By Max Votey
Opinion Editor
and Sean Yates
News Editor
While the world has games like “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft,’ it is also important to remember that there are independently developed games that exist outside the money-harvesting machine that is the video game industry.
“Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress” by Bay 12 Games is a free, massively complex city-builder game set in a fantasy world. “Dwarf Fortress,” as it is known by players, is the brainchild of Tarn Adams, who is the sole programmer of Bay 12 Games.The game was originally released in 2006 but, during the last four years, Adams made software updates that turned the game into one of the most intricately programmed simulators in existence.
“Dwarf Fortress” begins by creating a world map for a player’s fortress to exist in. World building is an elaborate process in which terrain is formed and then ground down by erosion. Towns and cities spring up and each game creates a new history.
Thousands of years have passed in the game timeline by the time the small dwarven colony begins its fortress. Once map building is complete, the player chooses a location to start a colony and carve out a fortress.
To call “Dwarf Fortress” complex and difficult is an understatement. From the beginning, players face innumerable threats to their kingdoms and must control subjects with impeccable precision to survive. The learning curve of the game is absurdly steep and difficult to master.
Once players master the learning curve, however, the complexity and detail put into four years of regular updates become apparent, and the game becomes not only fun, but also supremely addicting.
Every detail has been accounted for, from the genetic traits of dwarfs and their offspring to the effects of different levels of heat on all the game’s substances. The beauty of the game is that it is so complex and open-ended that a player’s underground empire may contain anything imaginable.
But for every success story, there is an abysmal failure. Alawar Games, a little-known Russian developer, released the bizarrely-titled “Hamlet: or last game without Massively Mulitplayer Online Roleplaying Game Elements, Shaders and Product Placement” on April 8 for download online. “Hamlet” is a puzzle/adventure game set in the world of Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet,” but diverges from the original plot in that the player begins as a time traveler who changes the storyline by knocking Hamlet unconscious.
The game’s title, game style and obvious allusion to one of the greatest pieces of literature suggest a more thoughtful approach. It immediately fails at this, as the cartoonish graphics strip Shakespeare’s characters of all their subtlety and turn them into mute caricatures, which evoke as much emotion and contemplation as a Saturday morning cartoon.
“Hamlet” has a plot limited to the occasional paragraph explaining the setting for the next string of puzzles, and it leaves out dialogue entirely. This means the game disappointed viewers hoping for a meaningful experience, and must stand on its puzzles to give it value as a game.
But the puzzles rely more on not telling the players the rules than tests of logic to achieve their difficulty, and once the parameters are discovered (usually by trial and error) they become childishly simple, ruining any potential enjoyment.
Dwarf Fortress is available for free download from bay12games.com; “Hamlet” can be purchased for $9.95 from the game’s website, www.alawar.com/game/hamlet.
Leave a Reply