'I'm not sure it was a rational decision': Caves of Qud devs ported the roguelike to Nintendo Switch because they're 'interested in solving impossible problems'

Heavily systemic, decades-in-the-works roguelike RPG Caves of Qud belongs to a taxonomy of games that we, the experts at PC Gamer, professionally identify as "PC-ass PC games." Other PC-ass PC games include Deus Ex, Dwarf Fortress, and EVE Online. Notably, none of those games can be played on the Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch 2 videogame consoles—but as of February 2026, Caves of Qud can.

It's a port that doesn't seem like it should work, given that Caves of Qud uses a healthy chunk of the keyboard by default. It also does not seem like Caves of Qud should run on the decade-old Switch at anything approaching a healthy framerate, considering how hard its systemic generation can push a CPU. And that's exactly why it exists.

"I'm not sure it's a rational decision," Qud co-creator Brian Bucklew said in a recent interview with PC Gamer. "I think we are interested in solving impossible problems in general, and the idea of making Caves of Qud work on Switch—initially, making Caves of Qud work on gamepad—that doesn't seem like something that should happen. But the challenge entices me to do it."

As Bucklew is alluding to, Qud didn't make the jump from beefy desktop PCs to Switch overnight. In 2024, months before the game left early access after many many (many) years of development, Qud got a UI and control overhaul, which made it shockingly playable on the Steam Deck. It's still clearly a complex-as-hell game with a lot of information to convey, which can get a bit cramped on the Steam Deck's 1280x800 pixel display, but it works. And the gamepad binding scheme's savvy shortcuts and button combinations make actions that seem like they should require digging through several menus quite easy to pull off. Who knew examining the lethal geometry of the Chrome Pyramid could be so intuitive?

Bucklew clearly relishes a technical challenge, but the underlying motivation was the question why there aren't other PC-ass PC games on Switch.

"People think that there is not a market for systemic games on Switch," he said. "I think a lot of people might think a game like Caves of Qud would not succeed, but there aren't any, right? So on what basis are you making that claim, especially for a device that has as many users out there? If even a tiny amount of people want to play a deep systemic game, that is a lot of units for an indie studio. … And I think we've proven that there's a market for this kind of stuff on Switch."

Bucklew said that Caves of Qud's sales on Switch peaked in the top five of the 'Physical + Digital' category, aka "everything." Qud was only released digitally, but that actually makes its sales more impressive—that means at its best it was outselling 95 of the top 100 games across cartridges and the Nintendo eShop. He couldn't share specific sales numbers, but said the game has continued to do well even after leaving the Switch's most elite ranks.

Some of the design decisions in Qud that made it possible to play on a gamepad happened years ago, and they weren't necessarily intentional. "We accidentally made a choice to collapse [the way] older roguelikes would have 20 different keybinds on different letters, and one part of their appeal was puzzling out what keybinds even existed," he said. While designing Qud, he and Freehold Games co-founder Jason Grinblat decided to make its interactions more menu-driven than they would be in, say, pioneering roguelike NetHack.

"It's still quite complicated, and sufficiently interesting to discover things despite having a list of things you can do," he said. "That makes it very amenable to gamepad play, whereas if you had 70 keybinds, it just doesn't [work]. We barely fit onto gamepad, but we do, because of that decision."

The Qud team are now working on the next challenge: Fitting those controls and menus that barely work on the Switch onto a phone screen, translating the game to both portrait displays and touch inputs. "We don't know if we'll be able to pull off a nice Qud portrait design, but signs look pretty good," he said.

Performance, at least, may not be a huge challenge this time. Today's phones are monstrously capable, and Freehold already spent "many months" on performance optimizations to get the game running on the comparatively ancient Switch 1's CPU.

"People make claims like 'oh, people don't want to play big RPGs on their phone. Are there any actual examples of a phone-first design big RPG? Maybe single digits. Not very many, right? I think people make these claims because nobody takes the risk to do it, and it makes sense for big studios to avoid that risk. But for Qud we're building on a 20-year-old basis. We're paying our bills. We can take these risks."