I'm shelving this for now, but it couldn't be further from the truth to say I didn't like the time I spent with it so far. Dwarf Fortress seems like the time sink I needed a couple of years ago, but I just don't have the time currently. It's one of the coolest game concepts I've seen and I already spent a bunch of time in Rimworld, which is (i think safe to say) directly inspired by DF. If you like colony sims, city builders, strategy games of any kind.... you won't necessarily love DF, because it's so excessively complex you will have to study the game and spend hundres, if not thousands of hours in there to really have experienced it fully. I hope I will find the time to check it out more thoroughly, can't wait to do it actually. <3

Despite me being a certified freak who enjoyed the old visuals more, I'm happy the new visuals have opened up interest to one of the most rich gaming experiences created by a human being.

If I had to play one game for the rest of my life, it might be Dwarf Fortress due to it being dizzying in it's mechanical richness. Every run will be so wildly different from one another due it's randomly generated values that you might feel as though you are playing a different game. One run you might be waging war with the goblins and mining resources and going through the motions. Another you and the goblins have formed a treaty and are now punching birds together and taking the dead birds to a wizard who will turn it undead and then you use said undead birds to go fuck with the elves because fuck the elves.

I can see myself playing Dwarf Fortress on-and-off for the rest of my life. That's the highest praise I could possibly give a game.

There is no other game like dwarf fortress.

The complexity of this game borders on insanity. Every limb, every finger, every muscle, every eye is simulated and reacts to liquids, attacks and anything that happens to the creature to which it belongs. Each dwarf has a deep personality, likes, dislikes, challenges, strength, relations with other dwarves. And cities have jobs, government positions, prisons, crime and soldiers. And cities belong to kingdoms with leaders and armies. And these kingdoms find themselves in a big world, that’s simulated for hundreds of years, before you actually enter the world. Monsters, Wars, Alliances, and Legendary Items shape a whole unique world. And this is built up on a world that uses realistic simulation to build a world with different vegetation, temperature and humidity.

This is just scratching the surface of the simulated world of DF. And the really crazy thing? This whole simulated world is just the backdrop for the actual gameplay. The actual gameplay where you lead the construction of a dwarven fortress, in a 3D world, with complete freedom. It is the ultimate sandbox. Build a Tower, build a giant hall, build a water pumping system that makes an indoor canal, build a town, build an inn, build a forge, build farms, build animal pens, open up the caves deep in the ground and defeat ancient horrors. But you can also go deeper. Let’s say you collect a lot of bones from fighting beasts or animals. You can then collect up those bones and then give it to a dwarf to sculpt them into artifacts, which you can sell. But bones on their own are not worth much. So you can have another dwarf polish gems from deep in the earth and then decorate your bone trinkets with these gems. Now your city has a truly unique ware to sell. And every step of this process can be programmed to happen automatically based on available bones, finished trinkets, amount of uncut gems etc. And this is just one example. There’s also smithing weapons, smithing armor, carving wooden furniture, making stone furniture, making steel, making any mineral, making your minerals into weapons and armor, making your minerals into furniture, making siege weapons, making instruments, farming, making food, making drinks, fishing, making honey, making clothes. The list goes on and on. You could play this game for hundreds of hours without seeing half of the possibilities the game has.

And on top of this gameplay you also have the unique ability of the game to make emerging storylines, just based on the dwarves' interactions between each other, how you interact with them, and how you shape your fortress. If you know where to look you will see these stories, and they will stay with you as some of the most memorable gaming experiences of your lives.

Now the game is not without flaw. The steam version is an improvement to ease of use, but certain parts of controlling the game is still clunky and outdated. And in large fortresses (150+ dwarves ish) lag is a serious problem. But with all I’ve said being only a small part of how cool this game is, and how unique it is, I think it would be unfair to see it as anything else than one of the best games of all time. 10/10

This is a hard game to review.

It is the most fun I've had with any game in a long time, and is the most detailed "base building" game I've encountered.

The fresh coat of paint and tutorials have helped a lot with making the game accessible to a crowd that isn't interested in looking at a manual every 15 seconds.

If you're on the fence, give the game a shot. If you don't end up enjoying the game, you can still look at "Legends" mode for fun procedurally generated story time and you may enjoy adventure mode when it comes out.

I've been addicted to Colony Sims and City Builders since I was a little thing who stumbled upon Pharaoh while looking for my dad's disc containing Nero Burning ROM so I could print Judas Priest songs and play them on my Hi-Fi.

