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Here's a game that will be thoroughly interesting to see on a Steam Deck. Caves of Qud is a fantastic science fantasy roguelike epic and the developers have been busy.

In the latest update not only have they added in a ton more content like two minor late-game regions, 48 new Achievements, makeovers to multiple areas, new animations and more — they've also made big improvements to gamepad support.

This new input system isn't fully ready and so it needs be manually enabled in the control settings under the pre-release option, but even so testing with an Xbox pad today it feels pretty great. It's good news for the Steam Deck too, as it's enabled by default if it detects you playing on it and scales things up a bit to be clearer.

Never thought this would work so well with a gamepad.

Game Features (to name just a few...):

  • Assemble your character from over 70 mutations and defects and 24 castes and kits—outfit yourself with wings, two heads, quills, four arms, flaming hands, or the power to clone yourself—it's all the character diversity you could want.
  • Explore procedurally-generated regions with some familiar locations—each world is nearly 1 million maps large.
  • Dig through everything—don't like the wall blocking your way? Dig through it with a pickaxe, or eat through it with your corrosive gas mutation, or melt it to lava. Yes, every wall has a melting point.
  • Hack the limbs off monsters—every monster and NPC is as fully simulated as the player. That means they have levels, skills, equipment, faction allegiances, and body parts. So if you have a mutation that lets you, say, psionically dominate a spider, you can traipse through the world as a spider, laying webs and eating things.
  • Pursue allegiances with over 60 factions—apes, crabs, robots, and highly entropic beings—just to name a few.

You can purchase a copy from GOG, itch.io and Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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15 comments
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spesk Feb 18, 2022
Wow, this is awesome! Really excited to see this, as I love to game on my Switch in bed before I go to sleep, and was hoping I could figure out a control scheme of CoQ specifically for when the deck arrives!

So happy to see this!
Purple Library Guy Feb 18, 2022
Suddenly I feel like there should be a game about spelunking cows: "Caves of Cud".
Migwell Feb 19, 2022
I'm pretty sure controller support has been a "prerelease" feature for 6 years at least.
Samsai Feb 19, 2022
It is a fun game where you can slice off your own face with an axe and then wear your face on your face, or psionically take over a goat and then have your character be digested by a gelatinous wedge and be doomed to live the rest of your life as a goat. So, basically it's a great experience.
ssj17vegeta Feb 19, 2022
Discovered this gem by watching the youtuber Ssethstzeentach, and I regret *nothing*.

Don't be afraid by the graphics (or lack of them), it's truly amazing !
Nezchan Feb 20, 2022
Quoting: SamsaiIt is a fun game where you can slice off your own face with an axe and then wear your face on your face, or psionically take over a goat and then have your character be digested by a gelatinous wedge and be doomed to live the rest of your life as a goat. So, basically it's a great experience.

And you can also eat an entire bear.

A whole bear.

Eat the bear!
denyasis 8 years Feb 20, 2022
This game is awesome. Literally saved my sanity during work travel with no signal.

My first play, I think I got infected/turned into a mushroom? And maybe I shot spores at people, I'm not totally sure, because then I died, probably horrifically. I was very confused, lol. Awesome.

Hopefully someone used my mushroom corpse in a fancy meal.
Purple Library Guy Feb 20, 2022
Quoting: Samsaiand then have your character be digested by a gelatinous wedge
Wait, they come in shapes other than cube?!
Mind = Blown.
mZSq7Fq3qs Feb 20, 2022
Quoting: SamsaiIt is a fun game where you can slice off your own face with an axe and then wear your face on your face, or psionically take over a goat and then have your character be digested by a gelatinous wedge and be doomed to live the rest of your life as a goat. So, basically it's a great experience.

Your comment made me buy this game. Loving it.

Died maybe 8 times today but it was always my own fault.
Samsai Feb 20, 2022
Quoting: mZSq7Fq3qsDied maybe 8 times today but it was always my own fault.
Caves of Qud does still occasionally have a problem, where you just end up dying and you didn't really have any reasonable way to avoid it. Stumbling into ruins as a low-level character and being ambushed by a chitinous puma that you can neither run away from or kill or running into a surprise rifle turret around a corner and being instantly killed sucks. On this aspect I think Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup does better, because it feels like 95% of deaths are due to hubris or panicking whereas CoQ deaths are sometimes super unavoidable unless you grind very hard early on and maintain a paranoid playstyle.

But the Roleplay mode helps immensely and if you want a character to last I recommend it highly. Qud has a ton of content already and permadeath eats a lot of low-level characters, so it's fairly hard to get to the meat and potatoes part of the game with it enabled.
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