Dwarf Fortress is a video game monument

Dwarf Fortress is not very young: its story begins in 2002, when two brothers (Tarn and Zach Adams) embark on the development of what will become the project of their lives. A dwarf fortress management game, which wants to simulate a whole bunch of complex systems and offer an experience that is both deep and organic. In fact, it is even often considered a simulator rather than a game, as its mechanics are numerous and detailed. Dwarves maintain relationships, feel complex emotions, all have unique histories, and live their lives in a vast ecosystem.

Explaining that we will have to wait until at least 2030 for version 1.0 of the game, the Adams brothers have already spent twenty years refining the mechanics and adding content, which makes it undoubtedly the most popular management game complex ever created. Only here, there is a catch – for twenty years, Dwarf Fortress looked like this:

The only version of the game, distributed free of charge under a freeware model since 2002, had a graphical rendering in ASCII – entirely made of text characters. This point did not facilitate the handling, especially since this old version was only playable on the keyboard and was devoid of tutorial. Wanting to learn by playing on its original version was the assurance of spending dozens of hours watching tutorials on YouTube and going through the game’s wiki to learn how to read the screen. Fortunately, a new version of the game has been released on Steam on December 6, 2022 and brings with it a tutorial, graphics rendering that no longer makes you want to gouge your eyes out, and mouse compatibility (thank goodness). It may seem trivial, but this new version is in truth a small revolution. It opens the doors of this fantastic game to ordinary mortals.

Dwarf Fortress, before being a management game, is a storyteller. This is felt from the creation of a first part, when it is necessary to configure and generate the world in which our adventure will take place. The game doesn’t just generate a world frozen in time for our sake. Instead, he’ll create a gigantic procedurally generated map, filling it with various creatures, factions, and peoples. Above all, he will imagine 100 years of history before the game even begins. All elements of Dwarf Fortress interact with each other: peoples can go to war, ally, migrate to a new territory, imagine their own myths and legends, and even be torn apart by a magical creature who had the good idea to pass by. The player is only one element among many others in this universe, which does not need him to live.

We therefore arrive in this hostile world with a small colony of seven dwarves and a caravan full of provisions, while waiting to set up a first camp somewhere. The first rule to understand when playing Dwarf Fortress is that you don’t directly move your dwarves. They all go about their business on the map and, depending on their skills (lumberjack, fisherman, carpenter, blacksmith…), we can define work priorities that they will follow according to the tasks to be done. If, for example, a tunnel is ordered to be mined and the miners are in a good mood, they will take out their pickaxe. On the other hand, if dwarfs who are depressed, sick or too drunk are asked to cut trees, there is a good chance that they will do as they please.

The beginning of the game will generally consist of establishing a first fortress with a few beds, food and drink. A necessary step that allows you to give yourself time to collect enough resources to have a tavern, trade and welcome visitors once the makeshift camp becomes a flourishing base.

After a few hours of play, the arrival of the first metals also makes it possible to create weapons and armor to equip a small militia, which will defend the base from future invaders and can even launch expeditions to bring back equipment or prisoners. Don’t get carried away too quickly, there’s still little chance that you’ll get there in the first game – and that’s completely normal.

The other great strength of the game is indeed to use its complex generation tools to pace the games. If the management mechanics may seem quite classic today (especially since they served as inspiration for Rimworld, Prison Architect or Oxygen Not Included), they are not the ones who make the sessions of Dwarf Fortress unforgettable. Rather, it’s the myriad of interactions and the absurd amount of events that make the Adams brothers’ game such a singular title. Dwarf Fortress always surprises, even after several hundred hours of play.

Even with the best of fortresses protected by dozens of traps, several militias standing guard, and hundreds of dwarves bustling about managing it on a daily basis, the game will always find a way to reshuffle the cards and generate situations of games that stay in memory for months. For example, I could tell you about this part where a 216-year-old were-lizard woman infiltrated my fortress before contaminating the fifty inhabitants who gradually turned into lizards. Or the time I asked an 8-year-old child to carry his own mother’s tombstone, before he burst into a temple in my fortress to kill three people there, driven mad by the ghost of his mother who visited him every night.

Failures and the unexpected are at the heart of the experience Dwarf Fortressto the point that the community has made it its official motto, chanted on the forums for fifteen years: “Losing is fun!” » (“Losing is fun!”). And, even after the end of a game, the fortress built for hours continues to exist within the world, and can be visited by the dwarves of a future colony. We never come out Dwarf Fortress with a feeling of frustration, but with a head full of stories, and the furious desire to immediately launch a new adventure.

Be careful, as formidable as it may be when you hear about it, Dwarf Fortress still has a long way to go to be a truly enjoyable experience — mouse in hand. It remains a game with austere controls, which is still satisfied with the minimum in terms of animations and tutorial. In addition, the menus look like a real maze when you first set foot there. To make matters worse, it is currently only playable in English and no official translation is planned, simply because the task is too complicated.

If you are ready to do a little violence to yourself by learning to play it, the release of the Steam version is a real small event in the world of video games. Already sold to more than half a million copies, it made its creators millionaires in a few days. Above all, it serves as a valuable gateway for a whole new community of players wishing to discover this unfathomable game. Considered a monument to video games, it is cited as inspiration by the creators of numerous titles that have become benchmarks. Of Minecraft at terrariaup to FTL: Faster Than Light or Project Zomboid.