Caves of Qud

There was a singular moment where Caves of Qud hooked me. I was exploring a ruin I’d found while wondering lost in the jungle, trying to regain my bearings. I came across a statue dedicated to one of the ancient sultans who ruled over Qud, millennia ago. The inscription on the statue mentioned a battle the sultan had fought in, in an ancient village, and apparently from these details, I was able to figure out where this ancient village would be on my map.

“That’s really cool,” I thought. “I want to go there, even though it has nothing to do with whatever this is I’m doing right now.” I hit the space bar to continue.

Ding! Replied the game, New Quest! Go to the ancient village. The game and I were on the same wavelength.

A YouTube review I’d watched before I plunged in mentioned “emergent gameplay,” which was kind of a selling point for me. I played through several deaths in the game’s classic mode, where each death ends each run and you start over from scratch, until I felt I had a good feel for the game, and then I started a run in RPG mode, where you get check-pointed every time you enter a village, and then when you die, you reload from the last checkpoint. I breezed through the starter quests, having done them repeatedly before. I continued following the starter quest line until I hit Golgotha.

Golgotha is a dungeon, where you descend through an ancient garbage disposal to the sewage pit at the bottom. Unlike most of the other encounters in the game, Golgotha is tight and confined, and you get swarmed with baddies. I made it about two-thirds of the way through before I started to run out of healing items. So I triggered a device that teleported me back to my starting village so that I could empty my pockets and restock.

But once I was ready to set out again, I paused. Golgotha was probably doable, but it was going to be a slog, and to be honest, I found it a little overwhelming. Also, I was little ticked off about the quest, anyway. The local technologist had decided that I was his apprentice because I’d found some stuff for him, so he had sent me off to this other technologist to consult about something, but the other technologist wouldn’t talk to me until I went to the bottom of Golgotha, found a disabled droid, repaired, and brought it back to them, just to prove I was worthy to talk to.

Looking back through my notes, I found a quest I’d forgotten, where a local techno shaman had asked me to throw the artifact he’d found down a special well in a special shrine city in the desert far to the north. I’d agreed to the quest but then had put it out of my mind because the city he wanted me to go to was so far away, and across the desert, but now it wasn’t much farther than Golgotha. So, instead of jumping back down a trash chute, I decided to hike across the desert and see this shrine city.

At the shrine city, I met a priest who served a cult that worshipped one of the ancient sultans of Qud. It happened to be the patron sultan of my starting village, so we had something to talk about, exchanging what we’d learned about the sultan. This gave me a bunch of XP. I then went and checked out the technocathedral, and inside met a chronicler who was looking for donations of books, as she was trying to catalog every book in Qud. I gave her the two books I had, and that also gave me some XP.

Later, I was once again lost (you spend a lot of time lost in this game) and exploring a ruin when I found a bunch of books. Also, I’d found some weapons and armor that had been engraved with some stories about the sultan, which I’d copied into my notebook. So once I got my bearings, I went back, on my own, and traded secrets with the priest and donated the books, both of which rewarded me with XP. Viola, an emergent gameplay quest.

The famous saying about Skyrim is that it’s a mile wide but an inch deep. Caves of Qud is an open-ended, open-world RPG that’s as deep as it is wide.