Caves of Qud

This is one of those games that is getting a reputation for being "hard". Inconsistent experiences such as extreme difficulty spikes starting as soon as the starting village missions is not the game being "hard", it is the game being poorly designed and balanced. Designing the efficiencies of navigating your UI exclusively around a full keyboard layout is not the game being "hard", it is the game being poorly designed and implemented. Getting one shot by something you couldn't see in location near the starting village is not the game being "hard", it is the game being poorly designed, poorly balanced and having no respect for you or your time and reasonable expectations several decades into this whole making games thing. There is a lot of delightful stuff in this game. In my earliest runs, the wild difficulty spikes or unexpected craziness of other forms was part of the fun. You're in your most generous state then. But as you go along, trends emerge, you refine what you're trying to do(and importantly: WHAT THE GAME LETS YOU DO), and certain things become less and less palatable. There is clearly a lot of thought and passion put into this, but we could expect more from a game being released in 2026 that had a NORMAL development lifecycle, nevermind this game's reality of having something like 15 years of work put into it. I'm going to keep playing. But increasingly, I am having some really low moments that make me question what the hell I'm doing here.

TL/DR Great and ambitious game, but it feels very time-consuming and exhausting. I felt as if I was giving more than what I was being given. Difficult to deal with for someone with a strong FOMO (fear of missing out) First of, this is a complex and amazing game for what it tries to do. Overall lore is fun to uncover, conversations are interesting, exploration of the world map feels great to me. Where I get confused, is just how time-consuming it is to learn and keep track of subtle mechanics and systems and lore and such. There is so much information constantly and it feels exhausting to figure out what is important and what isn't, because my god there is so much trivial information. Dying often teaches you barely anything as so much is based on randomness. I do like having some control in my games, but this one I felt that most of what I was doing/planning was attempting to prevent random bad situations from happening rather than curiously exploring and building a character. There's a bunch of combat options and actions you can do, but really they are mostly lackluster when you consider the effort and planning required and how you might just get utterly destroyed. I have one run that is going well, and I just kind of gave up from being tired and knowing it will end badly no matter what I do because of things I haven't seen/learned yet. I was playing a build I don't really like, but it worked well and let me advance. Classic mode (permadeath) seems the be the intended mode, but there's a lot of design decisions that I don't understand for a permadeath game. Roleplay is great though. It might seem as if I'm making this game harder to enjoy due to my own choices, but when given too many modes and information I simply get overwhelmed as I'm trying to understand intended experience and figure out everything. It's my FOMO talking even in games. If you have time and are willing to delve into a new world and probably get annihilated for a while, then by all means play this. If you're kind of a completionist and explorer, you might want to go with the Roleplay mode.

Eu morri pq eu bati contra uma parede, porem eu não morri por conta do impacto, e sim pq a parede me bateu de volta, e ela era mais forte, mais rápida, inteligente, e de alguma forma atirava lazer pelos olhos (ela não tem olhos) 10/10

Was incredibly fun to play at first. Compelling setting and excellent early game this has the bones of something that can be truly great. My biggest issue is that the late game breaks down and is a far cry from how fun and appealing the early game is. It gets to a point where you really are just auto attacking everything permeated by long bouts of gigantic inventory management and vendor cloning which are almost a requirement for decent endgame gear if you value your time at all and in the late game it feels like the only things that can even hurt you are enemies with permanent stat drains or enemies either designed or procedurally generated to be absurdly difficult and everything else is a complete pushover with little middle ground. In addition, the discourse and politics surrounding this game even if I can agree with or at least respect the idea of much of the premises of it is built on, it has undeniably has gotten out of hand and wildly toxic to a shocking extent. If you are looking for a game that scratches the same itch, Tales of Maj'Eyal does a much better job in my opinion with a much nicer community.

【祝】Switch版発売日決定ということで初レビュー 少し前にようやくクリアしました。 エンディングで感動というかショック状態になったゲームは本当に久しぶりです。 またそのうちやると思う。　次はペット導入しようかな。 英語の敷居は高いけど、勉強するつもりで単語帳を作ってやっていましたが、当然100%理解出来ていないと思う。 でもそうやってなんとか理解しようとする行為自体が、没入感を深めたと思います。 個人的にはマウスよりキーボード推奨です。　このゲームのためにテンキーも購入したほどです。 好きなようにキーマッピング出来たので快適プレイでした。 何かしらのエフェクトやサウンドが特徴的で心地よく、 この雰囲気は唯一無二だと思うので、 是非とも味わってみて欲しいです。

Слишком много текста без русского неиграбельно.

Tried it on the SteamDeck and controls are abysmal. They could have made the controls more tedious but I don't see how. That alone put me off on it. I'm sure it's got great depth/story/lore/flexibility, but the controls are so terrible I have no desire to fight the interface to find out.