r/Cogmind

I have been wanting to really get into them for a while now. The reason I'm making this post is because the way I see it, I would need to put in quite a lot of time in both to truly see them for what they are, and if they happen to be my thing, I want a nudge to see where I should start. After all my browsing, I ended up narrowing the games down to DCSS and Cogmind.

I have played Caves of Qud for a week or so, but spent many hours in those days. While I loved it, I was super confused on why it's considered a roguelike, it really felt like an open-world RPG with roguelike gameplay, which made it tedious to play on permadeath mode since you're essentially playing a relatively difficult (knowledge-based) RPG for the first time on perma-death mode. I will definitely be going back to it in the future, giving it a break for now.

For the two games mentioned, I would like some comprehensive thoughts on both or either one of them, depending on which you played. I value replayability, fun/fair challenge with many options self-imposed challenges, emergent gameplay (this is a big one). Tell me as much as you can about either game you played, what you love/hate, random details you would like to share, etc.

One last thing, controls are out of consideration, I got the hang of Qud very quickly using keyboard only with vi keys.

Thanks