Now is the time to say goodbye to friends and family. Forget your former life as it’s time to take a look at Dwarf Fortress.
In this digital-crack-em-up, you take on the task of mining, crafting, battling, slaughtering, building, adventuring, managing, and directing a bunch of dwarfs in a fortress, all whilst never sleeping again because there’s no time to do so.
Recently released on Steam (for the price of £25), Dwarf Fortress was originally released in 2006 with a ASCII-based graphics and a keyboard-only menu-driven interface. It has been consuming the life force of players ever since, whilst feeding their gaming addictions.
Dwarf Fortress is life. Every element of the game is tracked. The world has an entire history spanning hundreds of years, with legendary characters and artifacts, goblins, elves, mystical creatures and …. why is a pigdemon slaughtering my dwarfs? Oh no, we dug too deep and have awakened an evil from the depths of magma caverns. One sec, whilst I action my Captain of the Guards, Zutthan Anillibash, equipped with the highest quality crocodile bone short sword named Tagalkoben onul Keshan to take care of the problem with his squad of fighters.
Sorted. There are only ten people left, but they’ve now got 12,000 food stocks to get through – no need to concentrate on farming or Dwarf Ale brewing for the time being. We can survive, so long as the hatches are locked.
Thankfully the Steam version comes with a tutorial and help pages to get you started and the GUI can be driven with mouse clicks without needing to remember a whole load of keyboard shortcuts (although you will learn them and speed things up).
If you were intimidated by this game before (and it can be very complex), the Steam release has made it massively more accessible – if you are only going to buy one game to play for the next year, then this is it. This could be the only game you ever need to buy. The dwarfs must drink again.
Available on PC only, and you can still play it for free, but it’s well worth picking up the Steam version and supporting the ongoing development of this astonishing game. I’ll see you in Kúbukothil.
In this digital-crack-em-up, you take on the task of mining, crafting, battling, slaughtering, building, adventuring, managing, and directing a bunch of dwarfs in a fortress, all whilst never sleeping again because there’s no time to do so.
Recently released on Steam (for the price of £25), Dwarf Fortress was originally released in 2006 with a ASCII-based graphics and a keyboard-only menu-driven interface. It has been consuming the life force of players ever since, whilst feeding their gaming addictions.
Dwarf Fortress is life. Every element of the game is tracked. The world has an entire history spanning hundreds of years, with legendary characters and artifacts, goblins, elves, mystical creatures and …. why is a pigdemon slaughtering my dwarfs? Oh no, we dug too deep and have awakened an evil from the depths of magma caverns. One sec, whilst I action my Captain of the Guards, Zutthan Anillibash, equipped with the highest quality crocodile bone short sword named Tagalkoben onul Keshan to take care of the problem with his squad of fighters.
Sorted. There are only ten people left, but they’ve now got 12,000 food stocks to get through – no need to concentrate on farming or Dwarf Ale brewing for the time being. We can survive, so long as the hatches are locked.
Thankfully the Steam version comes with a tutorial and help pages to get you started and the GUI can be driven with mouse clicks without needing to remember a whole load of keyboard shortcuts (although you will learn them and speed things up).
If you were intimidated by this game before (and it can be very complex), the Steam release has made it massively more accessible – if you are only going to buy one game to play for the next year, then this is it. This could be the only game you ever need to buy. The dwarfs must drink again.
Available on PC only, and you can still play it for free, but it’s well worth picking up the Steam version and supporting the ongoing development of this astonishing game. I’ll see you in Kúbukothil.
