Caves of Lore

Some indie RPGs borrow the CRPG label loosely; Caves of Lore earns it the hard way. Built entirely from scratch by a single developer over six years, without RPG Maker or any comparable engine shortcut, it's a turn-based role-playing game with the kind of scope and mechanical density reviewers say genre veterans will recognize immediately — and it earned real community recognition for it, placing 5th in RPGCodex's notoriously discerning 2023 community Game of the Year vote.

A genuine, deep old-school RPG

The moment-to-moment systems back up that reputation. Combat rewards reading enemy weaknesses, both physical and magical, and layering buffs before engaging rather than brute-forcing encounters; dozens of spells and abilities carry utility outside of combat as well, giving exploration and puzzle-solving real mechanical texture beyond simple traversal. Reviewers repeatedly invoke Jeff Vogel's Spiderweb Software catalogue — the gold standard for one-person-built CRPG depth — as the nearest comparison, which is about as strong a compliment as this specific genre offers. The world itself draws separate, consistent praise: colourful yet melancholic, with genuine lore to piece together through notes, environmental details and NPC conversation, rewarding the kind of close attention the genre's best entries have always demanded.

A pacing problem the game's own fans keep raising

Set against that achievement is a specific, widely and independently repeated complaint about how the back half of the roughly 90-to-100-hour campaign is paced. Multiple reviewers describe the game shifting from exploration-driven discovery toward near-constant low-stakes combat, with one detailed account singling out a graveyard area specifically as the point where "gameplay devolves into taking a step or two, then fighting one of the endless slew of battles," with a boss in that same area spawning minions continuously enough to turn the fight into pure attrition. This isn't a complaint confined to reviewers who dislike the genre — it recurs across accounts that otherwise rate Caves of Lore extremely highly, several explicitly framing it as the one thing standing between a great game and an exceptional one. A related, smaller complaint concerns quest design: several reviewers describe objectives leaning heavily on repetitive fetch-and-kill-count structures that feel thin compared to the depth of the combat and exploration systems around them.

Real, substantive fixes for real, specific problems

To its considerable credit, Caves of Lore's developer has responded to exactly the kind of specific feedback described above with real, dated changes rather than silence. Controller support, rough enough at launch that reviewers describe menus becoming unnavigable without a mouse, was rebuilt with an entirely new input system in a dedicated February 2024 patch. A specifically confusing early quest that couldn't actually be completed until much later in the game — a design gap that left multiple players stuck and searching for outside help — was directly identified and moved to a more appropriate point in the story. The developer's responsiveness extends to individual bug reports as well: reviewers cite fixes delivered within minutes to hours of being reported, an unusually fast turnaround for any developer, let alone a solo one juggling a game this large. That responsiveness has continued for over three years past launch, most recently with a New Game Plus mode added in May 2026 that carries forward permanent stat gains, memorized spells and unlocked traits into subsequent playthroughs.

What the achievement data reveals

Global achievement figures give a useful, objective sense of just how far most players actually get. Even a comparatively simple milestone like walking 1,000 tiles sits at only 41.4%, and deeper completionist achievements — memorizing every spell in the spellbook, learning every characteristic, winning without dying — all sit at a flat 0.2-0.3%. That's an extraordinarily steep completion curve even by CRPG standards, and it's consistent with the reviewer accounts above: this is a long, demanding game that a meaningful share of buyers start and don't finish, whether because of the combat-frequency pacing problem, the game's demanding lack of hand-holding, or simply its sheer length relative to how much free time a given player has to give it.

A resistance system that cuts both ways

The elemental resistance and damage-type system deserves a closer, more balanced look than a single complaint can give it, since reviewers land on genuinely opposite sides of the same mechanic. For players who enjoy adapting their loadout mid-campaign, being forced to diversify damage types across a full run is exactly the kind of tactical depth old-school CRPGs are meant to demand, and several reviewers cite it as a highlight precisely because it prevents settling into one dominant strategy for ninety-plus hours. For others, hitting an enemy type immune to a character's specialized build reads as a punishing wall requiring a trip back to town to regear and relevel rather than a puzzle to solve in the moment. Both reactions are reasonable responses to the same design choice — how it lands likely depends heavily on whether a given player enjoys mid-campaign build flexibility or prefers committing to one specialized approach and sticking with it.

Where it lands

Caves of Lore succeeds at exactly what it sets out to be — a genuine, deep, old-school CRPG built with real sincerity and mechanical ambition well beyond what a solo six-year project typically delivers. Its specific, well-documented pacing problem in the campaign's second half is a real and fair reason some players won't see it through to the end, and quest design remains its weakest system relative to everything built around it. But a developer this responsive, still actively improving the game more than three years after release, earns real trust that remaining rough edges are being taken seriously rather than abandoned — and for CRPG fans specifically, this remains one of the more substantial, sincere entries the genre has produced in recent years.