Sensing I may not have min-maxed my stats adequately, I choose a career as a water merchant, which means I have good standing with the water barons, hopefully mitigating the cost of my relentless thirst. Also, I photosynthesise rather than eat food, which means as well as staying wet at all times I am compelled to bask in the sun. I select the amphibious trait, too - a debuff that frees up a few more mutie points but means I have to regularly pour water over myself to remain verdant and wet, which is quite a disadvantage given how precious a resource water is. From the outset, my character has a tough carapace, two extra arms and burrowing claws. Choosing to be a mutant invites radiation that lets you go to town on your genome. Really, my only significant interaction with the game’s procedural promise has come in the form of the character creator, and the huge number of funny, lurid variants that this enables. Instead, the only story I am qualified to recount is that of The Many Deaths of Bernard Pondscum. Yet this is a cake of which I have barely sampled a single crumb. “Diseases, storied artifacts, history books, the poetic ramblings of a mad goatman, cryogenic chambers” and more - these are just cherries on an epic procedural cake. 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. I couldn't stand the narrator's inflections from what I listened to, but I really want to read them again one way or the other.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. ![]() There's audiobook versions available also. What feels like a haphazard jumble of weird ideas ends up being all tied together as you slowly start to see the bigger picture of the history of the world and what's going on, much like a lot of the writing in Qud. And throughout all of it is the pervasive feeling that "the world has moved on" from these great marvels of science, and what they're encountering are more decrepit echoes of what once was. The background of Roland's world is low fantasy with guns, but it quickly pulls from modern era and weird unidentifiable sci-fi technology as realities blend together. There are definitely fantasy aspects, and one novel, Wizard and Glass, is pretty much entirely low fantasy and a sort of bubble novel (stands on its own), but there's a lot of technology set pieces and themes.
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