Recent reviews by Rittless

Infinitely better gameplay than it looks like it ought to have. It's liquid crack of the numbers-go-up, hit-marker-spam variety. Don't overlook this if that's your jam, because this is best-in-class - people are making games taking notes from this for a reason.

really brings the corporate mindset to you.

it's also actually a competent game, it just spends a lot of time trying to convince you that it isn't

Great port and update of a game that still holds up in its genre to a decent degree today.

I have never hated a game as hard as I have Noita.

The critical thing here, though, is that I came back because it is so utterly rewarding to play, highs as high as the lows are low.

Masterpiece of a game. Try your best to play it unspoiled, the game is best approached as it wants to be - a very hostile black box that rewards the investment of those willing to keep looking.

Any time I boot up this game, I think to myself: "someone please send food and drink oh god I'm dehydrated"
...and then I see the sunrise.

Yet I keep coming back.

Pretty fun game that would be not much more than that - pretty fun for a little while - if they didn't add a game mode that reverses the game mechanics and create something far more cerebral and novel in the process.

Basically, the 'disease' side of the game is similar to something like Plague Inc, where you evolve a disease with points and try to cause as much death and misery as possible - the only difference being that you work in a single person, rather than a global scale. To that end, there are far 'smaller' things to contend with, and, say, instead of where you would have transmission abilities to buy, you could have 'bad lifestyle choices' which make your job easier, and do things such as make the person more reluctant to go to a doctor, which is where you get pushback from the game and an attempt to 'cure' you. This is can be pretty novel especially with the pressure against you being related to whether your victim is at home, seeing their GP or in the emergency room, and you can change between states tactically if you so wish. But ultimately, it's a different flavour of Plague Inc. in this mode.

That's the original smartphone version of the game, and it's... okay, I guess.

But the new mode they added for the PC port - the Life side - for me, is the genuinely interesting side of the game. In short, it's the purely 'medical mechanics' side of a House M.D. episode. In that mode you get a variety of zebra patients with combinations of problems and you have to balance out the costs, reliability and time frames of testing for various problems, work out the underlying problems that can cause the constellation of symptoms, and other than your tests that you have to build resource and pay for (via an admittedly shallow points system,) the only hint you get is the very House M.D. approach.. which is just watching the patient get worse, seeing what systems fail first and fastest, and going off that, sometimes that alone. You even get some stages that change things up in tricky ways - there's one mode that's a massive challenge where the patient has no symptoms and you have to work out what's wrong through tests - and patient's system decline - alone, and it's very tough, and very cerebral.

I know Plague Inc added a Cure mode once COVID hit, but here it's much more interesting, because it's at a very relatable scale, the science behind the testing and the diseases themselves are actually fairly true to life (other than their simplifications for gameplay reasons, of course) and it's just so much more than its base game.

Worth it just for the Life mode alone.

It's better to play than any of the original ports, and I found myself preferring to stay in the remastered graphics by far. It controls really tightly, includes subtle improvements to the original's controls, a few of the original quirks but loses absolutely none of the original essence by doing so.

Honestly don't think you need to say much more than that, for a classic game remaster that is all you truly need.

Incredibly promising game that, even at this point, is feeling very cohesive indeed. They have the core gameplay - forgive this, you know it's coming - rock solid. Anyone with any interest in co-op wave games (L4D, Payday, etc.) will find a lot to love here, and if you ever found yourself digging in random directions on Minecraft to just see what you find will love this game. Like both of those? You'll love this to death as my friends and I have. Already bought it for my wife as well...

Although I had a couple of crashes, technically this is already better optimised and more beautifully rendered than many PC games are today, after shipping and late patching. Gorgeous stuff and refreshing to see the core game already so gleaming. They take advantage of the processing headroom they gain with low-poly graphics by cranking the texture shaders and reflections to 11. Play this on all-Epic settings and you see real-time reflections that embarass AAA games - all without slowdown.

I have full confidence that they'll add more cruft and late-game material to cement this one as a defining example of the co-op wave-fighter genre done stunningly right.

Update: since the review they've lost most of that processing headroom by cranking up environmental effects and room sizes to levels that were absolutely impossible to see years ago, and that's honestly not a bad thing, lol

My hours played is totally wrong for this game - if you were to add my hours in iOS port and in the non-Steam version, I would be north of 600 hours.

It's simply that good and that replayable.

Beautifully written and realised game that is under constant development to this day - early access should not be a factor in your consideration because it's a roguelike - and these games benefit from iterative refinement as players work to discover all of the possibilities.

Mixes some of the best elements of old hands like NetHack with enough gameplay elements to allow for greater freedom of playstyle and much more immersion within the game universe than the sometimes overmechanical feel of hard roguelikes.

I cannot overstate how fantastic the execution of the feel and atmosphere is, even at this incomplete stage. There is so much more I want to say about what this game achieves, but cannot think of how to phrase most of it without being off-puttingly earnest. I will limit myself to saying that certain parts of the game have had me engaged to the point that a few times, I was despondent about the cruelty of the world of Qud when there were flashes of such beauty within that needed to be protected. I don't recall the last time that I just... stopped, turned back and abandoned a specific dungeon crawl and pillage because I was so immersed that it felt actually wrong to pillage a village of NPCs that, while hostile to me at first, were not outwardly aggressive, not part of the story, had an 'established' lore, family areas and distinguished peoples. I knew it was autogenerated and just flavour text around a core RPG gameplay experience, but the spell weaved by the game's environment and narrative had been cast. I had fully bought into the game's world. I couldn't stomach the destruction of a single clan of beings, just trying to survive that hadn't done anything to me or anyone else. That's not something I'm prone to feeling in roguelikes like this, and it really struck me.

A complete, genuine delight of a game to experience, and I look forward to playing it for many years.

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Update, November 12th, 2019:
Since my review, this game has unfailingly managed to update like clockwork every Friday, (or where no update was provided, an explanatory notice provided - indie, AAA developers, all can take note from this incredible communication), and there is no end to the team's enthusiasm in sight.

The game world continues to deepen, mature and gameplay is improving by the week. I even had a personal e-mail exchange with a primary programmer for the game, AlphaBeard, to report a bug and provide my save-game to reproduce - not only did he fix it in very quick time, he personally e-mailed me to tell me it was fixed.

I cannot recommend this game - and its exemplary development team - highly enough. Caves of Qud is best-in-class.

I will be playing this for decades.

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Update, January 27th, 2021:

My hours are not as high on this game as they should be, simply because I have to ban myself from playing this gemstone of a game on work weekdays, and also weekends where I have other obligations, otherwise I get locked in for six hours or more at a time, letting time just vanish into the ether.

The game is still being updated like clockwork every Friday. It is absolutely beyond belief.

This was worth well more than four times the cost I paid for it. A once-in-a-decade game, and team.

Live and drink, water-brethren.