Dwarf Fortress Review – An Incredibly Exciting Thing

Over the past few days, we’ve been completely immersed in Dwarf Fortress, a building sim that has achieved unprecedented success on Steam. Whether it is justified, we will tell you in our review, where we will take a closer look at this dwarf case.

• Platform: PC (verified version)
• Publication date: December 6, 2022
• Developer: Bay 12 Games
  
• Publisher: Kitfox Games
• Genre: Colony Building Simulator
• Czech localization: No
• Multiplayer: No
• Game time: 10 – 100 hours (depending on your skills and luck)
• Price: about 710 CZK (couples)

Create your presentation

Anyone who has ever had the opportunity to think about their own game world knows that creating a universe is extremely difficult. The creators of Dwarf Fortress handled this aspect in a form of story-related generation. Thanks to this, you can go through a line of up to five hundred years, between which you have the opportunity to squeeze your civilization and thus begin your journey. It is advantageous to start at the turn of the century, or vice versa, to take a position in a place where someone already existed before you, because thanks to this you will be able to better withstand threats.

The number of years that the game world passes through in Dwarf Fortress is not the only factor that determines your subsequent hours of play. You can set before starting your journey, for example, how many advanced civilizations will appear, how big a problem monsters will be for you, how many ores you will find in the bowels or the size of the map itself. There are really a lot of options, thanks to which not a single passage is repeated, because during each of them you can meet hundreds of random events that shape the look of the whole adventure.

There is a tutorial at the start of your full Dwarf Fortress pilgrimage.

In most games, you completely wave your hand over the tutorial and move on. However, Dwarf Fortress isn’t exactly one of the most accessible projects out there, so I started my journey by completing it. Its concept is not that bad, but I can realistically imagine that the entire tutorial could have been more extensive. They build the first beds and a few buildings, and the main lesson ends with a farewell to the fact that dying is, after all, fun. And in fact, it really is. High replay value is one of the main pillars of this work.

You never really know what awaits you in the next minutes, or rather hours. However, at the beginning of everything is a small group of dwarf explorers who are looking for a new home. The composition is diverse, so in addition to bearded football players, you can also meet beardless women. Yes, the creators avoid Pratchett’s depiction of gnomes and give us their fragile halves in all their sleepiness. Next comes the choice of position, from where the odyssey of your colony of dwarves will begin. There are actually plenty to choose from, but usually shortly after you start, you head underground where you start building on one of the many floors available.

You can dig very deep, but working with moving between individual levels is not entirely easy. On the contrary, it’s quite a headache, because there are a lot of layers and jumping between them is sometimes quite stuttering. I could realistically imagine that the game would offer a more modern format, but it’s doubtful that it could be included in a concept as complex as Dwarf Fortress’s, as few sims offer you such a large scheme as this work.

As for the very concept of the floor, it offers a really large space for various games. Let’s take water for example. It is not available in all parts of the game world, so sometimes it’s time to bring it to your dwarven stronghold and give people the opportunity to drink something other than liquids containing a certain percentage of alcohol. And the moment you decide to do something like that, you will have a lot of fun with the fluid instability that can happen with bad design of the entire tank system, not helping your colony, but destroying it. And we’re talking about water here, which is about when it’s time to play with magma.

A colony full of complex personalities

Another trump card of Dwarf Fortress, in addition to playing with the terrain and generating the game world, is also the composition of your gnomes and, in general, all the creatures that you can meet here. Literally every inhabitant of this universe has a unique personality, abilities and, above all, a past. And I must say that every detail is important here. After all, how else can you find the killer before he strikes, or at least have an idea of ​​who killed the innocent dwarven stonemason, than by studying the diaries of individual members of the dwarven settlement and finding dark clues in them that arouse suspicion.

In addition to extensive biographies that you may or may not explore, you are tasked with managing your colony in Dwarf Fortress to meet the needs of all dwarves. The bet on creating a single room in which everyone will get along is not the best way out. Over time, this will cause you to pay more and more attention to expanding your empire and, above all, adjusting conditions to keep your people happy. If he is not made happy, it may well happen that one of the gnomes will go crazy in one of the harsh winters and make the lives of the rest of the employees into hell or immediately send them there.

Life here is a struggle

Although your fortress in Dwarf Fortress at first glance seems to be the only place in the vast universe, in fact, the opposite is true. There is a huge space around you, which is filled with the previously mentioned civilizations that managed to break through in history. Some are neutral. Others are friendly to say the least, while others are downright hostile. Expecting a dwarf to befriend a goblin is beyond reality, even if we completely remove the word race, there will still be thousands of years of mutual hatred and fighting. On the world map, forays into enemy territory are organized in order to extract artifacts, free stolen furriers, or capture strong enemy settlements.

Collisions occur both outside your tunnels and inside them. As you dig deeper and deeper, you come across new threats that don’t bother you. At the initial levels, only slush will be waiting for you, which you will smear with the chain sole of your boot. However, the farther, the more terrible the monsters will be waiting for you, and one day it may well happen that your last dwarf expedition from the depths simply will not return and you will have no choice but to start searching diligently, just to find his bones, gnawed by trolls. The life of the bearded is definitely not as easy as it might seem at first glance, and that’s what I like about Dwarf Fortress.

Dwarf Fortress is a gem from twenty years ago.

The journey of the original Dwarf Fortress is indeed a long one. During it, the team behind it managed to create an impressive piece that certainly took a lot of work to convert to a more modern format. However, the end product is worth it. Not only have the creators become millionaires, but the game itself has become relatively accessible, offering those who didn’t like the original format one of the most complete and (dare I say) the best colony management sim.

The strength of this title is the high replay value associated with the creation of unique worlds, uncompromising complexity and an almost endless supply of random events that determine the form of your passage. As for the shortcomings, there are not so many of them. Rather, these are elements that I consider secondary, which include relatively simple graphic processing along with more complex controls. However, if you overcome these shortcomings, you will get an excellent project for hundreds, and maybe thousands of hours of high-quality and, most importantly, varied entertainment. For me, Dwarf Fortress is one of the games of the year.