A while back Jonsku did a review on Rimworld, the story simulator. It's one of my absolute favorite games, but there's another game I love even more that you could technically say is Rimworld's grandparent, and I've played quite a bit of it over its lifetime. Dwarf Fortress has been around for a long time now, first releasing in early alpha back in 2006. A lot of games take a great deal of inspiration from it, including Minecraft and the aforementioned Rimworld. Dwarf Fortress's developers describe the game simply, stating that it is "a single-player fantasy game. You can control a dwarven outpost or an adventurer in a randomly generated, persistent world." But there's so much more to it than that. More than I could say here or have even discovered. I've been playing a ton of it lately, so I thought I should take the chance to share my thoughts on it, and I'll get right into it.
Story
Story is everything about this game, despite the fact that it arguably doesn't have one. Dwarf Fortress is a colony management game. You generate a world and choose where to embark in it, and then you arrive there with a small group of dwarves hoping to build a new fortress, and some basic supplies. There isn't really any particular set goal other than trying to keep your fortress alive, and inevitably you're going to fail. It isn't really a matter of if, but of when and how. But the idea isn't to reach some "You Win" screen at the end, it's to struggle against everything that gets thrown at you and enjoy the story that emerges from your attempts.
While there isn't a standard narrative to the game, the world that's generated at the beginning does have a history that's generated with it, with an initial duration chosen by you. Events unfold throughout the world whose consequences can end up affecting your fortress, and which can be affected by your actions as well. And even if you do lose, you can start a new fortress in the same world. You can even try to reclaim a lost fortress if you so choose. So while there isn't a story in the usual sense, a rich one unfolds that you and the other inhabitants of the world make for yourselves. This is also one of the biggest ways that it's different from Rimworld. Instead of a storyteller that determines the kinds of events that strike your colony, everything that happens in Dwarf Fortress is the result of events in the world.
Gameplay
Dwarf Fortress has two primary game modes. Fortress Mode is the primary mode, which is a colony sim where you start with a small group of dwarves and built up a fortress, and Adventure Mode, which is a more RPG-esque experience where you start as a single character of a race of your choice and proceed to go on your own adventures, exploring the world, banding together with others, and what have you. It's possible to have games of both modes in the same world, so in Adventure Mode it's possible to visit fortresses you've established, and it's also possible for your adventure mode characters to settle down in one of your fortresses. I haven't delved too heavily into Adventure Mode, and it's also not the primary focus of the game, so I'll be focusing primarily on Fortress Mode.
The first thing you do is generate a world. You're given several options: how populated the world is, how large it is, how long its history is, how savage the natural environment of it is, and so on. The world and its history generate, and then you're presented with the world map, where you'll choose where to begin. You have a plethora of different biomes and natural features to consider, such as the biome, the presence of soil, which ores might be present, whether or not there's an underground aquifer, and many other things. You also want to consider who else may be living nearby, as you could wind up victim rather early on to an invasion by goblins or a necromancer's undead horde if you're near enough to draw their attention.
Once you've chosen where to start, your initial group of dwarves will arrive with a wagon full of basic supplies, at which point you can get to work building up a base. You can build up or dig down to create a base (and a true dwarf would of course do the latter). You need to establish a supply of food, as well as brew drinks to keep your dwarves happy, hydrated and functional. You can build out of all kinds of things that are obtained differently, whether it be wood, stone, metal, bone, or glass. At larger scales you may even need to appoint administrators to help manage your stocks and work orders. You might decide to focus on trying to build a wealthy fort, trying to wipe out other civilizations, or just trying to keep your citizens happy.
The systems have far more depth to them than I could possibly get into in a review, but I will give one example of it by describing the soap making. You have to take wood and burn it to ash, then make that ash into lye. You also need to get some kind of oil, whether it be tallow from butchering animals, or oil you've obtained by grinding plant seeds and squeezing the oil out with a press. Once you have the lye and oil, you can finally make bars of soap out of it. That same oil can be used for cooking, and the wood can be used as fuel for a multitude of sources as an alternative to coal or magma. There's a great many materials, creatures, plants, and other things that interact with a near incomparable level of depth.
For the most part, the game won't make whatever goals you set for yourself easy. You may break into an aquifer while digging and flood your base, or you may run out of food during the winter and have your dwarves succumb to starvation. Perhaps some goblins will take notice of your fortress and decide to invade it for fun, or you may be attacked by elves you've offended by cutting down trees. Or you could become victim to an outbreak of vampirism or lycanthropy that turns your fort's residents into a source of danger themselves. Almost every fortress inevitably falls, to the point that the game's community has adopted the motto that "Losing is fun!" It's expected and considered an essential part of the experience part of the experience, both because some interesting stories can come out of failure, and because you'll remember what happened and learn from it for next time.
Visuals and UX
The dangers of the world aren't the only difficulty you'll face, but the others have become much easier to contend with. Originally, the game lacked any kind of proper polish or UI, and was incredibly difficult to approach as a result, since everything had to be done through hotkeys. It also didn't have proper graphics and was entirely ASCII based (and an example of how that looked is below), which takes a lot of time to get used to and is difficult to parse at a glance at first. This is a huge part of how the game managed to achieve the depth of simulation it has, since what focus was kept away from graphics and UI was instead put into the game systems themselves.
Things have changed a lot ever since the game released a Steam version in 2022. With that release, they enlisted the aid of a smaller publisher and added a proper UI and mouse support to the game. The Steam release also saw a graphical and audio overhaul, and included a tutorial to help newcomers learn the game more easily. It is a vastly more approachable experience now, and the changes are welcome even for someone that's played a lot of the older versions, since I can put more of my attention into what's going down in my fort and less into remembering all the hotkeys.
Conclusion
There's so much more I could say about this game, but it would not only take far longer to get into than I could put into a review, it'd rob anyone whose interest I've piqued from discovering all the game has to offer on their own, so I'll wrap things up here. I'll acknowledge that even with the changes made after the Steam release, the game can still be quite clunky and very overwhelming to get into, so it may not be everyone's cup of tea, and someone who isn't ready to chip away at learning such a monolith is likely still better off checking out Rimworld instead.
But if that doesn't deter you, or if you're a fan of Rimworld and games like it already and want to experience what inspired them, and delve the massive amount of depth that nothing following it can compare to, then I absolutely recommend giving Dwarf Fortress a fair go. Even with the game being on sale on Steam these days, the free version still exists, too. It gets all the same gameplay updates and has the new UI, but doesn't contain the graphical overhaul, so you would be playing with the old ASCII graphics.
Even with its clunkiness and learning curve (and I'm nowhere near even being an intermediate player), I absolutely adore this game. I've put thousands of hours into watching different stories unfold through successive fortresses, whether they fall to a raid, get turned into were-creatures, or the fort retires in peace so I can start anew elsewhere, and I don't see myself giving up this endless cycle of emergent stories any time soon.
VERDICT: Recommended
Reviewed on PC
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