I enjoyed them as a kid because it was nice to plop things down and see a city come to life, and that's all young me really needed to be entertained.

I enjoy them as an adult because they're some of the very few games where there is a constantly evolving challenge, and it's rare for them to peter out mechanically until you've hit 'the end'. Also, despite a bevy of narrative heavy games promising to have "choices that matter", I find it's the Colony Sims that offer more morally dubious means of survival (Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included) that have me thinking about my choices. They're a good genre, and I could probably write a paper on why they're one of gaming's best.

But one issue I continually run into them is that it's often just far too simple to optimize all the fun out of them, essentially leaving you with an ant farm simulator. This is mostly a me issue; A brief Engineering unit, two decades of City Builder experience and S-grade autism mean I'm just naturally suited to these kinds of games. My brain exists in grids, after all.

Dwarf Fortress, then, stands out for being the one exception: It is impossible to optimize the fun out of this game, in part due to how many moving parts it has. While the game advertising itself as an indepth world sim might turn prospective buyers off, I find that it's actually incredibly easy to get started once you figure out what the fuck a Manager is and why you need one yesterday. The fun comes from how many things are working in the background while you tend to your titular Fortress, and the ways those moving parts can snap.

"Losing is fun!" is the DF community's motto - officially adopted in game with the Steam release - and the in game tutorial even suggests you should brace for a failure. Sure, the actual mechanics are simple, but the shell around them is full of curveballs waiting to happen. Each Dwarf is simulated, having a home and family (dead or alive) and a religion and preferences and relationships with other dwarves. Other civilizations exist outside of yours, each with their own needs and goals and faiths. There is an entire world generated at gamestart, with a history and events and historical figures and secret treasures. Everything I just listed makes the foundation of your Dwarf Fortress save, and the joy of DF is watching a fortress bloom until a part of that foundation breaks and triggers a crisis.

Rivalries can bubble to the surface during a tavern brawl, spiralling into multiple murders that will demoralize anyone who witnesses it. Elves may view your wanton desecration of trees as cause for your erasure and send an army to wipe you off the map. Your burgeoning fame and fortune may draw the ire of legendary figures, for good or ill. And sometimes, just sometimes, you're the victim of Ocean's Eleven as carried out by fucking Kobolds.

Ultimately, I and many others are making this sound more complex than it is. The UI is a bit shit even after the Steam release, some mechanics are best learned through a wiki, and there's a lot of seemingly random (but not) stuff happening). But the actual core of DF is plopping down zones, workshops and orders before watching your dwarves carry them out. It is very simple once you get the hang of it. Indeed, sometimes you can go ingame years without events, allowing you to expand and grow your little ant farm with joy.

And then Ukrist Stonejoy engraves a children's toy with a depiction of him gouging out his rival's eyes, followed by your guard captain announcing a man was found without eyes, and now you have to learn what the Justice tab does.

I'm a programming man, and I tell you this with full sincerity: this is the most impressive game I've ever played.

The richness and detail of every aspect of every randomly generated world you play in is astonishing, a true marvel of software engineering. They truly feel like organic worlds with their own unique histories and politics and mythologies. The game can generate fantastic narratives out of the blue, and it becomes incredibly hard to pull yourself away from them.

The gameplay itself is hopelessly addicting, too. I remember when I first got the game I had already sunk something like 30 hours within 3 days of playing. Managing your forts, building them up from ramshackle camps into towns into a true Dwarf Fortress™, decorating your rooms, accommodating immigrants, fighting off ancient beasts from the depths, running an economy, it's classic civ sim gameplay, and by God is it fun. Even if you grow bored with a fort, you can just abandon it and start a new one. Maybe you make one next to a volcano, or on a glacier, or in the desert. The game has so much variety and content to offer, it's truly one of the most bang-for-your-buck games out there. The only reason I haven't given it a perfect score is because the adventure mode isn't out yet, but once that happens, you can be damn sure I'm coming back for more.

Dwarf Fortress is a true passion project and an unadulterated marvel of game design that's been in development for something like 20 years, and it shows. It's games like this that show the utmost potential of games and the indie game space, and it's games like this that need all the support and attention they can get. So play this game. Do it now. Like, close Chrome, go on Steam, and buy it right now. Or, hell, go to its website (https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/) and play this masterpiece for FREE. Just...play the game, man.