Dungeons of Dredmor

Developer: Gaslamp Games
Release: 2011
Platform: PC (played), Mac, Linux
Genre: Roguelike

First time I played Dungeons of Dredmor the usually intruding Achievements started popping up at an alarming rate. But instead of being annoying they were the first hint on what makes DoD really amusing: a grim sense of humor. It started with Heroic Failure: “Die during the tutorial.”; right after that Normandy cracked me up: “Die on Floor 1; play a new character with the same skills... and die on Floor 1.”.

Such mood permeates the entire game, from the anti-hero ‘Eye-browed one’ to the monsters—and their names, lines, sprite animations—to the absurd items you can find/equip/craft.

Truth to be told managing those very items is the main hindrance to hold the game back: they pile up high above the limits of your inventory—or your crafting abilities, or some practical around-the-corner selling—to the point an inelegant fix had to be thrown in as the easy-to-stumble-upon Wizard Keys, which provides the player a portal to a… storeroom.

How my typical storeroom looks.

Still, some skills can take advantage of that baggage overweight in a more interesting fashion, be them a late bandage or not. In DoD skills are the practical tip of the developers’ poisonous tongue, making form overflow into content. Experimenting with different skills combinations (and their respective trees) lends the game a much meatier replay value and helps a lot on letting the player work around failure and the genre’s typical lack of clear intel.

The original build had 10 floors available for exploring—which could be even smaller/quicker with the handy tool called No Time To Grind, used for cramping the same amount of XP into smaller maps—but I was only able to beat it after the hundredth hour of play. Anyways that’s not necessarily a testimony of some brutal difficulty level or over-punishing permadeath—even if some stupid demises were ensued in that front; it’s more like an awkward environment being a catalyst to a more playful approach where failing can be as fulfilling as winning.