Caves of Lore

My first hour with Caves of Lore had me reaching for a notepad, which is honestly the highest compliment I can pay a CRPG. One developer, six years of work, and the result is a game that confidently ignores most modern hand-holding conventions without feeling needlessly cruel about it. The setup is simple: your character, Lannon, falls into a cave system while looking for a lost animal and surfaces into an amnesiac world where even the NPCs have forgotten who they are. That mystery threads through every quest, book, and keyword-based dialogue exchange, and it gives exploration real narrative weight rather than just dungeon-dressing. The combat is grid-based and turn-based, supporting a party of up to six members on square-tiled maps. What separates it from generic tactical RPG fare is the classless progression underneath. There are no classes at all. Skills, abilities, and the 65-plus spells in the game all improve through use, so your mage gets better at fire spells by casting fire spells, and your frontliner's weapon skills climb by swinging said weapon at things. Traits are passive bonuses chosen at character creation or leveled over time, and stat allocation at the start is the one decision you cannot undo later, so yes, that character creation screen deserves a second look before you confirm. The community-written spoiler-free guide on the wiki is not cheating; it is practically required reading before you lock in your initial build. Mechanics like flanking, backstab positioning, and pre-combat buffing with spells before triggering an encounter add genuine tactical layers, and learning enemy weaknesses through the monster lore system (fight a creature type enough times and its stat sheet slowly unlocks) gives grinding a purpose beyond raw XP. The exploration is where Caves of Lore punches hardest. The three-moon lunar system is not decoration: moon phases affect monsters, unlock rune-sealed secrets, and open portals, so the time-of-day question is always in the background of your decision-making. Maps telegraph how many secrets remain in each area, but finding them often means actually reading the in-world books, cross-referencing clues, and revisiting locations when conditions change. RPG Codex called the exploration among the finest they had experienced in the genre, and that assessment holds up. The closest comparisons are Avernum and the old SSI catalog, but this runs on a fully homebrew ruleset with none of the D&D licensing overhead, which means the designer could do genuinely weird things with spell interactions and item enchanting. The rougher edges are real. The UI is underdeveloped for the mechanical density on offer, and early-game communication is poor enough that a meaningful chunk of players restart once or twice before their build clicks. Some quest puzzle design leans hard into old-school opacity, and one mid-game progression gate in particular has sent a notable share of players to online solutions. Enemy encounter density can outpace variety in the mid-section, particularly once you have filled most of the monster manual. These are the costs of a one-person production, not signs of a broken game. The difficulty slider can be adjusted at any point, and a New Game Plus mode was added post-launch for players who want a reason to rebuild a party from scratch. For players who lived through Ultima 6, the Magic Candle, or the Exile series and have been hunting for something that scratches the same itch with modern quality-of-life touches, this is a very efficient use of 40-plus hours. Newcomers who are willing to accept that the game will not explain everything, and that keeping a handwritten journal of NPC locations is a legitimate game mechanic, will find the depth-to-price ratio hard to argue with.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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