Portable Permadeath with Caves of Qud on Switch

Where do I even begin with Caves of Qud? No, really, this is like trying to explain the taste of sunlight or the smell of gravity. This is a game where you can access a locked room by killing a specific nearby enemy, digging through the wall next to it with a pickaxe or chem cell-powered jackhammer or grow mutated claws made for burrowing, chuck an acid grenade at the problem and wait for it to literally melt away or even make the door fall in love with you so you can convince it to let you pass.

It’s a world that’s so post-apocalyptic it’s circled back around to thriving – with strong notes of impossibly far-future weirdness thrown in for good measure. Typical humans basically don’t exist anymore, bugs are massive (and sometimes breathe fire), boars are always angry (and sometimes breathe fire), hidden bushes will warp you to a random part of the room you’re in, talking camel people will usually sell you life-saving weapons and armor and water has become so precious it acts as both a survival mechanic and universal world currency.

Even that simple idea – of water being necessary for survival but also being used as money – makes for an incredibly compelling time. Carry weight is a thing, and water isn’t exactly light, so you often have to forego the usual loot gremlin tactics common in similar games because sometimes the money you get from selling an item weighs significantly more than the item itself. Though there are workarounds, like buying trade items such as nuggets of copper or silver that have static values. And a single $50 nugget weighs far less than $50 worth of water. But you can’t drink the nugget.

I want to say Qud is a kind of roguelike – where you get one shot with your character and if they die you have to start over – but only two of its four game modes actually punish you like that. Roleplay mode offers the same overall experience as Classic, except you get checkpoint saves in friendly towns. You can still lose progress if you die while exploring, but at least you won’t lose  the character. But if you’d prefer to explore more than fight, Wander mode gives you those town checkpoints while also making most of the world’s creatures less immediately bloodthirsty.

I also want to say it’s like an RPG because your character earns experience from quests and discoveries and combat that can be spent on stat and skill increases – but the world and everything in it has so much potential to be reactive to the things you do it would put a lot of immersive sims to shame. Character creation alone encourages an immense amount of experimentation.

Do you want to be a Mutated Human or a cybernetic True Kin? Do you want a beak, horns, multiple arms, multiple legs, wings or the ability to expel corrosive gas? If you go the other route, do you want cybernetic implants to let you see in the dark, wield two-handed weapons in a single hand or robotic arms that can hold projectile weapons? Mutants can gain or improve their mutations as they level up, but True Kin have to find new implants at shops or by exploring ancient technological ruins. How you start can have a huge impact on how you play.

Some parts of the world are also procedurally generated, so how the game itself starts can also change the way you approach everything. Maybe you’re a mutant with fur, in which case the (very dangerous at early levels) baboons you run into won’t be aggressive at all and you can walk right by them. Maybe the starting town’s Warden (kind of like a sheriff, I guess?) was randomly given a bad rep with the town they live in, resulting in an absolute bloodbath right out of the gate.

Even I have a handful of odd tales to tell from the various runs I’ve attempted. Like my four-armed gunslinging bird person managing to make friends with a legendary antelope, convincing them to follow me and then realizing my new pal rolls with an entire herd, resulting in my unexpectedly becoming the leader of a small antelope army. Honestly if you’re familiar with the name Caves of Qud chances are it’s because of all the stories that come out of it. That or the fact that the vast majority of the people who play it sing its praises nonstop.

Qud is so much more than its emergent stories, though. It’s not “haha chaos and sometimes a goofy thing happens,” although the whole faction thing does sometimes lead to big random fights that you’re not going to want to stick around for, so much as “I wonder what happens if I – oh wow, I can’t believe that worked!” Like the time I had to trudge through a subterranean factory crawling with living slime that I knew from previous experience would A) destroy most of my gear and B) probably give me a couple of nasty, game-altering diseases. I had to go in, but then I thought “What if I use the water I’m carrying to clean myself off every time I get slime on me?” And between that and carefully avoiding the specific kind of goop that could make me sick, I actually managed to come out the other side with no busted equipment and no illnesses! To say that moment felt great would be a hilarious understatement.

