Re: The Game Thread
It is once again ROGUELIKE TIME BITCHES
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Caves of Qud. Currently in beta, it is set in a post-apocalyptic world - not all-brown-no-plants-anywhere, though, presumably the end of the world happened long ago enough that flora has returned. You start in a little farming village. There are presumably other civilized areas in the ruins and shit scattered around the world, but I have not seen them yet. Beware the horrible mutants, rogue robots, and hostile flora and/or fauna!
There is a crafting gimmick. AFAIK it's all technological kinda stuff - you buy the "tinker" skill, and you can disassemble stuff for parts, which you can use to make other stuff you have schematics for. All technological stuff shows up as "artifacts" unless you identify them, which is usually simple enough. Such things include drug injectors (potions, pretty much), guns, and grenades.
Food and water management. It's pretty scarce, don't go out into the wilderness unless you've got a fuckton of food, or know how to harvest and/or butcher! You can eat corpses as well, but those suck.
A world map. Occasionally you will get lost. When this happens, it kicks you to the local level map, and you have to evade all the horrible monsters! Presumably you can get unlost and go back to the world map, but the times I've gotten lost that didn't kick in, and I had to walk all the way back manually. There's a skill that helps you get unlost as well
The coolest bit though is the Mutated Human race you can pick. Currently, there are Pure Humies, who get boosted stats and skills from living in there non-irradiated, non-blown-to-the-Dark-Ages arcologies, and the Mutants, who weren't so lucky and had to live in the wastes. During chargen for the mutants, you can pick mutations, using a point-buy system. It's split into physical and mental mutations, which for the most part don't mix. Physical mutations give you shit like claws, a carapace, regeneration, more arms/legs and heightened speed/hearing/vision. It also has some less believable things, like ICE/FIRE HANDS, which you can use to SHOOT ICE/FIRE AT SHIT, but disallow you from wearing gloves. Mental mutations are the fun stuff like telepathy, pyro/cryo/[light]kinesis, super brainitude and stuff. There's also even crazier shit, like teleportation, a space-time vortex, and "Temporal Fugue", which basically makes TIME CLONES out of you.
Note, there IS a way to get access to both, though it's much more expensive than just access to one tree, and IIRC it's not totally free access.
You can also buy a defect, that gives you more points! These're also separated into physical and mental. On the physical side, there are things like amphibious (need to submerse yourself in (very rare, I might remind you) fresh water) and ravenous (you eat a lot), and crazy shit like spontaneous combustion (which I fucking ALWAYS take because it's fucking hilarious). Mentalside there's stuff like narcolepsy (Oh shit it's the dungeon boss heaven or hell let's roZZZZzzzzz), but none of it matters because there is fucking Evil Twin, which is fucking awesome and at an unknown time during your game will spawn a hostile clone who has all of your powers and equipment and holy fucking shit this is the best defect.
For the cons: Like I said, it's a roguelike, which is pretty hard to get into for the non-initiated. And it's permadeath - once your character dies, it's game over, no reloads, (s)he's gone for good. ...Unless you savescum, of course. AND, it's in beta, so it's not entirely stable. But I've only had one fuckup-error so far, so it doesn't seem to be
that bad, and there's a lot of content for an unfinished game.
My current character has the vortex mutation and Temporal Fugue, and has a firebomb in his throwing weapon slot. When I ran into a giant enemy crab, I used it, and they immediately both used their wormholes, like they always do. These proceeded to wander around the map, and every wall and enemy they touched was teleported to somewhere else in the world (think if I used it on your chair, your chair would suddenly appear up in a tree in the Amazon or something). The wormhole missed the crab, though, whose armor was so high we could barely do shit to it. So they proceeded to firebomb it and explosions and fire everywhere while I ran like a bitch.
