Fairly early on in Caves of Qud, I found myself in the great cave of Golgotha. This was a good while back now, but I’m still thinking about it – I’m still thinking about that cave. The great cave at Golgotha is part of a fairly early quest. You go in to find a malfunctioning robot and then fix it – just to show you’re good enough to go off on another, far more meaningful questline. Fine. But that cave! You drop in via an elevator shaft, and if you’re particularly careful – or if you can’t fly – you have to take it strictly one level at a time on your way down. And what’s down there? Darkness. Salty water. Puddles of green goo. But also conveyor belts, stretched and tangled across the earth. Sparking machinery that can give you a nasty shock. Doors that you’ll need to find the right key to unlock. The past and the future tangled together, and yet somehow it’s all ancient.
Caves of Qud reviewDeveloper: Freehold GamesPublisher: Kitfox GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam, GOG and Itch.io)
I love Golgotha. That’s probably clear by now. Nothing huge happens here, but it was such a bright shock to stumble upon what felt like parts of an ancient factory down in the subterranean gloom. And then there’s the tale of distinctly personal idiocy that marked my first visit. You’re meant to head down through the cave, find a malfunctioning bot, and then ride the elevator back up to the surface. But I found the elevator first, and I didn’t know it was an elevator when I found it. It was just a thing I stepped onto and pressed a button and then discovered I was… back where I’d started thirty minutes ago, all of that work for nothing. Painful, yes, incredibly. But also hilarious, brilliant, .
All of which is to say: I know how a Caves of Qud review should read. It should start absolutely in the middle of everything, in bright close-up on one specific glittering detail. A bioluminescent mushroom, say, growing on the back of the hand of my mutant desperado, glimpsed in all its alien, glossy weirdness before we pull out, and pull back to a gunfight erupting deep underground – bullets, frost attacks, melee lampings, all flying back and forth in some brawl between mutants, cyborgs, grumpy boars and sentient plants. Back and back we pull, through the stacked tiers of historical strata, through the game’s procedurally generated backstories and its shuffled deck of era-defining sultans, and out into a world that’s somehow fixed in place but ever changing.