Dwarf Fortress

Reviewing this game has felt a bit redundant. Its achievements seem to speak for themselves. But throwing my words onto the pile... In this game, you play as a particular community of dwarves. You decide how they build, how they strategise, how they manage natural resources. They labour, brawl, create art, study the world around them, and consume truly staggering amounts of booze. You respond to events outside your control. The outside world asserts itself. With the passage of time, it's very likely that your fortress will fall. And then you return to the world screen to ponder the vicissitudes of fate and choose your next move. How does the civilisation that community belonged to respond to the loss of their fort? Do they attempt to reclaim it? Pick a more strategic location and plot revenge? Move elsewhere and forget? Or does god (i.e., you) give up on them entirely and choose a different civilisation to patronise? Over millennia fortresses and civilisations rise and fall, stories emerge and are lost, famous heroes achieve marvellous deeds and sink into obscurity. You get to shape that process - to an extent. Dwarfs have their own personalities and are also impacted by events and conditions. If you forget to set up a cloth industry, for example, there will eventually be some dwarfs without serviceable clothes: are they made bitter by the indignity? Do they learn to laugh at themselves and see the absurdity of the dwarven condition? Do they come to certain intellectual conclusions about the nature of respectability and whether or not the pursuit of it is a worthwhile aim? Unlike other games in this genre, it is easy to become invested in individual dwarfs, because they feel like genuinely complex and unpredictable characters. Sooner or later one of them will surprise you. Having said that, this game is possibly not going to suit players who are looking for a cheap dopamine hit. To get the most out of it, I think you have to play creatively, not just react to the scenarios that the game creates for you. A community worships a god of death: how is that death cult aspect going to affect the development of their fort? A civilisation worships a god of the weather: maybe it would be fun to build a giant observatory...? Someone creates a certain artefact: how does this development affect the general cultural trajectory of the community? Your fortress falls: what sort of impact is this going to have on the history of the world you've created? How does it affect the balance of power, etc. Quite regularly there are complaints and lamentations from players whose play-style strikes me as highly passive. The richness of the world that has been created is orders of magnitude greater than that offered by any competing game. The developers have dreamt of this world for decades and problem-solved endlessly and inventively in their attempt to realise this vision. The replayability is endless. That doesn't mean it will suit every player. But I do absolutely recommend that you give it a poke to see whether it might suit you. Please keep in mind that if you purchase this game you are doing so to support the developers and/or to access sprites and the in-development adventure mode! You can download the ASCII version of the game itself for free on the Bay12 website, where you can also find comparatively sane discussion forums. The ASCII art version, by the way, is spectacular and can be enabled in game settings...