‘Dwarf Fortress’, a gargantuan-complex-in-depth simulated world, crowned as the most realistic simulated game to ever exist, and even being featured in the ‘Museum of Modern Art’. Dwarf Fortress has a long history of development, primarily developed by only 2 brothers, Tarn and Zach Adams. With the Steam version you get a UI and keybinding overhaul, and instead of text-based ASCII graphics and only 1 song, you get actual graphics and a full OST. This is the definitive way to play Dwarf Fortress as it currently stands - and with mod support, adventure mode, and an ASCII graphics mode coming in the future, at its asking price, not only is it worth buying, it stands as one of the best at what it does - even among its competitors… Most of which were originally inspired by Dwarf Fortress.

To further explain how much depth this game has, I might as well send you its wiki, which resembles almost a pocket introduction to reality, as it describes how our reality works, in detail - but instead of doing that, I thought I’d try do my best to summarize SOME of what this game accomplishes.

Everything in the game is simulated in real time and tracked without the player's influence or direct input - civilizations will rise and fall, and have their own internal conflicts, materials, moods, etc.. You’ll be able to view 100s of years of procedurally generated and simulated civilisations, down to every action someone took throughout their life - in the legends viewer.

Organs, skin, nervous tissue, hair, and distinct animal parts are all simulated, and instead of having a generic HP system, the game will base the demise of each creature on the blood it loses - a blood system which interacts with each individual simulated part of their body. 712 creatures are simulated with distinct features such as shells, hoofs, horns, and unique abilities.

Clusters and stone layer-types are realistically simulated and affect how roughly 81 stone/rock/ore-types spawn. There are 71-72 trees in the game, each with their own unique wood type. Different wood types affect density/weight, and that density/weight affects storage hauling, weapons, and armor. Metals have density, a melting point, and material value, and armours and weapons made with it are impacted by impact yield, impact fracture, impact elasticity, shear yield, shear fracture, shear elasticity. Glass also shares a lot of the same factors as metal, same with leather, and a lot of other materials, where each sub-effect is coded into the game and is dependent on a value/number given to each effect, which changes the quality of most if not all crafts. There are roughly 112 different crops/plants, each needing their own condition - such as light, temperature, biome, above ground, below ground, wet, dry, etc. and can be eaten raw, cooked, or turned into alcohol. Each plot has different levels of fertilization/yield.

You can trade, create military units, look at the thoughts and emotions of all your dwarfs, and specify each individual clothing piece on their body, see each dwarf improve at their trade/craft/profession, and even read books they’ve written.

Dwarf Fortress is also technically 3D, as you can traverse through different 2D layers that create a 3D space - allowing you to travel up and down. This allows you to build massive castles, underground fortresses, trap rooms, path water and lava, and basically do anything you can think of.

I could go on, but I hope this encapsulates what makes this game so great. Currently though, there are some issues.

Issues such as: UI cutting off, blurriness on zoom in, jittery/lagging screen panning, and poor control design which requires a lot of manual remapping to make feel good, taking quite a large sum of your time initially (especially because some settings don’t match their in-game names). While you can put up with a lot of this, and even just use your mouse instead of bothering with using the keyboard for 90% of actions, I do think an overreliance on the mouse makes the game quite click intensive, which doesn’t feel “good”. Overall though, these are minor compared to what you had to put up with on the classic version of this game, which for most people has a ridiculous barrier to entry - more than most games.

Amazing release, hope the best regarding Dwarf Fortress’ future development, and may the next 2 decades of development get us closer to that goal of simulating 100% of reality!

Daggerfall is held back by outdated controls and a time where its vision couldn’t be fully realized. With the Unity version you are given a much more modern control scheme, with even the option to completely do away with the click and drag swinging of the original. While combat is still just mashing left click and hoping the dice rolls in your favor, as you improve your stats and weapon handling, it isn’t much different from Morrowind, where at the start you feel useless, missing all the time, and later on you’re one hitting rats as you walk by.


The most impressive thing about Daggerfall is its size. It’s ridiculously massive. You won’t be spending your time actually traversing most of it manually, and instead you’ll be using the games more active version of fast travel, with random encounters, camping, and choice on how you get from one location to the next. But even in saying that, some of these dungeons feel ridiculous in size. A single dungeon can run you multiple hours of getting lost in its labyrinthine size. With levers, elevators, moving segments, secret doors, switches, cogs, teleporters, trap doors that turn into stairs… Within flooded levels connected to sewers connected to caves to crypts… These dungeons are massive and sprawling, and just when you thought you explored everything, after an hour you find one door that leads to the latter half of the dungeon. This is possible due to the games procedural generation, which does mean you’ll see the same layouts or rooms repeating eventually. This can make the game feel repetitive, and while its probably its most unique element, it’s also the main thing that’s working against it.

