Caves of Qud gets a big content upgrade, improved gamepad and Steam Deck support

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.