Dwarf Fortress

No review could do this game justice. It is a product of a lifelong ambition to create one of the deepest, most all-encompassing colony management simulation games, with all manner of bells and whistles and quirks and unnecessary detail that only a labour of love could produce. I've sunk hundreds and hundreds of hours and I have barely scratched the surface of the surface of this beast.

Now that the 2022 Steam Release, adding graphics and a sane(r) UI exists, there is no better time than ever to pick this up.

Even if this is not the game I have sunk time into the most (there are many alternate universes where I sell my soul exclusively to this game), it is certainly the most artistically ambitious game I have ever seen, and I struggle to see how it could be ever topped in the near-distant future, and the game is still nowhere near "done".

An incredible sandbox game, only held back by its frustrating UX. Once they figure out how to incorporate some of the QOL items this game desperately needs in order to actually manage and automate a colony of dwarves at a reasonable scale, I'll be coming back to dwarf fortress.

This game fills me with pure awe. Generating entire worlds from scratch, reading about the world's storied history and traditions, starting a fortress, planning out logistics and layouts, building megastructures, staging bloody battles and sacrifices, watching as your fortress hilariously implodes, opening up legends mode and reading about your favorite dwarves and what they got up to after the fortress went to shit, looking at the world map and realizing holy shit, all these places actually exist in the game world and i can go into adventure mode to visit them, sack them, or sneak in, dig a hidey-hole and live off stolen food... this game, to me, is the epitome of a sandbox. You have the whole game world at your disposal, and the only constraints on what you can do are your creativity (and sadism).

Great fun, if you've learned it once you've learned it for life. I learned back in 2011 and was able to jump right back in a couple years ago just googling hotkeys now and then.

Playing in ASCII in public makes you seem very mysterious in public, which may be a good thing

This game has already stolen thousands of hours from my life, and even more from my friends' lives. It is designed to be an all-encompassing simulation of a fantasy world down to procedurally-generated event-shaped personalities, dungeons, stories, interwoven relationships, battles, and the brutal merciless murder of elves. If there's anything that the countless hours have taught me in this game, it's that anything can happen and will happen, as well as can shape personalities.
It's the potential that this game will be hailed worldwide as one of the highest works of art ever made for a computer, if it does become finished.

In order to understand how rightfully MASSIVE this game's mostly-original engine is, you must first understand how it was made: by two men, the brothers Tarn and Zach Adams. Zach mostly contributed through conceptualizations and storytelling, while Tarn programmed from 2006 to present. (12 years of Dwarf Fortress!!)
Secondly, in order to understand it fully, you must experience it. There is a bunch of footage of Dwarf Fortress in action on several Youtube and Twitch pages, and many of these people who make the footage either have a tutorial or describe what to look for in the Dwarfish sea of ASCII/tiles (eugh). As well, you can actually play the game. For free.

The game is rich with potential stories to tell and in my experience will only get better.