Kitfox Games and Freehold Games have confirmed a release date for Caves of Qud on Nintendo Switch.
This 2D turn-based science fantasy roguelike is set in a biologically diverse world “steeped in retrofuturism, deep simulation, and swathes of sentient plants.”
Inviting you to inhabit a living, breathing world where you can chisel through layers of thousand-year-old civilisations, you must determine whether it is a dying earth or if it is on the verge of rebirth.
The publisher has outlined the game’s key features, which include:
- Deep Physical Simulation: Don’t like the wall blocking your way? Dig through it with a pickaxe, or eat through it with your corrosive gas mutation, or melt it to lava. Yes, every wall has a melting point.
- Fully Simulated Creatures: Every monster and NPC is as fully simulated as the player. That means they have levels, skills, equipment, faction allegiances, and body parts. So if you have a mutation that lets you, say, psionically dominate a spider, you can traipse through the world as a spider, laying webs and eating things.
- Dynamic Faction System: Pursue allegiances with over 70 factions: apes, crabs, trees, robots, and highly entropic beings, just to name a few.
- Richly Detailed Science Fantasy Setting: Over fifteen years of worldbuilding have led to a rich, weird, labyrinthine, one-of-a-kind storyworld, layered on top of the simulation, all for you to explore. Live and drink, friend.
- Tactical Gameplay: Turn-based, sandbox exploration and combat offers as many solutions as you and your mutations, implants, artifacts, and skills are creative enough to invent.
- RPG Elements: Quests, NPCs, villages, historic sites; some dynamic and some handwritten, interwoven to produce a transportative RPG experience.
- Atmospheric Original Soundtrack: Over two hours of otherworldly music to delve to.
Caves of Qud will be released as a console exclusive digitally on the Nintendo eShop for Nintendo Switch worldwide on 16 February 2026.
