Sci-fi roguelike Caves of Qud hits Early Access

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Caves of Qud

If you follow roguelikes, you're probably aware of Caves of Qud, a free ascii roguelike (available here) that mixes science fiction with fantasy, ancient civilisations with sentient plants. Well, it's being remade, minus the ascii, and with a bunch of extra stuff—and it's just touched down on Steam Early Access. £6.99 is enough to let you "swap stories with an albino ape mayor", "dig a tunnel anywhere in the world", and "clone yourself, mind-control the clone, and then hack off your own limbs". Somewhere, money is being thrown at a screen.

Developers Freehold Games (they also made Sproggiwood) reckon that "most of the major systems are already in the game", with some "50-100" hours of stuff to do in the Early Access version. "The big missing piece is the resolution of the main plot", and that's their main focus going forward.

I love Qud's 'faded old computer screen' aesthetic. The Early Access trailer, below, is brill too.

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.