>_

[malymin]

I should be working on the next chapter of my fanfic, but I've been addicted to Caves of Qud instead...

I don't know how to describe it to people who haven't heard of it. It's a roguelike, but to most people "roguelike" refers to a genre modifier rather than a genre in itself, and CoQ is very specifically a "roguelike as genre" game inspired by old ASCII dungeon crawlers...

I love the tantalizing ambiguity of old, low-res spritework. As a fan of the Mother series, I think people don't appreciate enough how Mother 1 has a lonely, eerie feeling that's enhanced by its technical limitations. It is frustrating in those limitations in a way that hurts it, sometimes, but the large expanses of empty wilderness between settlements, the lethality of even ordinary wildlife like bears amidst the aliens and robots, the strangeness of the pink seashell world of Magicant, the inability to fully parse out exactly what some objects and creatures even are. Qud has so much quality of life improvement over genuinely old games while still leaning into the sense of danger and mystery that very old RPGs are good at.