Caves of Qud 1.0
One of the first post-1.0 characters I made was a chimera, a mutant who can only develop physical mutations (meaning body-related buffs/abilities and not psychic powers) and who gains specific benefits from doing so. At one point I picked up a new mutation that came with an extra limb, thinking the limb would end up somewhere sensible or would at least be too abstract to worry much about. At which point a hand grew out of my character's face.
The cardinal sin in Qud is judging a book by its cover, or maybe looking at the cover once and acting like you've read the whole book. You might encounter a talking vine librarian, a deer centaur with three parents, or a sentient laser turret adopted into a culture of comtemplative weasel-folk who have no use for the contrivance of gender. There's a lot of productive RNG at play, but in fact only one of the above involves a random element. Here random generation isn't a mechanism that produces fun or funny moments on accident in the form of garbage data, it's wielded in service of the designed ethos of the thing. So, sure, I have a hand on my face now. That's my special shield hand. So far my best buds--the aforementioned deer people, a village guarded by an acid slime that constantly burns everybody, and fish in general--have been cool about it.
It occurs to me that if a game with this approach to the little hand puppets running around inside its narrative is sitting at overwhelmingly positive on Steam, with 9,000 reviews despite its being an unforgiving and brutally long roguelike, maybe the troglodytes screaming in comments sections lately in favor of the new heterocentric white supremacist world order are not the dominant cultural force they pretend to be. Maybe they're an outnumbered cabal, the dregs of a terminal ideology that, for various reasons, happens to have its finger on the trigger at this moment. Or maybe that's wishful thinking, but if there's one thing I know about moments, and that Caves of Qud acknowledges about the moments occupied by tyrants and technologies and civilizations, it's that they only last for a moment. In 6 AR, Resheph, the Above, Ghost-in-Cerulean, the Coiled Lamb of Baetyls, died of natural causes. And so will you, if you live long enough.
Anyway, it's a good video game. To me the goal of creating a rich world filled with interesting characters has always felt sort of at odds with the goal of making an oldschool roguelike with permadeath. But I suppose it wouldn't be what it is if the devs hadn't decided to live in the tension between those things, and at this point there are non-permadeath game modes too, one retaining a satisfying amount of the difficulty while not obliterating hours of emergent narrative every time you make a mistake, the other changing the game such that difficulty becomes much less relevant. I saw a comment on Steam that describes Qud as one of those impossible dream projects people used to talk about on forums in the early 2000s except it actually got made to completion, and that seems right. Being big and weird and messy is the point. But it's also a lot less messy, a lot more focused on its goals, than you might think.