The co-creators of Caves of Qud, our favorite roguelike fever dream, worked as narrative consultants on Marathon—which mostly meant they 'got to sit there in the room and throw completely absurd ideas at the wall'

We named Caves of Qud our best roguelike of 2024 based on the merits of its singular atmosphere, arresting procedural systems, and the fact that you can play as a psionic, railgun-wielding bird-ape infected with a sentient fungus. You can imagine, then, how thrilled we were to learn that Qud's co-creators, Brian Bucklew and Jason Grinblat, revealed on Bluesky last week that they'd had "the real privilege" of working with Bungie as narrative preproduction consultants during the development of Marathon.