So how does all that nonsense work on the Switch?

Astonishingly well, it turns out.

Even after seeing so many comments from PC players about how wonderfully it manages to play with a controller, I still had my doubts. There’s just so much going on in Qud – from basic navigation that includes quick-selecting points of interest and navigating up or down stairs to firing ranged weapons and tossing throwables. The idea that you could do all of that without a keyboard, and do it so smoothly that people often say they prefer using a controller? I dunno about that.

And yet, here we are. After finishing the tutorial to get to grips with the new interface approach I was legitimately stunned by how intuitive it all was. Fighting, examining, interacting, using abilities and so on, it’s all mapped to the controller. Very little compromise, too. Or at least that’s what I was expecting to say at first. Then I realized there are other controller inputs the tutorial doesn’t mention that basically address every single one of the nitpicks I thought I had.

Auto-explore is there. Throwing rocks and grenades is there. Inspecting specific map tiles for dropped loot is there. Even zooming in and out of the main screen – something I was going to complain about being adjusted via the UI menu and was a particular thorn in my side when switching between docked and handheld mode – is handled via button presses. Holding ZL and pressing left or right on the d-pad, specifically.

Even if you don’t like some of the controls, you can easily remap them. The one thing I personally changed was getting rid of the auto-target hostile function of the L button and making it pull up the “wish” (kind of like a debug) menu instead. Just in case I don’t feel like dealing with a fungal infection that makes my arm glow in the dark but also swell up so I can’t wear armor on it, you know?

As incredible as playing Caves of Qud has been on the Switch – it’s so much easier to play in bed this way versus on my laptop – I did run into a small number of rough spots. The permadeath and even checkpointing can be irritating when you lose hours of progress, but that’s the nature of the game and I knew what I was getting into. Performance, though?

I mean performance is nice and solid overall, for the most part. However there have been times – I think usually when there are loads of entities on screen at once – where inputs just kind of lock up for a second or two. I say inputs because the various animated minor visual effects will still move, but my character won’t for a few seconds even when I issue the commands multiple times. This also tends to happen right after performing rapid fire repeated actions like digging.

Unfortunately it’s also crashed on me several times. I want to say like four or five times total as of writing and sinking about 24 hours of playtime into it so far One time it crashed while I was playing in handheld mode and when I loaded it back up, the UI was suddenly smaller. Not microscopic, but definitely smaller. Given the nature of the game and the way it tends to auto-save after you enter a new screen, crashing isn’t ruinous. But it is annoying.

Of course given how dedicated Freehold Games has been with patching and updating the PC version, I have every confidence that there hiccups will be addressed at some point. And really I’m just glad to be able to play this on my Switch 2, so I can deal with a handful of (presumably temporary) small annoyances.

From the perspective of someone who lives for rewarding exploration in videogames, Caves of Qud goes way beyond simply “delivering.” Yes, there’s a good chance those ruins I just stumbled upon have some worthwhile loot hiding inside, but the reward is so much more than a new piece of armor or a new weapon. Simply looking at a statue or the description of an engraved item can lead to a surprise side quest. There could be an antelope friend with a small antlered army hanging out one more screen to the north. Maybe there’s a book tucked away on that shelf in the corner that will explain how to make food that temporarily bestows freezing breath.

Point is, even when you know what to expect with Caves of Qud you never really know what to expect. And there’s almost always going to be an answer (several, really) to any situation it throws at you.

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Rob Rich is a guy who’s loved nerdy stuff since the 80s, from videogames to Anime to Godzilla to Power Rangers toys to Transformers, and has had the good fortune of being able to write about them all. He’s also editor for the Games section of Exploits! You can still find him on Bluesky and Mastodon.