Play, Die, Mutate: A two-man team worked for an ungodly amount of time on a "simple" roguelike game, but now they are nearly done and celebrating their first major release. Caves of Qud is one of those punishingly hard games in which you can fully immerse yourself, with permadeath looming as a constant threat to spoil the fun.
Caves of Qud takes inspiration from Dwarf Fortress and other lore-rich worlds, blending core quest-based gameplay mechanics with procedurally generated content. Freehold Games, which includes Brian Bucklew, Jason Grinblat, and other contributors, worked on the game for 17 years. Now, they have announced that release 1.0 is ready to launch on new and old PCs – stretching all the way back to the Windows 7 era.
Caves of Qud (CoQ) is a science fantasy roguelike epic experience dealing with retrofuturism, deep simulation, and swathes of sentient plants, as stated on the game's official Steam page. The game has an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating with 95% of positive reviews. The exotic, far future world depicted in CoQ contains thousand-year-old civilizations, while the player can assemble their character from over 70 "mutations" and defects.
There is a digging feature that provides a way to overcome every obstacle, going through walls with a pickaxe, a corrosive gas mutation, a lava-melting ability, and more. Monster limbs can be "hacked" thanks to every NPC being a fully simulated character as the player's, so you could "psionically dominate" a spider, go through the world as a spider, lay webs and eat prey.
Caves of Qud is brutally difficult and deaths are permanent, the developers warn, but players can always roll a new character if they want. CoQ 1.0 introduces some significant improvements to the game, including the conclusion of the main quest, multiple endings, new music and sound effects, a more polished UI.
There's even a Dromad Deluxe Edition with additional contents and future DLCs, though I will never understand why people insist on pay more money to get "exclusive" stuff for a digital-only game. And no, my two Elden Ring Collector's Editions absolutely don't count here.
To ease new players into the game, the developers collaborated with SBPlaysGames to create a beginner-friendly tutorial.
This ensures that first-time players won't feel as lost as if they were trying to play Ultima I on a 2024 PC Booter machine. Now that CoQ 1.0 is complete, Freehold Games plans to take a well-deserved break before resuming development with new story arcs. The team has yet to decide whether these arcs will be released as free updates or paid DLC.