Dungeons of Dredmor

The Indie Revolution in gaming is upon us.  What does that mean for you, the aspiring game developer?  Well, for you it means that you can grab your kid brother and cobble up something on your parent's Commodore 64, add some chiptunes and, voila!  You have your next indie sensation.  Send your gold copy to Gabe Newell (be sure to wrap it in cheese so he takes interest) and it'll be on Steam within 24 hours, probably part of another Humble Indie Bundle for $19.99.

Dungeons of Dredmor works on the basic assumption that you have no idea what Nethack is, and it's a pretty good assumption as the only people who do are dangerously obsessive Autistics who moderate the Nethack wiki.  This game flew across my radar when it appeared in PC Gamer's 100 Best Games of All Time list (which, shockingly, does not feature Deus Ex as its number 1 game any longer.  Now it's Portal.  More cheese, Gabe?)

Dredmor is pretty much Nethack lite.  However, that might be an unfair statement.  While Nethack has had a lot of work put into it over the years, making it possibly one of the most complex and difficult RPG's ever made, it has had absolutely no work done to it to make it remotely palatable to the average human being.  ASCII characters making up the visuals combined with a stark cliff face of a learning curve do not pull in the customers as well as graphics and sound.  I'm looking at you too, Dwarf Fortress.

So Gaslamp Games made an easier-to-play Nethack with Super Nintendo graphics and decent sound effects and music.  Chiptunes, of course.  That's the Indie hallmark, everyone loves chiptunes.  Retro is the candy that gaming nerds crave.

Nethack's staples still survive:  Hardcore game mode, where there are no loading saved games and character death is final.  Ramped-up difficulty that will have you slaying tiny blobs of goo one level and horrendous mind-raping abominations from Below the next.  You drink from fountains and they either make you feel good or poison you.  Your can choose for your character to be laughably inept to deal with the challenge of defeating a dungeon's worth of monsters, just for fun.

However, you won't see truly random happenstances like putting on a ring that's cursed, which you can't take off, which makes you float around and unable to go downstairs until you exit the dungeon the way you came.  You won't be able to kill a gnome and use your tinning kit to make canned gnome to eat later.  You won't drink a potion that turns you into a tarantula.

Dredmor's graphics and crafting system are notably good and fun to use.  The character creation system is hilarious.  You choose 8 aspects to throw together in a mishmash and see what kind of adventurer you create.  You can have an armor-using mathematician magician who uses blood magic and crossbows, who specializes in mushroom magic to summon killer fungus to defeat his enemies.  And he's a sparkly Twilight vampire as well.

The game has a lot of referential and sardonic humor, which helps make it a fun little diversion.  If you're a neckbearded hipster then you'll love this game's many references, which are the nerd's lifeblood.

What really shows this game's Indie origins are the fact that it crashes every 15 minutes and gets old really, really fast.  Having a game that centers around you having a hardcore, un-revivable character who you play for a couple hours until he or she becomes really cool, then gets deleted when the game crashes, is not a hallmark of a professionally-made product.  Gaslamp Games then proceeds to not give a fuck, instead making a half-assed sequel with more references and chiptunes instead of patching the original game.

Thanks, but no thanks.  There's nothing I Dredmor than an unfinished product.