Dungeons of Dredmor

Repetitive, but entertaining and satisfying.

Dungeons of Dredmor feels like a turn-based hack-and-slash game, with a focus on repetitively butchering your way through large hordes of monsters, while growing in power and optimizing your character build.
(Rift Wizard revisited the same format years later, in a much more condensed form.)

The humor is best described as "quirky", sometimes it made me laugh, but when it didn't, it didn't detract from the game for me.

What I adore is the build system - you select seven classes with linear skill progression at character creation, and victory usually requires a balance between raw synergy and power, vs covering some utility functions that your main classes may have trouble with.
I have played this game for over 300 hours, since there is such a wide range of possibilities for your build, and I really enjoy refining on past attempts and trying something new.

Inventory management can be on the tedious side, and I have thrown away many runs due to the sheer tedium of killing the same handful of monsters over and over again. The game option for smaller floors is pretty much mandatory, and even then..
There is so much depth to this game, but it only really shows up on a macro level, and I admit the micro is mostly boring, though occasional tense moments and interesting decisions exist.

Dungeons of Dredmor is a rogue-like dungeon crawler. You define your character by choosing several skills, then venture into the randomly generated dungeons, defeating enemies, looting, and working your way down through the dungeon's many floors.

There are many different skill trees available, covering offensive, defensive and crafting. In terms of weapons, you can specialise in physical weapons such as sword, pole-arms, daggers, crossbows, projectiles (crossbows and thrown weapons), or rely on several types of magical masteries. Other skills include abilities to dodge, block, detect traps and more.

The gameplay is turn-based, so when you move a square in the grid-like map, the enemies will then take their turn. This allows you to plan a strategy rather than frantically hammering buttons.

The graphics are functional. The basic graphics work for what the game is trying to achieve, but the disappointment is that your character never changes from the boring stock avatar. No matter what type of character you are trying to play as, or what armour you have equipped; he/she is the same. It doesn't affect the gameplay, but it loses that customisation aspect.

There are three difficulty levels, with the option of permadeath, so can be played by hardcore RPG fans, or a more casual gamer. You can also have smaller sized floors if you want to experience the game faster, where enemies give more XP to compensate. With a normal-sized dungeon, the game will last several hours which is a bit too long; given the appeal of a game like this is to replay with a different type of character.

At first I thought the interface felt a bit fiddly and involved too many clicks to pick up items. In the menu, you can configure it so clicking on an item instantly places it in your inventory. Also, you can configure an auto-loot setting so certain items will be picked up when you walk over them.

There's also a lot of items in the game and it can be a bit overwhelming to newcomers to understand how certain items are used, or what all the symbols and stats mean. A lot of the potions and mushrooms you find are either really beneficial, or can really hurt you. This is why I prefer to play without permadeath. You really don't want to be hours in to the game just to die by drinking a potion!

There's a lot of humour in the game which can also make the descriptions nonsensical. The enemies have text pop-ups to show what they are saying. These are mainly jokes about RPG games.

It feels fun and addictive exploring the dungeon. Your character has limited sight, which the game represents with Fog of War. As you uncover areas, they are drawn on your map at the top right, and there's plenty of branching paths and multiple stairs to manoeuvre up and down through the floors. The deeper you go, the tougher the enemies, so it's important to explore each floor to gain the experience and find better loot. You will find multiple stairs that lead either up to the previous floor, or down to the next level. Due to the structure of the map, if you want to fully explore a floor, you will need to find a staircase on the floor below/above to reach other areas.

Like most rogue-likes, it can feel a bit too tough at times. It can feel quite tough to start the game, but even once you have established your character, there are difficulty spikes here and there. The games multiple difficulty levels and the ability to turn off permadeath is a welcome decision. This does ease the frustration and makes the game much more fun as a result. However, the game is one of those games where you may think your character in unbeatable at the end, only to find out the boss is way overpowered.

Dungeons of Dredmor is possibly not too well-liked by roguelike purists because it deviates from typical features in couple of points: first, it has graphics instead of pure ASCII art, and second, it has an available setting to remove permadeath, thus going to see big bad Dredmor is not an unreasonably difficult feat.

Otherwise the popular characteristics are there, the hero wanders in randomly generated dungeons, meeting random monsters and strange events, collecting random equipment and trying to get to lower and lower levels of the dungeon. And death comes, sometimes completely unfairly (though not quite as easily and frequently as in, say, Nethack)

Beside added graphics, almost everything in the game comes with zany names, visuals and flavour texts, often poking fun at fantasy cliches, so there is also a lot to see and read in the game. As often happens with comedy, it is probably not to everyone's taste but I was amused. There is also lots of customization available for character skills, and lots of parameters affected by skills and equipment (if you haven't hit a monster with ten different damage types simultaneously, you are still a beginner). Having all these things to see, it does make sense that the game is not quite as lethal as some other roguelikes, and eventually one probably wants to try that "no permadeath" option.