I keep bouncing off Caves Of Qud because I guess maybe it feels more build focused like Tales of Maj Eyal, which isn’t a bad thing at all, but there is something so radically expansive about Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead, it feels less like you are in a game than you are in a system undergoing a descent into monstrosity and yet you have agency… with a depth Project Zomboid isn’t even on the same magnitude as.

Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead speaks to a desire to inhabit liminal spaces in me, which is also why I love the movie Stalker (and the mostly unrelated video games too of course) and that coupled with the fact that the most terrifying parts of Cataclysm’s world are geniously the wetlands (the monsters evolve out of pre-existing animals and wetlands have the greatest biodiversity so it makes sense…) makes it hard to pass over when thinking about trying some of these other games.

I say all this to say, the universe in Caves Of Qud is almost painfully evocative, I love it, it is beautifully strange and weird while still feeling heartfelt, I want to spend more time in it and I cannot recommend Caves Of Qud highly enough but fuck… Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead is one of the world’s great wonders.

If you want more focused gameplay in Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead you MUST try the “Sky Islands” mod that is now part of the base game, the name is a bit confusing, it changes the game into a “run” based system where you spawn in a random spot on the game world and must reach a portal some distance away in a randomized direction before a certain amount of time to get back “home” which is an empty island in the sky. You can only keep what you carry through the portal and if you die you spawn back on the sky island hurt and naked with nothing you had on you, which makes CDDA more into a “game” and I love it!!!

https://github.com/TGWeaver/CDDA-Sky-Islands