simulated

The Hugo Awards: they’re not just for science-fiction novels that make you think “I should read that one day” and never do. Now they’ve got an interactive category, so once a year you can be told how excellent one more videogame is, think “I should play that one day,” and then never get around to that either.

This year the winner of the Best Game or Interactive Work category is Caves of Qud, a game we gave a score of 94% to back in December so you can keep that “if it’s so good how come I’ve never heard of it” comment to yourself.

Caves of Qud, pronounced “cud”, is a roguelike so old-fashioned it’s barely got graphics, which fully simulates every NPC in its baffling world full of weirdos. To quote from our review, “The main quest takes you on a journey well-suited to pit stops, dotted with odd characters like a deaf-mute albino bear-porcupine gunsmith and a very rude talking fungus you have to bring with you by letting it grow on your skin.”

This year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel went to The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett and Best Series went to Between Earth and Sky by Rebecca Roanhorse. Dune Part Two picked up Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form while Star Trek: Lower Decks won Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, which is a nice send-off for it. (The tie-in comic Warp Your Own Way picked up best Best Graphic Story or Comic as well.)

The Best Game or Interactive Work category was added to the Hugos back in 2021 as an experiment, when it was won by Hades. The experiment must have worked because it’s since become a permanent addition, with Baldur’s Gate 3 winning it in 2024.

The other nominees this year were 1000xResist, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Tactical Breach Wizards, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which I will go to the grave defending no matter what anyone else thinks about it.

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Shokuho is hardly the first mod to adapt TaleWorlds’ Mount & Blade series to a new era of history. Mount & Blade: Warband’s startling array of total conversions practically let you command armies anywhere and, indeed, anywhen in the world. Yet not only is Shokuho a total conversion for the slightly less well-served Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, but it is also one of the most comprehensive, transposing TaleWorlds’ historical RPG to feudal Japan in impressive depth and detail.

Shokuho’s samurai action begins in 1568, the year Oda Nobunaga marched on Kyoto and sparked two centuries of civil war and political intrigue. As in vanilla Bannerlord, the mod lets you carve a path through the period in all manner of ways, such as building up your own army, or joining the forces of a local lord to rise up the ranks.

Yet while Shokuho is built upon Bannerlord’s foundations, this is no simple reskin. Shokuho boasts a completely new map that, according to the creators, is “five times as big as vanilla [Bannerlord], with 56 towns and 181 castles,” all of which are based on settlements, clans, and kingdoms from the era.

Mount & Blade II Bannerlord: Shokuho Release Date Announcement – YouTube

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Moreover, as well as bundling in the popular Diplomacy Mod, which adds systems like alliances and war exhaustion, it also features several mod-specific mechanics. These include tiered castle sieges where you must fight through multiple checkpoints, and fully simulated naval battles that let you control your own ships, destroy enemy vessels with archers and gunfire, or board them with your own troops. Amusingly, Shokuho has pipped Bannerlord to the post here. TaleWorlds is working on its own naval expansion to the base game, but it won’t arrive for some time yet.

Also, considering Mount & Blade has never been a visual powerhouse, Shokuho has a remarkable sense of style. The release-date trailer published a couple of weeks back shows battles taking place across windswept grassy plains and misty forests, snow-dusted sieges of mountain fortresses, and a samurai duel beneath the golden canopy of an autumnal Japanese maple. Developer Dockside Interactive has clearly taken a leaf out of Ghost of Tsushima’s artbook, and it’s paid off.

Shokuho is available to download over on ModDB. As for Bannerlord itself, TaleWorlds’ War Sails expansion was originally scheduled to launch next week, but it has since been delayed to autumn as the developers get it ship-shape.

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The deeply simulated roguelike strangeness of Caves of Qud won this year’s Hugo Award for Best Game or Interactive Work

This massive mod for Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord not only converts it to Sengoku-era Japan, it adds fully simulated naval battles months ahead of the base game