Dwarf Fortress

Spent 20 hours building a fortress over the weekend. First, some keas kept stealing from the stockpiles I had outside, so I had to haphazardly move all my valuables indoors. Then, a miner digging the reservoir for my fortress died while trying to get water for his fellow dwarves. Unfortunately, he didn't stay dead. His spirit turned into a troublesome poltergeist, pulled the lever controlling the water channels, and flooded the entire fortress. Somehow, I managed to fix that. Then an elk beast attacked. It destroyed everything. I lost a 30-hour fortress to a valley beast that breathed fire. And remember to save your game. Otherwise, you'll eventually realize you've reverted to a save from five hours ago, spend another five hours rebuilding everything, only to watch the exact same stupid thing happen again. 10/10. I'm starting another fortress.

Personally, I consider this the greatest game of all time—a title truly capable of seeing you through to your twilight years. The only regret is the lack of official Chinese localization.

This game is fun and nothing is random. That wereturkey necromancer that showed up at your front gates to infiltrate your fortress has generational trauma and his actions were set in motion because of something that happened to his great grand parents.

the longer i play the more fun it is

One of the first times I played Dwarf Fortress after buying it, I clicked a random spot on the world map and embarked in the most beautiful location I've ever seen. A waterfall split a massive cliff into several sections, and I turned each one into its own district of my town. There was a residential district, a market district with a tavern, a crafts district, and a citadel surrounded by sheer cliffs. Every district was connected by drawbridges spanning deep chasms, with a raging river far below. It was, without a doubt, the most memorable fortress I've ever built. Then my hard drive died, and I lost the save. For the last six months I've been generating new worlds and embarking over and over, hoping to find a place like that again. And you know what? It's almost impossible. The embark map is incredibly hard to read. Every time you pick what looks like an interesting river or cliff, it's basically a lottery. You embark, realize the terrain is nothing like you expected, quit back to the main menu, and start all over again. I even tried searching in Adventure Mode, but that has its own limitations. The most frustrating one is the fog of war, which makes exploring the world for a good embark site painfully slow. So here's the thing: the day the developers add a way to preview the actual embark map before embarking, I'll finally be able to explore the world properly, find the perfect location, and really enjoy the game. On that day, I'll happily change my review and call Dwarf Fortress a 10/10. But until then, it's a game that constantly frustrates me because of its awkward embark system, an almost useless world map, and the inability to disable the fog of war.

Created a massive impenetrable fortress diving to the depths of the Earth, an army of legendary fighters in the finest armor and weapons I had. Hundreds of dwarfs living and producing underneath the mountain. Then a forgotten beast arrived, a spider of sorts. No biggie, I had a drawbridge for this exact situation, only there was 1 issue. I told my dwarfs to seal the gates, as they made their way up, a single cat had wandered to the surface for the first time in years. At this exact moment, the cat rushed upstairs past my dwarfs, to the entrance, spotting the Beast. However the Beast also spotted my cat. The cat sprints back inside the drawbridge luring the beast across before we can seal it, killing many dwarves along the way. I send my military. Every single legendary dwarf slaughtered in a second. I watch as the only defenses I had crumbled in under a minute, the beast slaying hundreds of women and children, the civilians attempting to bite the beast, my army of cats and dogs inside clawing its chitinous hide. I however witness the last of my dwarves, a child bite down and punch at the crumbling armor of the Beast. The Beast was finally slain, though my halls lay bloodied, endless corpses filling every corridor, a measly 50 survivors out of 500. We had stopped the beast, but at what cost? All our animals and livestock, slain. Protection, dead. Hundreds to entomb, it would take years to clear the halls and bury them all, ghosts start to haunt the hold. This hold, could it be salvaged? Probably, but the cost is too high. A jewel of the empire turned to dust, and the survivors scatter to the wind to tell the tale of the impenetrable hold brought low, by a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cat that got curious.

The game is an interesting concept but you frequently have dwarves who simply will not do the tasks you want them to, but there's nothing telling you WHY they won't do it. Also there's very few tooltips about what things do or what you need in order to do them. I'm sure it's fun if you memorize every single sub system in the game (a whole lot) but it's very daunting when nothing you do works and there is simply zero information about why.

fun but too simple and easy not very in-depth