‘Dwarf Fortress’, a gargantuan-complex-in-depth simulated world, crowned as the most realistic simulated game to ever exist, and even being featured in the ‘Museum of Modern Art’. Dwarf Fortress has a long history of development, primarily developed by only 2 brothers, Tarn and Zach Adams. With the Steam version you get a UI and keybinding overhaul, and instead of text-based ASCII graphics and only 1 song, you get actual graphics and a full OST. This is the definitive way to play Dwarf Fortress as it currently stands - and with mod support, adventure mode, and an ASCII graphics mode coming in the future, at its asking price, not only is it worth buying, it stands as one of the best at what it does - even among its competitors… Most of which were originally inspired by Dwarf Fortress.

To further explain how much depth this game has, I might as well send you its wiki, which resembles almost a pocket introduction to reality, as it describes how our reality works, in detail - but instead of doing that, I thought I’d try do my best to summarize SOME of what this game accomplishes.

Everything in the game is simulated in real time and tracked without the player's influence or direct input - civilizations will rise and fall, and have their own internal conflicts, materials, moods, etc.. You’ll be able to view 100s of years of procedurally generated and simulated civilisations, down to every action someone took throughout their life - in the legends viewer.

Organs, skin, nervous tissue, hair, and distinct animal parts are all simulated, and instead of having a generic HP system, the game will base the demise of each creature on the blood it loses - a blood system which interacts with each individual simulated part of their body. 712 creatures are simulated with distinct features such as shells, hoofs, horns, and unique abilities.

Clusters and stone layer-types are realistically simulated and affect how roughly 81 stone/rock/ore-types spawn. There are 71-72 trees in the game, each with their own unique wood type. Different wood types affect density/weight, and that density/weight affects storage hauling, weapons, and armor. Metals have density, a melting point, and material value, and armours and weapons made with it are impacted by impact yield, impact fracture, impact elasticity, shear yield, shear fracture, shear elasticity. Glass also shares a lot of the same factors as metal, same with leather, and a lot of other materials, where each sub-effect is coded into the game and is dependent on a value/number given to each effect, which changes the quality of most if not all crafts. There are roughly 112 different crops/plants, each needing their own condition - such as light, temperature, biome, above ground, below ground, wet, dry, etc. and can be eaten raw, cooked, or turned into alcohol. Each plot has different levels of fertilization/yield.

You can trade, create military units, look at the thoughts and emotions of all your dwarfs, and specify each individual clothing piece on their body, see each dwarf improve at their trade/craft/profession, and even read books they’ve written.

Dwarf Fortress is also technically 3D, as you can traverse through different 2D layers that create a 3D space - allowing you to travel up and down. This allows you to build massive castles, underground fortresses, trap rooms, path water and lava, and basically do anything you can think of.

I could go on, but I hope this encapsulates what makes this game so great. Currently though, there are some issues.

Issues such as: UI cutting off, blurriness on zoom in, jittery/lagging screen panning, and poor control design which requires a lot of manual remapping to make feel good, taking quite a large sum of your time initially (especially because some settings don’t match their in-game names). While you can put up with a lot of this, and even just use your mouse instead of bothering with using the keyboard for 90% of actions, I do think an overreliance on the mouse makes the game quite click intensive, which doesn’t feel “good”. Overall though, these are minor compared to what you had to put up with on the classic version of this game, which for most people has a ridiculous barrier to entry - more than most games.

Amazing release, hope the best regarding Dwarf Fortress’ future development, and may the next 2 decades of development get us closer to that goal of simulating 100% of reality!

Game is extremely optimized, runs great on Linux at max settings, 4K, above 100 fps on a 3070 w/ DLSS Performance.

Gorgeous visuals, great art direction.

Gameplay is as you’d expect, a traditional Dark Souls-esque game – everything from stealth back attacks, to aerial falling attacks, light and heavy, charged attacks, blocks and timed blocks, stamina, health, etc. It’s very fast paced and everything from the animations to the sounds to hit and hurt boxes, everything feels tight and fun. Difficulty is as you’d expect from a Souls-like – it’s hard. You have a lot less stamina in this game and you’re punished a lot more for getting hit while out of stamina. If you wear down the enemies stamina you can do a special attack on them, similar to ‘Lies of P’. There is a skill tree that gives you more combos, strings, and abilities – similar to ‘DMC5’ but more grounded. One feature I liked the most about this game is that you get this games version of souls during a boss fight, and the bonfire equivalents are always close to the boss arena. This makes it easy to keep retrieving your souls and spending them if you die too much on a boss, completely negating the need to grind enemies like you would in most Souls-likes.

If this is what the demo looks like, I expect great things from the release. Here’s hoping the game is long enough and has new game+.