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This is in-group humor, not out-group mockery. Fortunately, Dungeons of Dredmor falls squarely on the side of “laughing with” rather than “laughing at”–you’re never made to feel like you’re some kind of idiot if you enjoy non-humorous games in this genre. It’s not a 100% silly game–there’s plenty of strait-laced magic swords and shields-but there’s a very Pythonesque sense of humor, and I don’t mean the programming language. Yes, Dungeons of Dredmor blends typical dungeon crawl tropes with a distinctly idiosyncratic style, reflected in the items you find, the monsters you fight, and the occasional flavor text that pops up here and there.
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Sadly, neither your impressive eyebrows nor your purported diseases will keep you from many, many, deaths in the Dungeons of Dredmor.In Dungeons of Dredmor you control a single adventurer who must make his or her way through a randomly generated dungeon, casting spells, swinging a sword, collecting items, avoiding traps, battling monsters, committing acts of “Heroic Vandalism”, gathering lutefisk to sacrifice to the lutefisk god, making grilled cheese sandwiches… wearing a traffic cone… wait, what was that about lutefisk? It wraps the standard gameplay in highly stylized, (perhaps too highly stylized) graphics, which are fun, memorable, and charming, and a wonderfully far cry from typical thud-and-blunder fantasy images. It follows most of the defining tropes of the genre, but also adds enough new twists that they’re worth commenting on.
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It makes for a system with great tactical depth and replayability: heading back into the dungeon with a different build can lead to an adventure that feels nothing like the last one - and that's before you start augmenting your character as you level up.Dungeons of Dredmor ($5, buy-only) is a graphical roguelike game, which is not quite as contradictory as it might seem. While you can read through all the little descriptions, for your first few play-throughs it's probably worth just pressing the random button and seeing what you end up with.Īlongside standards like boosts for each particular weapon class, you can use vampirism to change the way you regain health, opt in and out of various magic abilities - a typical example is Viking Wizardry - and improve your chances with burglary, critical hits, and handling fungus. Instead of character classes, you pick a starting load-out of seven skills from a collection of 34 (I counted). There are some lovely systems in place here.
#DUNGEONS OF DREDMOR FULL#
Side-quests, skill trees, ranged combat, traps and even a comprehensive crafting system: everything gets a look-in, while your character sheet is filled - perhaps too full - with dozens of tiny numbers to watch steadily ticking upwards as you ramble deeper into the game.īeing a roguelike, permadeath is the order of the day. That said, even seasoned travellers might find it wise to poke their way through the pithy little tutorial although Dredmor feels pretty compact to play, it's been fearlessly inclusive in its approach to mechanics. Gaslamp's game is all about whacking monsters, picking up treasure and inching your way from floor to floor as you seek to take down Lord Dredmor, who's done something terrible that I keep clicking past too quickly each time I start the game over. If you know your way around this bitterly lovable genre, you'll be instantly at home. One of the skills you can pick at the start of the game even pushes you into battle with a Fedora equipped, bringing back all the right memories of the Fate of Atlantis. This is NetHack with an early-nineties LucasArts presentation slapped on top: gangly, squelchily-animated characters, a lead who appears to be Guybrush Threepwood by way of Stan Sitwell, silly names for the potions and armour that includes traffic cones and starched shirts alongside gleaming chest plates and greaves (a standard fantasy shin-guard word that I really must look up one of these days). We've all got a few friends like that, right?ĭungeons of Dredmor even looks like an old friend. Losing yourself in a procedural maze of loot and monsters and incessant violence increasingly seems like spending the evening with an old friend - albeit an old friend that often backs you into corners and kills you without a moment's notice. Brutal, sneaky, and faintly inhuman, it's surprising how comforting a really good roguelike can be.