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We named Caves of Qud the best roguelike of 2024 because of its indulgent procgen writing, its mesmerizing world simulation, and—importantly—its options for creating mutant player characters with an indefinite and increasing number of limbs. At GDC 2025, I met with Caves of Qud co-creators Jason Grinblat and Brian Buckley to talk about their game’s launch after more than 17 years of development.
And I did, eventually. But first, I had a more important question to ask: What’s the ideal number of limbs for a being to aspire to in life?
“Oh, zero,” Bucklew said. “I mean, perfectly spherical is an ideal form, right? You’re unlimited in directionality. You always know where your whole body is if you know where any of your body is.”
The answer surprised me, both for the alarming speed with which it was provided and the fact that one of Qud’s most reliable strategies for success is to simply stack as many limbs as you can encourage your genome to sprout. Thankfully—or troublingly, depending on how you look at it—Bucklew elaborated.
“A perfect sphere is the ideal form that we’ve diverged away from. I think that the parable of Eden, divergence from the garden, is really about the divergence from the single-cell entity, which was already the perfect form,” Bucklew said. “We started in perfection and only moved farther from God, AKA growing these horrific appendages to achieve ungodly things.”
“If you can metabolize an apple, you’re already too complex. That’s exactly right,” Grinblat said, noting that Caves of Qud has creatures like the Oddity Golem that meet the criteria. “I think it’s just an orb with roots, so that’s good.”
Grinblat also offered three limbs as an alternate answer, “because we ended up finally doing, in the last area, a three-handed weapon, which is something we never did.”
This, Bucklew said, was another good choice, because it’s the first prime number. When Grinblat noted that two is also a prime number, Bucklew explained that two “isn’t really a prime number,” and that three is more deserving of the recognition.
“They’ll quote you on that,” Grinblat said, gesturing at my phone. “You’re literally being quoted on that controversial mathematical statement.”
Bucklew encouraged any aggrieved mathematicians to “come face me on BlueSky and be defeated.”
With the interview already at a comfortable temperature of body horror, I asked the Freehold Games devs if there was ever a moment during Qud’s 17-year development where they found themselves horrified by what the systems they’d created could produce.
“I don’t remember anything about the last 17 years, and that may be a trauma response,” Bucklew said. Grinblat, however, had a specific abomination he could pull: The time he gave the walls brains.
In Caves of Qud’s code, objects and entities are all built from the same modular component system. If an object’s given the appropriate tag, its behavior will change. This is what lets items like the spray-a-brain turn a chair into a person, and it’s what allowed Grinblat to subject an entire town’s architecture to the terror of sentience.
“The game started crashing a lot, in a way like it felt like it was kind of screaming—like I’d given everything a sort of nerve ending where the game just started getting very upset,” Grinblat said.
Even giving the walls a mere 20% chance of possessing a brain was unsettling to see. “They all just started to move around, and it created this visual, very upsetting effect,” Grinblat said. “That was one where I was like, I think we may have gone too far here. We did something wrong.”
Caves of Qud is available on Steam for whatever existential horrors you might hope to witness.
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Kurt Indovina
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