Caves of Qud

This isn't the worst game I've ever played, but is definitely one of the worst experiences I've ever had with a game. It's certainly an achievement in several ways, but I won't go into its strengths. There's already a wealth of content gushing about its mechanical freedom and story generation, which is not entirely inaccurate. But it is overstated and wrapped in one of the most hostile ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of a game I've ever seen. Nearly every aspect of the player experience reminds you that, if you are 99.9% of the population, this game was not made for you. It's hard to believe it wasn't designed to be as painful and frustrating as possible.. It's like how online scammers deliberately send emails with spelling mistakes to ensure the only respondents lack critical thinking skills. It feels like Caves of Qud made playing it so psychologically grating that its fanbase self-selects for people with infinite tolerance for emotional abuse and no respect for their own time. The more I've learned in my failed effort to enjoy it, the more it looks like some kind of weird cult. [b]UI/UX[/b] This is perhaps the least accessible game I've ever played. When I play Elden Ring or ToME or another large, complex RPG, I expect to Google things as I go. Like "where's the 8th Borgorite Shard" or "best fleshromancer dex build." Playing CoQ means Googling "How the ♥♥♥♥ do I use the stairs??" and "I'm taking damage and it doesn't say why help me." I've been buying potions at shop screens since I was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ my own pants, and this is the only time I opened a shop and couldn't intuit how to buy something. The controls are an arcane fever dream of keyboard chords that aren't listed anywhere in game. The devs have, apparently, promised improved "onboarding" since Obama was in office, and it simply doesn't exist. Most game jam games have a more fleshed out tutorial. [b]Graphics[/b] Traditional roguelikes are not known for graphical fidelity, which I knew going in. Qud is on the bleeding edge of modernization for the genre by making the brave decision to actually have graphics. That said, this style leaves a lot to be desired. The overwhelming retro green theme is not only an acquired taste, it's optical terrorism after a few hours. Everything is dark and obscured by filters, with contrast either inscrutably low or brain-bleedingly high. I'm not color-blind, so I can't speak to that accessibility dimension, but I feel like I'm gonna be blind-blind if I spend a couple hundred hours staring at this Fallout terminal of a game. Even if you like the retro aesthetic, the lack of sprite detail often leaves you with no idea what you're looking at. It's essentially trying to create the experience of ASCII graphics without the ASCII. Yes, there is a unique conglomeration of pixels representing a specific thing in an abstract way, but if you don't already know what that thing is, good luck figuring it out by looking at it. As a side note, when I searched for alternate tilesets online, every thread was filled with people saying things like "The game is a visual masterpiece" or "This is a highly intentional and elegant visual style core to the game's identity." Straight up Star-Citizen-whale, Stockholm Syndrome Qud master race comments. I mention it because this seems to be the general approach to the game's design, community and developers alike, borne out in every dimension. If you feel that you [b]must suffer[/b] to assuage your Catholic guilt, and this suffering grants you [b]righteousness[/b] beyond the [b]uncultured heathens[/b], then this is the game for you. [b]Gameplay[/b] Even the pukey graphics, egregious UX and wiki-based tutorialization could be overlooked if the game delivered on its core promises [i]in a compelling way[/i], but it does not. My first impulse was to call its systems "shallow," but maybe "hollow" is more accurate. Qud promises complex systems, extreme freedom and emergent chaos, and it technically delivers. It has systems for liquid simulation, electrical power, gas dispersion, body temperature, explosions, the list goes on. These systems interact, creating a dynamic, deeply simulated world where anything could happen! But "anything," in 99% of cases, means something that will either kill you outright, or make it take 10x longer to do whatever you're trying to do. Like everything else in the game, none of these systems are explained to you, ever, and all of them have been engineered to troll you. Gas physics are less interesting when you're holding down "pass turn" for 45 seconds while a gas-filled hallway disperses over 1200 turns. Then doing it 15 more times because this dungeon is 100% gas bomb fart monsters. This is just an example, but I'm sure some Qud-Anon prelate will rebut that it's my own moral failure for not bringing a gas mask, ceiling fan backpack or whatever the hell removes gas. Qud offers tools to overcome its challenges, sometimes. Highly specific tools you don't have, don't know how to get, and probably don't even know exist. It's an endless stream of inventory-checking grief, because [b]everything[/b] is a gimmick. "Oh you have armor? Here's an armor piercing enemy that snipes you across the map, and spawns in clusters on every screen!" "Here's a completely invisible boss!" "Here's an infinitely respawning enemy you need a specific grenade for, or else you're ♥♥♥♥♥♥!" You've heard of the gacha game, now we bring you the "Gotcha!" game. Don't even get me started on the disease system. Better start fast-forwarding time to refresh vendor stocks to reroll for the 5 random ingredients you need every time you get hit by a mushroom so you don't lose your run. Super engaging. Worst of all, for all its "infinite" content, there's almost nothing to do. You basically have two activities: grinding samey randomly-generated cave dungeons, or trying to advance the sparse main story, which is gated by such brutal difficulty spikes that most of the time you have [i]one[/i] activity. Procgen content will never feel unique or authored, but Qud doesn't seem to try. There are infinity maps and infinity loot piles, but once you've seen a few you've basically seen them all. 99.9% of NPC's have 2 dialogue options: "Trade" and "Bye." There are no random events, basically zero points of interest beyond "villages" with one of 3 radiant quests and "ruins," which are cave dungeons not in caves. There are a handful of lorebooks and a few minor sidequests, but this is basically the entirety of the worldbuilding. Exploration surfaces no meaningful discoveries, and instead results in endless frustration. Grind until you hit a wall, grind somewhere else to find stuff to go back grinding at the first place, but they're all the same anyway. Honestly, I think the only reason this game has any significant profile is its potential as a meme generator. "I cloned the Space Pope, but dogs hate him so the mayor of Dogville gave me super-AIDS" is funny.. the first time, I guess. But it's not fun, because these "wacky" attributes are interchangeable text substitutions that are not meaningfully different from one another in the game world. It's basically a massively overcomplicated $30 Madlibs generator. The sandbox of Qud is so limited and uninteractive, that the [b]only[/b] way to extract joy out of its happenings is to turn them into a 4chan greentext and send them to someone who may be briefly entertained by their absurdity. But the novelty of "lol a spork" random text generation wears out quickly, especially when all its systems are gradually filing down your will to live. It's really a shame, because the game's systems are creative, and the [b]mechanics[/b] of its emergent gameplay are actually compelling. While it would not be easy to make, it's not hard to imagine a version of this concept that's actually fun for people outside its ultra-Orthodox sect of Nethack fundamentalists.

Fun to ♥♥♥♥ around, but actually progressing requires a wiki open in the background, and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around too much and wandering around will just get you killed because there's random procedurally generated dungeons hanging around with massive unkillable ♥♥♥♥ in them. Games should not require a wiki to actually progress in them.