Here at Citizen Game, we’re mighty fond of a bargain. But how do you know if a cheap or even free game is worth your valuable time? After all, you could be out walrus wrestling, or reading poetry to molluscs, or whatever it is important people do these days now that we no longer have an economy.
Luckily, our time is worth almost nothing at all, so we’ve plumbed the depths of the Intertubes to bring you our latest feature — Freebie Friday!
This week, we’re looking at Dwarf Fortress.
Unusually for a game, Dwarf Fortress has a motto.
It’s ‘Losing is fun’.
Let’s think about that assertion for a moment, shall we? After all, it’s a pretty bold statement to make, given that modern games do all they can to hold your hand through challenges, gently prodding your skill level with a blunted spoon rather than setting it on fire and chopping it up with axe.
But that’s not how things used to be, is it? I’m old enough to remember a time when games weren’t ashamed of their difficulty, but proud that beating them required almost godlike reflexes and the memory retention qualities of several supercomputers. Can you imagine a modern publisher releasing a game as insanely tough as Battletoads for the SNES? And yet, it’s one of the most cherished icons of the early console era.
So Dwarf Fortress exists in a strange limbo, sandwiched between a legion of hardcore fans who never tire of boring you with tales of one-armed dwarven psychotics murdering goblin legions, and a vastly larger section of the gaming community watching their frothing enthusiasm with glassy-eyed bewilderment.
What I’m saying is, this may not be the game for you. And that’s okay, some people liked a more structured approach to challenges, or don’t enjoy losing despite doing everything almost perfectly.
DF is essentially a resource-management game along the lines of The Settlers, where the goal is to set up a complex network of asset producers, finished goods crafters, administrators, armed forces and assorted infrastructure that works like a finely crafted machine. The interface is intimidating at first (which isn’t helped by the fact that standard versions of the game use an entirely ASCII-character graphics pack), but before long you’ll be changing job assignments, managing item flows and issuing orders with puffed-up bravado and a false sense of confidence.
This is as pretty as it gets, people
The game really stands out in its attention to detail — almost everything about each dwarf, animal and object is tracked, whether it be history, family, mental issues, values, religion, training, artistic achievement, needs and desires or even physical status down to individual bones. Every moment of development time that didn’t go into making DF look pretty went into building a system that procedurally generates every facet of a huge and fiendishly complex world.
Standing in the way of you taking your bedraggled band of dwarf settlers from cowering in caves to a mighty empire is the game’s consistent habit of throwing a spanner in the works. From invasions of blood-crazed elephants and tree-hugging elves, the occasional mental breakdowns caused by living in a barely-functional underground chasm and the inevitable destruction wreaked by horrors released from deep beneath the earth, you’ll be lucky to last a week.
So if ignominious defeat is inevitable, why do so many otherwise rational people continue to punish themselves in such an oddly baroque fashion? Well, it certainly gives you some pretty good stories. Check out the classic story of ill-fated colony Boatmurdered for some seriously chucklesome, and occasionally strangely touching, moments. But more than that, it’s managed to find a community that cares about it, when so many other games seem to be flung out into the ether only to disappear without a trace.
In a way, facing the challenge and being beaten time and again is a badge of honour for fans. In the same way that whenever war correspondents meet they swap horror stories to help deepen bonds and process their shared experience, meeting another DF player is an occasion for digging up great disasters from the past, and giving them an airing once again.
If you want the chance to build up your own stock of tales of terror, visit Bay 12 Games to download the game and remember to read the excellent Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial to help you get started. The Dwarf Fortress Wiki is an invaluable resource, be sure to bookmark it.
