After 17 years of work on D&D-inspired roguelike Caves of Qud, co-creator says "I personally have lost my mind and started posting about my dark desires to drop off the grid"

Key art for Caves of Qud, showing someone riding next to a horse next to a giant tortoise, looking at a figure in the foreground. — (Image credit: Freehold Games)

Hot new roguelike on the block Caves of Qud has finally hit 1.0 after 17 years of effort, so the team is taking a break for a few months to rest – and because a co-creator "lost" their mind and started posting about their "dark desires to drop off the grid." All round, a needed rest for the gang, then.

To celebrate Caves of Qud's release, the team held a question-and-answer session where a fan simply asked how much of a break the team is taking as getting here has nearly taken two decades. An answer they certainly got.

"The team will be taking a few months at the beginning of the year to rest and recuperate," co-creator Brian Bucklew says. "I personally have lost my mind and started posting about my dark desires to drop off the grid and start working on an aurora4x/dominions/Crusader Kings-inspired sci-fi mech game but Jason and Tanya keep yelling at me to take like two weeks off so we'll see how it goes!"

If you're curious about what Bucklew is actually doing, he has turned to Dragon Age 2 to "chill out."

"I really bounced hard off of it on PC trying to play it as a hard tactical game, but really enjoying it on a gamepad with the combat dialed down to 'joke combat,'" he adds. But hey, I'd happily wait another 17 years for a sci-fi mech game from the Caves of Qud gang.

The wait for Caves of Qud has been long – the roguelike has been in early access for 15 years and in development for 17. Thankfully, that's plenty of time to pick up a solid following among fans. The roguelike RPG takes notes from a post-apocalyptic derivative of Dungeons & Dragons called Gamma World, focusing on player agency and emergent narrative. Whether it's the story of the world or the physical properties around you, things are deep and rarely the same on each new save file. And now that the game has hit 1.0, the final quest to the main storyline is here, so you can actually finish the game after 15 years.