izigame.me

My feelings for this game are impossible to put into words, so I am thankful that there's no minimum character limit. If I could convince anyone to buy any game; I would probably convince them to buy Portal 1, or perhaps Portal 2. I would never even so much as mention Dwarf Fortress, despite it being the best game I have ever played in my entire life. There is something undeniably special about the game. Its cult following and impenetrable user interface (at least for the non-steam version) might make it hard to get into, but if you can stick with it, very soon; you will find that Dwarf Fortress is not hard.
There is one button to do anything, you could play this game on a controller with some very liberal rebindings and only marginal sacrifice to certain controls. I'm sure someone has already played this on the Steam Deck, even. And even beyond the controls, the actual means of surviving is simpler. Funnily enough, copy-cat games in the vein of Gnomoria often have this reverse flanderization effect, where they exaggerate the difficulty and make everything more complicated simply because it's what people expect from these types of colony sims now. They expect that BECAUSE of Dwarf Fortress.
To continue using Gnomoria as an example, in Gnomoria, to make a pickaxe, you first need to make a workshop, then you need to make a wooden shaft, then you need to make a pick head, then you need to assemble it at a workshop.
In Dwarf Fortress, to make a pickaxe, you first need to build a wood furnace to get charcoal, then build a blacksmith and make the pickaxe from there. That's two steps compared to Gnomoria's four.
Even then! That's not complexity. That's just steps. Something having a lot of steps doesn't make it complicated! (dont google the definition) Making your own fresh coffee has a lot of steps, but any idiot with running water and an annoying personality can do it, the difference is commitment. Dwarf Fortress is a game that requires a lot of commitment. Because it isn't complex, it isn't challenging; it's frustrating.
We've all had games that make us want to break things, depending on the type of person you are, Dwarf Fortress may or may not be one of those games for you. You might start your first embark, you're excited to see what all the rage is about, and then before you can even adjust your eyes to the adorable pixel art style -- your fortress has crumbled to its end. While you were trying to figure stuff out, all 7 of your dwarves were eaten by ravenous NBA sized hippos. Shaquille O'neal type hippos. If you try again, you might just give up because it simply isn't fun; nothing is happening. Everything is going too smoothly, and there's no excitement at all. I don't mean to victim blame; but both of these outcomes are the fault of the player. Environments in Dwarf Fortress aren't binary options. 1 doesn't equal good, 0 doesn't equal bad. You might embark right next to a Necromancer's tower just because you don't know what it looks like, or you might settle in the lovely Peaceful plains of Babykillingtonshire where unicorns roam and leprechauns grant wishes. The challenge, even though it's rarely ever explained to you; is completely up to you.
The challenge in the game comes from the papier-mâché slap-fight combat. Imagine if you would that you were playing Silent Hill 2, but it was the Sims, and there were 200 James Sunderlands walking around that had the same level of hit-points that the average civilian has in Arma 3, Sunderland #199 accidentally got a bad ending, so he loses his mind and bicycle kicks Sunderland #40 down a well, or throws him into a flowing stream of magma. The combat in Dwarf Fortress is so miserable that it's a blessing that you have no direct control over it. It's clunky and desperate, and even an encounter with an angry cardinal (the bird, not the popes-to-be) can feel like it has a life threatening impact. Because it does. The fights can go on for minutes of in-game time, but minutes in-game are fractions of seconds in the real world, so while it might look on the screen that your Legendary Hammerdwarf just got creamed by a giant Murderdeath Killthug made of solid bronze in less than 30 seconds, he actually held out for almost an hour in a one-on-one fight with a beast as old as time.
On one hand: THAT'S FUCKIN' SICK!
On the other: You just lost someone.
Dwarf Fortress has really made me feel for losing characters more than any other game. You'll never feel like they're real people, and you'll never acknowledge them as anything more than a statistic, but it's like having a critical component of infrastructure go missing. You're mad about it, you're not sad. You don't go "oh no, interstate-72 had a family" or whatever, you go "I NEEDED TO GET TO WORK ON TIME YOU MISERABLE BASTARDS!" Maybe the drafted soldier that just got turned into a comically large puddle of raspberry filling was a legendary crafter who made awesome artifacts regularly, or maybe he wasn't a soldier at all, maybe they just kicked your chief of medicine into a brick wall and he died on the spot. He was your best doctor! Who knows when you'll be able to replace him? All the time spent managing a replacement could be used elsewhere! A doctor might not even show up in the next migrant wave, and everyone else is already specialized into a profession because you spent two real-life hours staring at the labors screen like an autistic little freak-creature, trying to make everything perfect, only to have it all undone because your doctor decided to haul the tattered pants of a dead soldier that had fallen trying to fight the beast. Or because your soldier kept landing glancing blows on a monster. Or because of any number of things.
The game's sick as hell, buy it.
If you don't want to buy it, it's still free on the website.