Bytes ‘n’ Blurts: Marvel Overwatch and Some Deeply Confusing Caves

Year: 2024
Platforms: PC

I feel like my game friends have been talking about Caves of Qud, a roguelike based on tabletop role-playing games that’s absolutely in love with the possibilities of language, since Clinton was in office, but the damn thing just now left early access this week. I’m nowhere close to getting my head around it—if that’s even possible—but I can see why it’s captured the attention of some of the best writers and academics in games. I’m also pretty sure it’s destined to remain a cult game, with a small but passionate following, for the very reasons that makes that cult love it.

Qud is incredibly dense, with layers of text-driven menus supporting its small, rudimentary graphical display. Simply remembering where to go within those menus for what reason can be difficult, and will probably take most players who stick with the game a few hours to even start to internalize. That density will be like catnip to players who love deeply fleshed out worlds with an almost atomic-level degree of detail and control. Character creation alone has so many options that it could take hours to actually start a run. And once feet are on the ground, the game’s procedurally generated world guarantees an ever-changing and hostile experience that can cut a character down in minutes.

I can’t really downplay how staggering the possibilities of this game are. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a game as overwhelming as this one, to the point where I had to really force myself through my first few runs. The appeal of Caves of Qud is not always apparent the first (or second, or third…) time you play it. I’ve kept coming back to it, though, and am starting to see the scope of its storytelling, getting with each run a deeper glimpse into its elaborately constructed history and the delicate tower of civilizations that comprise its world. And its mastery of the English language, obvious from the first play, has grown exponentially more impressive with every subsequent one; from dialogue, to descriptions of characters and objects, to the brief memorials every time my character dies, Caves of Qud is one of the rare videogames I’d almost rather read than play.

That’s because playing it is, well, still kind of hostile, hours in. The intentionally basic graphics are a striking stylistic choice (and a pragmatic one, too), but are hard to look at for extended periods of time. It doesn’t help that the graphical map is just over half of the screen, with most of that being black until you’ve actually explored it; it’s even harder to really tell what’s going on when you’re playing on the small screen of the Steam Deck, as I am. If this came with a physical manual, I’d have it open on my lap the whole time I was playing, just to keep the most basic things about the interface straight.

As somebody who’s old enough to have been playing games in the 1980s, I often write about how computer games, back then, felt like a completely different, overwhelmingly complex thing compared to console or arcade games. Caves of Qud drags that sensation kicking and screaming all the way up to 2024, feeling like a pen-and-paper RPG’s computer adaptation that barely gives a shit if anybody can actually understand how to play it. And somehow that isn’t a complaint—it’s the main reason to play this game, in fact. 

Maybe Caves of Qud will start to make more sense to me the more I play it. Maybe my little freaks will be able to last more than two or three in-game days before getting offed in ignominious fashion. Or maybe Caves of Qud is impossible to crack, and will remain a weird, bewildering mystery no longer how much I play it. Either way I feel safe saying that this game is decidedly not for everybody, or even most people—but that the people it is for will probably be talking about it for another four or five presidential administrations, at least.—Garrett Martin