The Sad Unusability of Video Game Reviews
The Bottom Feeder
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The Sad Unusability of Video Game Reviews<br>Dude, you can’t rate PowerWash Simulator and Dwarf Fortress on the same scale.
The Bottom Feeder<br>Jun 11, 2026
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I have such memories of Rogue, the meat grinder for which the Roguelike is named. (Note I did not say “fond memories”.)<br>So I was trying to write reviews of a bunch of hit indie games I played recently. Then I got overwhelmed by the pointlessness of video game reviews these days and had to take a long nap.<br>And, I mean, pro reviews are pointless, right? If a game has a big enough budget or following and isn’t actively on fire, it gets a 9. If it is a competently made but low-budget indie, like mine, it gets a 7. If you read the actual review (nobody does), it’s a collection of facts about the game you could easily get from watching the trailer. Throw in a couple of comments from the reviewer about whether they like this genre or not, mix in 3 or 4 ham-handed political comments, and you got a review! Hit send!<br>But the pointlessness of the whole exercise came crashing in on me when I tried to play Caves of Qud.<br>What Is That?<br>Wayyyy back in the day (1990, give or take a few years) all the hot RPG action was on your college’s mainframe computer. Really complex games where you play a lone hero wandering the world, with everything rendered as ASCII characters. (You were always an ‘@’. If you see a ‘c’, run for your life!)<br>Rogue. Nethack. Omega. Moria. I played them all.<br>Anyway, Caves of Qud (pronounced ‘kahhwooooood’) brings that experience to a modern audience, with a patina of super abstract story and a trailer that promises a constant string of cool, wacky events. (You can turn into a door! And get slammed and die! Whoah!)<br>But it’s a big hit RPG, and I kept hearing about it. It won a Hugo (an annual science fiction award) based on its storytelling. The reviews were ECSTATIC. Like, look at this Eurogamer review, which drives the reviewer so hard into aggressive poetry that he neglects to say much about what playing the game is actually LIKE.<br>So I felt obligated to try it.
Every review goes on about Caves of Qud’s intricate world simulation. I believe them, but I couldn’t find it.<br>How My Caves of Qud Experience Went<br>This will sound a bit snarky, and I hate being snarky about the work of other indie devs. And I really was looking forward to trying this game. A genre I love plus weird storytelling, perfect for my mood. But this is how it went.<br>After supplementing the punishingly inadequate tutorial with a ton of googling, I wandered the world and followed the story. I didn’t find any of the promised wackiness. I just killed monsters, sold their stuff, occasionally found a magical whatsit to complete a quest, and repeat.<br>Actually, something kind of wacky happened. At some point I got a disease that spreads across my body and keeps me from equipping items in one slot after another. After a bunch of effort, I got the book that tells me how to cure it. A long, involved process that involves a ton of seemingly common items I never found. It was just kind of aggravating.<br>Sometimes the world simulations were clearly interacting with each other in unexpected ways, like in this nasty dungeon called Golgotha that had wall guns and conveyor belts. But the graphics were too abstract and went by too quickly for me to ever understand what was happening. In a game which sells how comprehensive and surprising its system is, legibility is very important.<br>I sensed that there was an effort to create a huge, active, deep world here, but it kept bouncing off of me. The interface, the crude presentation, the abstract, almost pointillistic bits of storytelling, the repetitive gameplay, I just couldn’t get it to gel.<br>I’m 10 hours in, and I’ll give it some more time. Not much more. I suspect getting the wackiness involves doing a lot of replays and investing a ton of time for digging. Making games designed to devour time is, as I have written a lot lately, a legitimate artistic and professional path. I just don’t have that time to be devoured.<br>Game Rating: “Wait. There’s a way to train my character?” / 10
If you want that “RPG in an incredibly elaborately simulated world” goodness, NetHack is a great place to go, but I will grant Caves of Qud heaped a pile more stuff onto the model.<br>But This Isn’t a Negative Review<br>Everything I just wrote may sound like criticism, but it’s not. This is a features list! Everything I said that might have sounded like a sick burn convinced at least one person to buy the game.<br>I wasn’t being critical! I just described the perfect game for many people. A LOT of people have bought this game! Did I get frustrated by the game? Darn right, I did! But people are lining up around the block to drop $30 ($10 more than I charge) to get that sort of frustration.<br>(Though, based on the worrying low percentage of people who have obtained the early achievements, I fear a lot of players...