The Ever Ending Story
Yesterday, I was crushed by the weight of a thousand suns. It wasn’t the first time it’s happened and it probably won’t be the last but I need a break.
I’ve been playing the same video game for 9 years now. The game is called Caves of Qud and it is, in my opinion, the greatest video game of all time. Ive played it for 1,188 hours. I’ve died 444 times. And I’ve beat the game exactly once.
I should say two things before I go any further.
1 - There are some mild spoilers later on but I’ll my do best to keep it minimal.
2 - I am not a writer. Not like this anyways. Most of my time writing has been dedicated to writing lyrics for my old band and descriptions for tarot cards. I’ve never written a game review before and I’ve never written a blog. But these are exciting times because today I’m doing both.
Opening Moves
So why write this? I guess it’s sort of a love letter and a break up letter. For a long time I’ve been meaning to write something significant in regard to how I feel about this game. At this point a steam review just didn’t feel appropriate. I have a lot of love for Caves of Qud and a lot of thoughts about it too. I also really enjoy playing the game, but I hit a limit recently. This is my own doing. I took things a little too far on my last run. But I’ll talk more about that later.
For now let’s talk about Caves of Qud in general. An introduction of sorts. If you’ve never played then here’s the official teaser from the creators:
“Inhabit a deeply-simulated science fantasy world and chisel through layers of thousand-year-old civilizations. Build a character from over a hundred mutations and cybernetics. The award-winning sandbox roguelike & RPG full of robots, deep lore, and sentient plants.”
And the description from the wiki:
“Caves of Qud is a roguelike role-playing video game developed by Freehold Games and published by Kitfox Games. It is set in an open world that is partially pre-made and partially procedurally generated. The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic science fantasy setting and is inspired by pen-and-paper role-playing games like Gamma World and Dungeons & Dragons.”
So, it’s real nerdy shit.
Glorious Grids
Most of the time the game looks like this:
This is my first love of Qud. I think it looks truly beautiful. I fell for the pixel art the first time I saw it. I’m sure there’s some deep nostalgia at play here. I think about the first video game I can remember and it’s this old chess game that my dad used to play on our ancient desktop when I was a little kid. Chess figures would tick and trudge across the board. When taking another piece they would have individual animations in which they would reveal their weapons and then slay the other piece before taking their place on the new tile. This chunky retro style of video game art is so much fun. Caves of Qud really takes it to a new level though. On its surface it’s like candy. The color palette is brilliant and enticing. But beyond that the game designers are able to achieve so much variation with so little. The simple sprites become more of a language you read and less of a video game graphic interface. And it leaves just the right amount of space for you to fill in the gaps with your imagination.
Speaking of space, this is the world map.
Each one of these tiles has 9 other tiles nested inside of that that look like the previous image. And that’s just the surface! Below all of that is a literal infinite expanse of caves for you to explore. As far as I know there is no maximum depth you can reach in the caves. The game is oceanic in size. But even the massive scale of the world is dwarfed by the deep and expansive writing.
Mind Sports
Caves of Qud has inspired me to buy two books. One is ‘The Book of the New Sun’ by Gene Wolfe as recommended by Jason Grinblat (half of the original duo behind the creation of this game) and the other book is a dictionary.
Caves of Qud is saturated in text and lore. My wife lovingly refers to it as “The Words Game.” And she’s not wrong. It’s a lot of reading. But that’s another reason I fell in love with the game in the first place. The narrative tone in this game is sublime. The descriptions of the world around you are delightful. You can, if you so choose, use the “look” option to navigate around the screen and read the descriptions for all the individual sprites you see. You don’t even have to move your character to do this. So the game waits for you while you look. And if you’re in a particularly busy part of the world with lots going on around you then you could sit in the same spot and look at the world around you for a very long time. This game is teeming with life the depths of which will reveal themselves to you if you only take the time to read the description of an object.
I’ll never forget the first time I came across the description of a Great Saltback Tortoise.
I read that and it stopped me dead in my tracks. I sat and stared at the description for a very long time. I read it over and over again. Was the game suggesting that my having read the description of this tortoise was part of the reason why it exists in the first place? Was I creating this world simply by looking at it? I thought about this long after I closed out the description and stopped playing that day. I’m still thinking about it now almost 8 years later. I wasn’t even doing anything in the game. There was no movement. No action. No 0s and 1s ticking by. It was just a bunch of pixels and some text on the screen waiting for me while I stared at a tortoise. For 8 years I’ve been thinking about that.
Which leads me to another reason I fell in love with Caves of Qud: Time.
Game Clocks
I’m writing this over the course of several days and what I suspect could possibly be several weeks. I’m not sure how this ordinarily works. It’s just now occurred to me that often times I assume the articles I’m reading have all been written in a day or two. As I’m writing this my first born son is about to complete his second lunar cycle. During the early days of parenthood Caves of Qud has been an excellent companion. Through long sleepless nights with only one hand free I’ve been able to slowly and carefully explore the world with my most recent character. Always the game would wait patiently for me as I got up to walk away and care for my family.
The Caves of Qud wait for you. Yes, it’s a turn based game but I’ve never played one like this before. Every action you take in the game moves the unseen clock of the world by one tick. All of the living creatures, weather, sun, moon, and every other celestial body all wait for your keystroke. The massive chessboard of a world hangs in harmony patient for your melody. And this is to say nothing of the abilities in the game that allow you to manipulate the flow of time. Theres a variety and they’re all a lot of fun. You can speed up your movement or rather reduce the amount of time it costs for you to take an action. You can slow down everything else around you. You can even pick a point in time and then play the game and revert to that previous point in time if the wheels of fate don’t turn in your favor. I think games like this have always captured me. It’s why I love Pixel Dungeon. It’s why I love deck builders and Balatro. It’s why the only first person shooter I ever enjoyed were the Fallout games that featured V.A.T.S. I like games that let me take my time, not take it from me.
