Check out these last updates, I was waiting for the"war/settlement/caravan", updates to work as a bare minimum because I mostly play mods for warband/bannerlord and total war titles like med2 and rome/RR but this game gives me something more unique and like I said once I cannot wait for the religion update and I visualize this game as all the previous games mentioned merged together with the most popular mods for each one, I just cannot imagine the future for this gem but wish them the best !

TLDR: this is a puzzle game masquerading as an "open" sandbox where you can do 'everything'. it is false advertising.
none of the steps involved in e.g. getting food or (as another reviewer goes into, planting crops - a completely insane rabbit hole of nonsensical roadblocks and issues), nothing makes any sense. it is set up so your experience as a player of games like this won't help you. you have to read a guide. or trial and error for hours on end to do things every real sandbox game lets you do immediately.
it literally is set up in a way to trip you up and kneecap progress until you google it or read a guide.

the challenge in sandbox games is usually what you put on yourself, environmental challenges, monsters or hostile factions (i.e. combat difficulty, steep gear grinds and so on).
here it is finding out HOW to do the most basic things, but like from the perspective of some malevolent bizzarro universe where nothing makes sense.

it is essentially tyranny by bureaucracy retold in the form of a fake sandbox fantasy world

avoid like the plague.


original review:


trash game with pseudo "difficulty".

I spawned as an Orphan, got 7 money on my name, no house, nothing, just a few items, now try not to starve while looking for resources.
this game has the most obnoxious and idiotic food mechanic: in the real world, you can go 14 days without eating anything. here, not even 5 minutes.
you can get into a zone, look around for just a bit, without having even seen a quarter of it and suddenly be too exhausted to ever recover. you sleep, and when you wake up, you can take 2 steps and are fully exhausted again. you can't see that coming.

now I bought food with all the money I had, and it lasted like not at all. you're set up to immediately die. possibly so you look up the only "way to do things" and you can get rich and successful by just doing this one strategy for which the game was designed. sorry, but I have been baited into quite a few of those by now, and at the end it has always been a waste of time.
if I can't succeed with literally tens of thousands of hours of playing games -- very often like this -- and I am in a no win scenario from the very start, I feel like I'm being had.

in my experience, having played 400 games or so by now, those games with the most obnoxious and wannabe harsh rules and regulations about what to eat and that you can just starve in a few minutes of wandering about, those games have no substance.
all they do is simulate suffering. this game even simulates aging of all things.

if you want to craft, explore, build and do all of those things that the blatantly false advertising tells you, play Caves of Qud, which is pretty much this game, just executed perfectly.
or the adjacent Terraria (excellent), Necesse (excellent) or Core Keeper (excellent at start and gets progressively worse until you are bored to hell, but at least that takes like 30h).

Hell, even the free Moonring game which is obsessively quirky but surprisingly ok is less annoying: if you "die" in Moonring, someone will stumble over your unconscious body and nurse you back to health.
Here, the very village you grew up in will just watch you starve and you have no home to your name and not even a pickle in your pocket to eat. it's just idiotic.

and no save function of course, so it's extra "hard", i.e. wastes your time extra efficiently.

apart from that, people who see the world as purely dog eat dog tend to be very unsavory people.

do not buy

edit after the dev responded:
and that's exactly the dev response I expected: insinuating I need a tutorial or it's a challenge to overcome when the only way anyone would not starve is read a guide or waste several hours of losing characters and restarting from scratch.

it's not a challenge. Caves of Qud is challenging. this is just wasting your time. just like I said in my original review: there's like one way of doing it, and you can just look at a guide and then overcome this "challenge".
when it's nonsensical to immediately starve, to not even have a home in your home village, to not start the game with any food and just enough coins to buy food for half an hour looking for things in the wilderness where you'll most likely starve.

if you design your game around artificial, inane and immersion-breaking roadblocks, you don't have the imagination or drive to create a deep world with complex mechanics.
because it tells the player THAT is the experience he wants. basically a stupid puzzle that makes no sense and needs a guide to solve it for you.

it's a joke of a game

This is a game, not only fun by its already great mechanics (I made a guy who can survive in the wilderness by destroying the wilderness with holy fire) but it is also promising, not because what the developer once told, but because of what it constantly does, this game needs the support of all the rpg pixel excel sheet aficionado community on Steam, not to pull it through, but because this developer deserves it.
Also, if we gather power as a unite community, we could make the dev put child labor in the game, so we can fed our Nike factory with inbred elven child slaves, so plis, support it.
Got get them Artur