Dwarf Fortress review – a grand chronicle of inevitable disaster

PC; Bay 12/Kitfox
A graphical overhaul offers a gentler way of playing this vast, strange strategy game of staggering intricacy

The idea of reviewing Dwarf Fortress is inherently hilarious. You might as well apply a tape measure to a black hole. Playable in unfinished form for 16 years and counting, with no end to development in sight, Bay 12's deceptively lo-fi colony management simulation is as vast and alien as one of its own Forgotten Beasts, rising up through layers of terrain to obliterate the miners burrowing down for sapphires and platinum.

It's better understood through the stories whispered about individual, player-created fortresses, preserved in the amber chambers of online forums. The tragi-comedy of Boatmurdered - almost doomed when a butterfly flew into a door mechanism, granting access to bloodthirsty elephants. The horror of Glazedcoast, where the puppy pies are always extra-flakey. The humble history of Paddledclimax, my own creation, flooded when I tunnelled through a riverbed to escape a goblin siege. Tales from the trenches like these sell the game's fecundity more compellingly than any overview. Still, the release of a relatively accessible Steam edition, published by Kitfox, is as good an opportunity as any to assess the whole.