of combat, trade, diplomacy, and a story arc which feels satisfying. If this sort of game has ever appealed to you then Caves Of Qud is very probably worth a try.
If you've grown to love the game and want to make sure you don't miss any of the hidden treats, or if you hate the game and need help making sense of it, then these sites will be of use: