![]() Apparently, you can “dig a tunnel anywhere in the world” or, should you find it an appealing notion, “clone yourself, mind-control the clone, and then hack off your own limbs.” I am down with that, or at least the granular, reactive simulation it suggests. “Thousand-year-old civilizations”? Sure, okay. What could possibly compensate me adequately for an aesthetic and interface I am guaranteed to find pedantic, hostile and pointless? “Deeply simulated physical and political systems” would be a good place to start. Mouse menus are a boon that should not be abandoned without good reason in favour of operating hugely complex games entirely through the number pad and a mnemonically-resistant quantity of keybindings. Things have just got objectively better since then. I have zero nostalgia and a negative value of patience for the sort of restrictions, both graphical and mechanical, that existed in the era of games this apes. This week, every which way he turns is a genetic cul-de-sac in Caves of Qud, an uncompromisingly old-school Rogue-like set in a doggedly lo-fi post-apocalyptic sci-fantasy world, heavy on simulation and mutation both.Ĭaves of Qud probably has one of the best Early Access pitches I’ve read - and it would have to be to get me to play it. Don’t worry, though - you can always roll a new character.Each week Marsh Davies sniffs out advantageous evolutions among the many horrendous deformities of Early Access, and comes back with any stories he can find and/or succumbs to a gruesome fate in a Darwinian dead-end. ![]() Die - Caves of Qud is brutally difficult and deaths are permanent.A novel’s worth of handwritten lore is knit into a procedurally-generated history that’s unique each game. Learn the lore - there’s a story in every nook, from legendary items with fabled pasts to in-game history books written by plant historians.Follow the plot to Barathrum the Old, a sentient cave bear who leads a sect of tinkers intent on restoring technological splendor to Qud.Pursue allegiances with over 60 factions - apes, crabs, robots, and highly entropic beings, just to name a few.So if you have a mutation that lets you, say, psionically dominate a spider, you can traipse through the world as a spider, laying webs and eating things. That means they have levels, skills, equipment, faction allegiances, and body parts. Hack the limbs off monsters - every monster and NPC is as fully simulated as the player.Dig through everything - don’t like the wall blocking your way? Dig through it with a pickaxe, or eat through it with your corrosive gas mutation, or melt it to lava.Explore procedurally-generated regions with some familiar locations - each world is nearly 1 million maps large. ![]()
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