Best Roguelike 2024: Caves of Qud

GamesRoguelikeCaves of QudBest Roguelike 2024: Caves of QudWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Freehold Games)

Best Roguelike 2024: Caves of Qud

Our favourite roguelike of the year was deeply strange and absurdly deep. It’s the impossibly inventive retrofuturist fantasy Caves of Qud. For more awards, check out ourGame of the Year 2024hub.

Lincoln Carpenter, News Writer:There is too much to say about Caves of Qud, but it never quite feels like I’ve said enough.

Qud’s real treasure is its writing. Its NPCs have their own dialects, tics, and idioms reflecting their own histories in Qud’s surreal world, granting a sense of humanity even to those that—to us—seem the most inhuman. Every item and creature, meanwhile, has a unique description in gorgeously arcane, purposefully excessive prose. Mutants are “vessels of the metamorphic numen”; old statues are “erosion-smoothed abstractions.” In Qud, a chair isn’t a chair. It’s a “wharf for the ass.”

(Image credit: Kitfox Games)

An adventurer in Caves of Qud approaches a statue of a sultan from a previous age.

Sure, it’s self-indulgent, but those excesses are deliberate. It’s a game seeking to feel like an artifact impossibly out of time, and it succeeds. Once you’ve made it past your introductory dozen-or-so deaths at the hands of hyenafolk and gyre-wights, playing Caves of Qud feels like reading a history book written on the other side of an unfathomably distant future, in a language you only understand just well enough to be enthralled.

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Even when I’m not playing Qud, I love reading about the experiences other players are having in it. Outside Dwarf Fortress, EVE Online, and perhapsKenshi, I don’t think any game has prompted better ones.

Evan Lahti, Strategic Director:I’m determined to get better at Caves of Qud, and play it more over the holiday break if only because it is such a resounding conduit for those indulgent, Mad Libs-arranged proper nouns that Lincoln mentions.

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