look, let's get it out of the way right away. if you play roguelikes for strategic depth, maybe try a different one. the build variety in this is cool but it's just for fucking around; for winning consistently, unless there was some huge rebalance, you start light manipulation and find a gun.

but that's not what anyone is here for. qud really captures the sense of estrangement characteristic to the kind of scifi i love the most: everything is weird, slightly disturbing, threatening, suggestive of some kind of history and natural laws that you're unfamiliar with, some tragedy or sequence of tragedies; everything comes with a vivid, poetic description that uses unexpected metaphors and unfamiliar concepts that you're not sure are real-world specialist lingo, or made up just for this. there's a lot of words, but always more questions than answers, and it's up to you to put it all together. it is, if you'll excuse the cliche, the dark souls of roguelikes.

the reason i'm docking it half a star is because there's a tension between the roguelike permadeath mode really amplifying the sense of a hostile and unfamiliar world, and the wonderful variety of wacky character options and concepts that i really want to keep trying out but that are never as good to start with as "just don't get in melee".