The same is said for the over-world, with the same house designs, merchants, NPC sprites, trees, shrubs, just in different orientations on different height maps.

Besides maybe the main quest-line, most quest in Daggerfall feel very random, where you’ll be sent off on a goose chase to find one item, and due to how ridiculous some of these dungeons are, I wouldn’t blame you if you gave up trying to find said item.


While the game might be more repetitive and have worse combat than the Elder Scrolls games that came after it, I do think Daggerfall has a lot to offer.

I found dungeons more interesting than the later games. While not all of them, as obviously games like Skyrim have beautiful hand-crafted dungeons with interesting self-contained lore and stories, but when it comes to a lot of the smaller caves and ruins in Skyrim, it’s hard to say they really compare to the ridiculous hour long puzzling labyrinths that Daggerfall has to offer. The game also doesn’t treat you like you’re simple, like Skyrim’s secret doors that are perfectly outlined with a lever or chain to pull right next to it. You often have to spend several minutes at a time analyzing the games 3D maps to try find out where you are or where to go.

A feature I’d love to see in later games is the wagon, a storage unit that allows you to bring more loot with you. Looting a dungeon until you’re full and then going to the dungeon entrance to load your wagon is satisfying.

Clothes and armour is way more expressive. You have underclothes, left arm, right arm, hands, legs, boots, chest, head… Maybe this would have been too annoying to deal with in later games, but the level of customization and expression through what you wear is a lot better because of it. The same can be said with the massive variety of weapons. You can truly be whatever you want to be in Daggerfall, while later installments reduced scope to focus on a more tailored experience.

Something that I personally like is when characters in RPGs feel specialized - feel unique. I like the DnD style of honing in on a certain play-style and mastering it. While a game like Skyrim lets you be the jack of all trades, master of all trades, Daggerfall lets you define primary, major, and minor skills as well as your stats, and permanent buffs and debuffs to become a certain type of character who is good at some things but bad at others. This will make every new character you make feel unique, and with how large the world is, and the procedural generation, I wouldn’t be surprised if your adventures are also unique.

Climbing is a mechanic that is unique to Daggerfall, where if you angle it just right and hold forward, and have enough climbing stats and strength, you can scale whole buildings. This is true for all flat cardinal direction facing surfaces, opening up a lot of possibility for role-play and grand escapes out of murky depths from a slaughterfish or onto roofs evading guards.

Gold has weight, with banks to offset this. You can get loans, buy a house, ship, all within the bank, adding to Daggerfall’s immersion. Same with being kicked out of towns for resting outside, forcing you to stay the night at a tavern. Bartering, entering a house or town, usually has flavor text attached, immersing you in a non-visual action. A lot of little additions like this make Daggerfall very immersive, and while newer games rely on voice acting, effects, and visual representations to immerse you, there is something to be said about systems immersions vs. visual immersion, something I’ve definitely felt with games like Diablo 2 vs. Diablo 4, with older games leaning into a more hardcore-tedious realism that makes them feel so unique comparatively to the polished modern game experience.

Lack of censorship. The gore, violence, and nudity present here is great. It’s something a lot of older games weren’t afraid to do, and it adds to the vibe and immersion.

Music and sound effects is also very good, though they do get quite repetitive and annoying at times. Something later games definitely improved on. Graphics are nice despite being pixelated-3D environments – it reminds me of Doom in a lot of ways.

And just to wrap it up within character limit: The ability to kill all characters without essential NPCs constantly reviving; ability to become a werewolf or vampire, with major deficits to this style of play; spellcrafting; crafting; a reputation system that changes based on your actions; guilds and factions you can align with. You can be whoever you want, do whatever you want, and create your own story within this sandbox RPG, and not in the superficial guard railed ways of Skyrim.


There is definitely a lot more here that someone with my limited experience won’t be able to cover, but that is also the beauty of this game. It feels like anything is possible with how large and dense it is. Just seeing how many variations of things I can buy fills me with all sorts of ideas. Though I’m not going to sit here and convince you that the game is all good. While older games like Diablo 2 or Doom are still fun mechanically, Daggerfall really isn’t. Combat isn’t good and it does feel rather repetitive. Unity carries the movement and combat beyond what was possible in the original, but even then it’s just spamming left click on sprites until they die. It lacks skill expression. While I feel like melee first-person combat has always lacked, it especially lacks when you and the enemies are not 3D characters physicalized within the environment you’re fighting in, with nothing more than attack as an option.

However, despite this, I still think that Daggerfall is an ambitious game for its time and worth a try. It has a lot to offer that newer installments lost along the way, and has its own “itch” so-to-speak, where you’ll randomly feel compelled to pick up this nearly 30 year old game.

With the Unity version and modding capabilities, the world is your oyster, and this world is the size of Great Britain.