Little Guys
If you don’t know Qud then I’ll tell you there are essentially two different types of characters you can play with a whole lot of subdivisions beyond that. You can be a True Kin (effectively a cyborg) or you can be a Mutant. I only play as a Mutant. I’ve tried the True Kin multiple times and it’s just not for me. I get it. It’s objectively interesting to play as a cyborg both narratively and logistically but at the end of the day I just want to be a little mutated freak. Someone could probably write several thousand words exploring why some people pick one and some the other. For now, let’s talk about my latest character. The ultimate mutant: Akira.
In my last play through it was my goal to create the most powerful mutant. I wanted to be able to shoot lasers and travel through time. I wanted to be able to see everything and everyone and everyplace around me. I wanted to be able to teleport wherever I wanted whenever I wanted. I wanted to be invincible. I wanted unlimited power, speed, and strength. I wanted to create a god. And I got really fucking close.
It wasn’t my first time with this character build in mind. There had been several attempts at creating Akira before. Forty-four attempts in total. And they had all died. And this final iteration ended in the largest explosion I’ve ever seen in this game. It was beyond my control. All of this has its own level of irony baked into it if you’ve read the Akira manga. (If you haven’t Akira, I highly recommend it.)
Keeping God in Check
I put a lot of time into this last Caves of Qud run. But eventually I could feel myself become desensitized to the artistry in this game. I could feel the story peeling away. Past a certain point it was just numbers on a screen.
A lot of what I loved about it began to fade into the background as I perfected my loop. I had a few specific items I was looking for that would allow me to farm experience, manipulate my standings with various factions, and permanently boost all of my stats. And I got really good at it. I made it to level 50 with nearly 1,000 hit points. I rarely saw my health dip below 80% even when the game threw some of its most difficult bad guys at me.
Let me tell you about these bad guys. When you create a really powerful character with high level mental mutations in this game you can become very difficult to kill. You gain a lot of exit strategies. Combine that with the aforementioned item that lets you artificially manipulate your standings with various factions in the game and you get a god. Nearly nothing can kill you and those that dare try have had their histories rewritten so that they’re no longer hostile towards you. So, Caves of Qud has this excellent counterweight built into it. As your mental mutations grow you gain something called ‘Glimmer’.
Basically it puts a supernatural target on your back. Inter dimensional psychic assassins began to randomly show up and hunt you down. As your power grows so does the frequency and strength of these mental marauders. They can get really nasty, they always have a posse with them, and they don’t belong to a faction so you can’t manipulate your reputation with them. They hate you no matter what.
But even the extra dimensional assassins weren’t slowing me down. Anytime the screen became thick with these assholes I would just create twelve temporary clones of myself and let them wreak havoc on the wanna-be-highlanders. Always I came out on top. Until one time I didn’t.
Too Close to the Sun
You make it far enough in a run with a character and you start speed running everything. You hardly even do battle anymore. You have a series of button combinations you memorize in order to use the few moves you need to mow down the only enemies crazy enough to fight you. You set your auto-explore speed to max and you cruise through map tiles in search of greater glory. Which in this instance was the final Girsh Nephilim.
(Some spoilers ahead.)
What are the Girsh Nephilim? They’re sort of like the horseman of the apocalypse mixed with the toxic jungle from Nausicaä. (If you haven’t read Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, I highly recommend it). They are living manifestations of the seven plagues that are reseting Qud. They’re colossal beings brought forth from some deep crevice of the world. They are the final plague. And you begin the game right around the time they start showing up (again).
There are seven Girsh Nephilim. But the seventh one only appears after you have killed the first six AND as you are completing the final chapter of the main story. Interestingly, you can affect your reputation with the Girsh faction and potentially become friends with them. Of the original six there are two that can always be found in the same spot, three that spawn in specific zones, and one that can literally be hiding on ANY map tile (randomly chosen during world generation). As you can probably guess, finding this last one is difficult. So much so that of the two times I’ve found them both were on accident. One time it happened literally within the first 2 minutes of playing a run. The other one happened after 50 hours of gameplay and right before I died.
So, I find the sixth Girsh Nephilim. I descend down into the local map to begin my journey below the surface and slay the behemoth. But before I could take 3 steps one of those inter dimensional assassins shows up and teleports me to a spot on the map where several space time vortices are colliding at the same time. Checkmate. After 235,955 turns it all comes down to one final keystroke. I move, the world turns, I die. Just like the four hundred and forty-three times it happened before. You always die in Caves of Qud. In the end it’s the most exciting part about playing the game. If you’re lucky you get to die multiple times with the same character.
End Games
The thing I love the most about Caves of Qud is the commitment that its creators have made to it. This is a project that’s been in development for over 17 years. It’s a living breathing world that is regularly tended to by a small team of dedicated people. I read an interview once with the development team and they referred to the main story of the game as a trellis they built so that the players participation in the world could fill in the gaps like a plant growing up a garden wall. But it’s not just the narrative arc that follows this bend. The whole game is like this, and that is truly inspirational to me. I hope to have the dedication it requires to spend nearly 20 years tending to the garden of my games.
In the world of spiraling late-stage capitalism, where everything is for sale and hardly anything works anymore, Caves of Qud is a cool drink of water on the tongue of a parched traveler.
After almost 10 years and nearly 1,200 hours of play my most recent death was different than any of the times before. It was easy. Where ordinarily I would feel disbelief, loss, maybe even frustration, and definitely the urge to start again; I instead felt relief. Finally, I was dead. Finally, I could stop playing this game. And maybe, after a few lunar cycles, I could fall in love with it again.
I mean let’s be honest, I already wanna start another character.
