Caves of Qud

Caves of Qud is a Hugo Award-winning science fantasy roguelike from Freehold Games that's been in continuous development since 2007 and reached its 1.0 release in 2024. The setting is a deeply weird post-everything world layered over fifteen years of worldbuilding: sentient plants, retrofuturist eco-domes, salt deserts, ancient ruins under newer ruins, and a slowly unravelling question about whether the world is dying or about to be reborn. The greeting is "live and drink, friend," and the game means it.

The simulation runs unusually deep. Every wall has a melting point; you can dig through obstacles, burn them, dissolve them with corrosive gas, or eat them depending on your build. Every monster and NPC is as fully simulated as the player, with their own skills, equipment, faction allegiances and body parts — psychically dominate a spider and you can run around the world as that spider, laying webs and consuming things. A dynamic faction system covers more than seventy groups, including apes, crabs, trees, robots and highly entropic beings.

Character creation is one of the most expressive in the genre. Over seventy mutations — wings, two heads, four arms, flaming hands, teleportation, cloning — combine with dozens of cybernetic implants and twenty-four castes and kits drawn from Qud's social order. You can play a true-kin descendant from one of the few remaining eco-domes or a mutant indigenous to the dunes and jungles. Four play modes — Classic with permadeath, Roleplay with checkpoint saves, Wander focused on exploration without forced combat, and Daily with a fixed seed — give you a way in regardless of how punishing you want the experience to be.