Dwarf Fortress Critic Reviews

You could summarise Dwarf Fortress as a game about the meticulous cultivation of downfall. There’s no victory condition beyond the satisfaction of bolting together another grand chronicle of inevitable disaster. It’s this joyful fatalism as much as the simulation’s richness that makes it timeless.

A dedicated renewal for an already-legendary video game, the 2022 release of Dwarf Fortress brings it to a level where the casually interested can finally dive in and Strike the Earth!

Dwarf Fortress is a storytelling engine as much as it is a game, spitting out associations and facts and details that you can shape into a coherent and specific narrative. This is also what we do to our own lives, personifying random events so that they feel significant rather than a matter of chance. Life isn’t usually a satisfying narrative. It isn’t so much that “Dwarf Fortress” is a perfect simulacrum of life, but that it shines a bright light on the human tendency to look for meaning in everything. I care about my dwarves because the stories I make up about their lives are also the ones I make up about my own.

Dwarf Fortress is a very difficult, edgy game, but it is also an essential experience, a true celebration of the hidden potential of the videogame medium, which you will not find in any other game.

A truly masterful fantasy simulation.

I’m not even close to having experienced all that Dwarf Fortress has to offer, and I’m excited to see what I can learn next. After all, failure is the mother of learning, so I must have learned a decent amount from Dwarf Fortress.

Dwarf Fortress is, initially, a little daunting. Not because it’s inaccessible, but because you just know that it’s going to turn into a real time-sink. Is it the prettiest game around? No, but it’s wonderfully, ridiculously deep and a sheer joy to play. If you’re prepared to put the time in, Dwarf Fortress will drag you into its depths and you won’t regret it for one second.

A worthy revision of the legendary settlement sim. Slightly less impenetrable, just as engrossing.

The steam release may have a few rough edges that need work, but everything from the original has been drastically improved upon and is a joy to lose at.

Dwarf Fortress is a brilliant game, but it will make you work to find that out.

It may, as it did for me, invoke a sense of anxiety as you feel unsure what it is you ought to be doing. But in following your instincts, stories will begin to arise, just as they do for a novelist when they sit down to write. Your base motivation (survive the winter) will be supplanted by something else as you respond to what unfolds before you — whether that be drunken cats or, in my case, a dwarf who struggles to find purpose in life. Your only role, then, is to see that story through.

Dwarf Fortress is a long-term investment. Playing it is a skill that you need to hone, it requires research and planning. It’s almost a hobby in itself, demanding time and effort. Even in this much more approachable form, it still isn’t a game for everyone, but for a particular flavour of colony simmer, it’s catnip. It’s massive and messy and beautiful, and now I can put it down while I’m hyper-fixating on Star Wars or the next big Marvel drop, and not have to worry about starting over from scratch again when I come back to it later.