Dwarf Fortress

I hate this stupid game. After successfully defending my fort from wereanteaters (like werewolves, but anteaters), I took my injured dwarves to the clinic and tended to their wounds. They transformed into wereanteaters themselves due to their infection and destroyed my base from the inside-out. Everybody freaking died.

Dwarf Fortress is less a game you play than a complicated machine you gradually learn to interfere with. At first, the difficulty mostly comes from the interface and from not knowing which of the games many systems you have accidentally neglected. You will spend twenty minutes figuring out how to perform an apparently simple task, confidently unpause the game, and discover that half your fortress is dying because you misunderstood something three hours earlier. At some point something clicks though. You stop seeing a collection of awkward menus and begin seeing a functioning little society. Your dwarves have jobs, preferences, relationships, grudges, pets, strange artistic tastes and an impressive ability to turn minor inconveniences into mass casualty events. You begin making plans. You build workshops, defenses, hospitals and elaborate infrastructure. You start feeling competent. This is usually when the game kills fifty dwarves because sometimes that is just what happens. Should have found a way to kill the child that got bitten by a werelizard. Once you have figured out the crucial systems, the game can become an exercise in optimization, but optimization for whatever you personally decide matters. You can optimize for efficiency, cruelty, wealth, military strength, architectural beauty, population growth, self-sufficiency or the production of an absurd number of finely crafted mugs. The game does not tell you what success should look like. It gives you a collection of interacting systems and lets you decide which numbers, outcomes or increasingly unnecessary megaprojects you care about. You make a plan and try to coerce your dwarfs into executing it. My fortress has flooded because I misjudged an ice plug (3 times, how did I not realize that water freezes...), lost citizens to deadly dust from a forgotten beast (or maybe ichor? It sticks to your dwarfes...), produced several new werecreatures because I failed to contain the first infection quickly enough, and had an important artifact stolen by a visitor. At one point a bird stole my last cheese. The cheese wasnt important but it somehow felt personal. These events do not feel like scripted quests. Dwarf Fortress is often described as a story generator, although at times it is closer to Mad Libs for D&D (thank you to whoever wrote that). The game supplies an enormous pile of characters, incidents and oddly specific details, while your brain does much of the work of turning them into a coherent tale. When its systems collide just right, the resulting stories feel more personal and memorable than almost anything deliberately written for a game. Failure is rarely just a failed save. It becomes the history of a place that briefly worked before everything went catastrophically wrong. The Steam version makes Dwarf Fortress much more approachable but “more approachable” is doing a lot of work here. The game still expects patience, curiosity and a willingness to look things up. Some information is buried, some controls are just not explained ingame, and some tasks remain far harder to perform than they have any right to be. There are moments when it feels less like commanding a fortress and more like operating ancient software whose original developer disappeared fifteen years ago. I'm still not sure where to collect clay or what certain icons actually mean. And yet, once the machinery starts making sense, very few games offer anything comparable. The simulation is absurdly detailed, the procedural history gives the world genuine texture and the freedom to build, experiment, optimize and catastrophically miscalculate is enormous. Dwarf Fortress is not welcoming. It does not respect your time in any conventional sense. It will confuse you, frustrate you and occasionally make you close the game after realizing that several hours of careful planning have ended in disaster. Then, a little later, you might start wondering how the surviving dwarves are doing. Highly recommended, provided you find the sentence “I wonder what terrible thing will happen if I try this” appealing.