Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Free Indie Game: Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress is one of the hardest to learn games I've ever played. It's also one of the most awesome. The Dwarf Fortress motto is, "Losing is fun". That's because Dwarf Fortress has no win condition.
The purpose of Dwarf Fortress is to help a caravan of dwarves establish a base.

Kind of.

Dwarf Fortress is so sandbox-y that you can pretty much do whatever you want. The catch is you can only do it by ordering around alcoholic dwarves (they actually require alcohol to function.) The game is prone to mass, hilarious destruction. Boatmurdered, for example, was a fortress that resulted in all of it's populace dying because an insane, fire-covered dwarf went around killing everyone else with his axe.

The graphics are ASCII,so unless you've played rogue-likes, it can be hard to understand. However, you can either download tile sets to make the graphics understandable, or you can learn to read it, like the Matrix. Nowadays when I play Dwarf Fortress it's like "Blonde, brunette, redhead..."

While the learning curve is steep, there is a wiki and several tutorials to assist you in learning this game. Believe me, the reward is worthwhile. Ultimately I can't really encapsulate all the awesome in this game, so I leave you with this image:
Tl;Dr

1 comment: