Sci-fi roguelike Caves of Qud hits Early Access

If you follow roguelikes, you're probably aware of Caves of Qud, a free ascii roguelike (available here) that mixes science fiction with fantasy, ancient civilisations with sentient plants. Well, it's being remade, minus the ascii, and with a bunch of extra stuff—and it's just touched down on Steam Early Access. £6.99 is enough to let you "swap stories with an albino ape mayor", "dig a tunnel anywhere in the world", and "clone yourself, mind-control the clone, and then hack off your own limbs". Somewhere, money is being thrown at a screen.

Developers Freehold Games (they also made Sproggiwood) reckon that "most of the major systems are already in the game", with some "50-100" hours of stuff to do in the Early Access version. "The big missing piece is the resolution of the main plot", and that's their main focus going forward.

I love Qud's 'faded old computer screen' aesthetic. The Early Access trailer, below, is brill too.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.