Countless worlds beyond imagination exist at your fingertips. You are a nameless deity who controls what starts as a small group of settlers but evolves into an entire civilization and a mighty fortress.
I’m talking about “Dwarf Fortress,” a free game that has been reviewed by The Skyline View in the past. This year’s update has been a particularly massive one, so large that it has been dubbed “Dwarf Fortress 2012,” as opposed to the previous huge version known as “Dwarf Fortress 2010.” This game definitely isn’t for everyone. People who have watched me play it late in the newsroom ask if I’m watching the Matrix, and no, I’m not talking about the movie: I’m talking about the scrolling code from the movie.
Dwarf Fortress is akin to old rogue-like games, all in ASCII text to represent tiles. There are tile sets that players have created that make the game a lot more manageable, though, so if you’re already scared, fret not–but brace yourself. The game is not for everyone. The level of complexity in this game is insane, to the point where the learning curve is not a curve. It is a brick wall you’ll need to smash through with your bare hands.
The game has insanely intricate water physics, in which if you don’t account for water pressure, you may end up drowning all of your citizens. Your job is to ensure that your dwarves survive as long as possible. You need to make sure they stay fed, hydrated, rested, healthy and happy, and it can be a constant task.
Those are all things that have been in Dwarf Fortress for a while though, and there are lots of new features that make the update worth talking about. The first is that if you were to embark near another city or go there in adventure mode, you would find that cities are much larger and more robust now. They also now boast catacombs and sewers to explore.
The new version also features vampires, and these aren’t your Edward Cullen variety vampires looking for love. These are vampires are looking to murder and feed wantonly without getting caught. They look for sleeping members of your society to feed on, and if other dwarves witness them, the witnesses will run to the captain of the guard and tell them about the vampire in the fort. While you could just beat the vampire to death, there are more creative uses for them which will probably be addressed in the future. They never need to eat, drink, or sleep, so they make the perfect soldiers if you isolate them from the rest of your society. They also make great slaves for pulling levers and operating machinery.
“Creatures of the night” seems to be the theme of this version as the game now has lycanthropes, people turning into randomly generated creatures during a full moon. The lycanthropes are quite dangerous if you don’t have a way to deal with them properly, although I don’t think I’ve been exposed to the full breadth of their danger yet as all of their victims have died immediately.
The scariest new aspect of “Dwarf Fortress” is necromancy, in which ambitious persons will come to your fortress and attack by reanimating corpses they find to lay siege on you. As such, it’s important to dispose of or inter your corpses properly. They’ll reanimate anything they can get their hands on, including hollowed out skins that will attack you like an animated skeleton.
Over all, the latest version of “Dwarf Fortress” is pretty incredible and shows great potential for the “Future of the Fortress.” There’s plenty more that was added in the new version, but most of it probably hasn’t even been discovered yet! So what are you waiting for? You can download it for free at http://bay12games.com/dwarves/.
