The 2025 Nebula Award for Best Game Writing: a Case for Caves of Qud
By Jason Grinblat
Jason Grinblat is co-creator of science fantasy roguelike & indie RPG Caves of Qud, published by Kitfox Games.
It’s fitting that I’m writing this on the Kitfox Medium account, because I’ve previously pitched Caves of Qud as Dwarf Fortress’s weird, bookish cousin. (Dwarf Fortress is also published by Kitfox.) Like that paragon of delicious complexity, Caves of Qud uses deep simulation — enabled by its lo-fi graphics — to drive emergent, narratively rich, often charmingly bizarre gameplay. Unlike DF, though, Qud is also obsessed with language, and weaves text through and out of its simulative systems.
The Nebula nominations for works completed in 2024 are coming up — just about timed to our 15-year-in-the-making 1.0 release — and so I wanted to take a moment to make the case that Caves of Qud is a novel work of language-driven science fiction, and that it’s worth looking at for this year’s Best Game Writing award.
Note: If you’re a SFWA member and would like a game key, please check the SFWA forums! We can put in more if they’ve run out!
Caves of Qud is difficult, in all the senses of the word. It draws straight from the well of the roguelike genre, where tough combat, surprising system interactions, and lasting consequences combine to make every achievement in the game hard-won. It’s also textually difficult. It bucks the trend of directness in games writing and favors baroque, idiosyncratic prose. Some games want to get you fluent in their system metaphors as quickly as possible, to give you footing and let you ply your agency in the game world. Not Qud. Qud prefers you be lost.
Think (as one of our great influences) Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, with its close POV and archaic diction, and how it asks you to puzzle out even the most basic facts of its strange, refracted world.
And so here we have Qud. A hard game. A game that unfurls its magic slowly. A game that doesn’t look like premiere video games of 2024. Possibly a tough sell when put up against the likes of last year’s winner for Best Game Writing.
But this is where I want to point: to the riffling of those distinctly indie features — lo-fi graphics, deep simulation, baroque prose — and how it creates a unique sense of placement in a second world, encasing you in a civilization-scale layer cake through the cyclical pattern of worldbuilding uniquely afforded by games a medium.
Caves of Qud is set in an ancient-world-coded far future, ecologically unrecognizable, where sapient plants and rust-shelled robots are just as likely to share their water with you as humans are. Under the simulation output that changes every game, like an ever-growing vine, is a trellis of familiar villages, characters, and historical notes that remain constant from playthrough to playthrough.
The main story comes at you at a slant; it’s not initially signaled who or what is important in this place (the game certainly gives many indications that your character is not). But over time, after repeated takes of what the game and its simulation are capable of throwing at you, a picture of the world and what it values starts to emerge.
Caves of Qud is a game obsessed with culture, radical body morphology, and transhumanism, in both its themes and mechanics. Every weird creature is as fully modeled as the player character. Every piece of furniture is as fully modeled as every creature!
Every piece of furniture … is as fully modeled as the player character.
And so, through the psychotechnological means the game systems offer, you can project your mind into and play as a robot, a spider, a giant amoeba, a sentient door…
Does this quirky gameplay lead somewhere narratively? The answer is yes, but it’s a circuitous yes. The more time you spend in the world of Qud, the more of its strange cultural practices you witness and perform firsthand. You’ll engage in the water ritual, gifting to a stranger precious freshwater made rare by geologic or possibly even galactic sea-change. You’ll discover and recreate the rituals of the Eaters — the historically constructed caste of Qud’s precursor population — and transgress all sorts of boundaries: cultural, historical, even the very laws of physics.
In doing so, in sampling all the different ways moss can skirt a statue in this salt-powdered world, you’re able to see the deep past in parallax, the difference between what its artifacts are flatly telling you and the more nuanced, syncretic, forever out-of-reach truth.
This is the Dying Earth project that Qud, like its predecessors in the genre, is engaged in: here is the smoldering present; what of its fiery past?
The repeated visits of the roguelike gameplay loop excavate a historical mystery that veers into the mythopoetic, all while orbiting the central axis of the story (and literal physical space) of Qud: the Spindle, a needle that erupts out of the Tomb of the Eaters and disappears beyond the cloud-ribboned sky. Everyone gets there eventually, but no two orbits are the same.
Tips for Starting
If this pitch catches your interest, I’ll end with a few pointers for getting started. We’ve recently made strides in making Qud more accessible, while maintaining its puzzle box core.
Do the tutorial. It’s about 15 minutes long and teaches the very basics of the game.
Switch to Roleplay or Wander mode. In the last couple years, we added alternate modes that blunt the pain of losing a character significantly. Roleplay mode plays more like an RPG; your progress is saved at settlements. Wander mode is even more forgiving; most creatures are neutral to you and you get bonus XP for exploring. These modes have become some of the most popular ways to play! Wander especially is great for jumping in a seeing a lot of the game on a short time budget.
Visit the wiki. We love wikis, actually. The practice of a community coming together to collectively interpret a difficult work… chef’s kiss. We see reading about all the wild stuff others get up to as a perfectly valid way of engaging with the game. For instance, check out this delightful page the community put together on all the myriad ways your character can die.
That is all. That’s Caves of Qud. I hope your interest is piqued, and if you’re a SFWA member, that you check the Games 2024 forum for a key. Until then, feel free to follow us on Bluesky.
- @cavesofqud
- @kitfoxgames
- Qud co-creator @jfg.land
- Qud co-creator @unormal
As we say in Qud, live and drink.
[Kitfox/Editor’s note: Caves of Qud fully launches its 1.0 version on December 5, 2024.]
