I am, not to put too fine a point on it, a gigantic neckbeard. I'm the kind of neckbeard who appreciates Warhammer 40,000 but doesn't play it because I like miniatures wargames with even more granular rules. I'm the kind of neckbeard who runs a Vampire: the Masquerade tabletop Chronicle set in the Albigensian Crusades, because I enjoy, for fun, worldbuilding vampire alt-history onto a lesser-known historical conflict (the first mass usage of trebuchets in Europe, natch). I'm the kind of neckbeard who calls Legend of the Galactic Heroes, an unbelievably dry 110-episode OVA from 1988 about the macro-level politics of two warring interstellar empires, my favorite anime.

Twenty years ago, I attempted to play Dwarf Fortress, ran headfirst into a wall made of ASCII and pain, and realized that I was not a neckbeard. I was a little lost normie, stumbling into the deep waters where the true neckbeards play. I could sit by the sidelines and listen, rapt with awe, to its players' stories of the densest fantasy simulator ever created, but I couldn't play it, because I could not cross that User Interface rubicon of "What if we took 20 "King of Dragon Pass"-styled text-adventure games and welded them all together and made them all play at the same time in a deafening schizophrenic chorus?" This was a game for the Alpha Neckbeards, the true kings of the no-lives, those with no respect for their own time nor anything else (including, presumably, hygiene). I was humbled and utterly emasculated.

I had a few abortive dabbles 15, 10, 5 years ago with tilesets and visualizers, but I could never quite mesh with Dwarf Fortress. While I did, I derived great joy from its descendants: Minecraft, which also procedurally-generates infinite subterrannean worlds. Crusader Kings, which is equally granular about simulating the inner lives of its titular nobles. Banished, which also models the interconnected economies of dozens of frontier businesses and families. My favorite up to this point was Oxygen Not Included, which borrows Dwarf Fortress' vicious "losing is fun" difficulty, extremely tenuous environmental/biome rule balance, and erratic and unreliable lemming-esque workers.

That is, until Bay 12 slapped a fresh coat of paint on Dwarf Fortress, the father of the genre. It's not ergonomic; dear lord, it's not ergonomic. It has been improved inasmuch as "has a user interface, any user interface at all" qualifies as "an improvement." You still need to manually, singularly, exhaustively control every build, every dig, every room designation, every assignment, in an infinitely-dense ouroboros of pursuing optimization and automation that never happens because your little dwarves are completely nuts and prefer to live their own private lives.

But merely having a proper UI was the barrier to entry that I needed removed to play, and now I've been leaving Dwarf Fortress on and running on my laptop for the last 11 days, constantly checking back in. It's swallowed me like games haven't swallowed me since I was a teenager.

In that time, I've:

- Lost 8 fortresses (3 to the same army of zombies that just kept cleaning out the same ruins until I got the hint to stop living there)

- Built a 200-dwarf metropolis that was exterminated to the last, because there was a snail and it could fly and shoot poison, and the shell was too hard to pierce with crossbows and it flew above my dwarves' heads so they couldn't hit it with axes, and I just had to watch as it slooooowly flew around the city poisoning everyone

- Built another 200-dwarf metropolis in a region filled with hostile elves and fish people and defended myself on two fronts while my fat ugly elderly pacifist mayor keeps roaming the walls chewing out the guards because she "hates military"

- Had a craftsdwarf go insane and become a serial murderer, then his son immortalized him by carving his screaming face on a gear, and I built that gear into my fort's gate mechanism so the first thing everyone sees when they enter my fort is a dwarven serial killer

- Let a pack of feral dogs live scavenging on my garbage level because losing the occasional dwarf garbageman to them was a small price to pay for the hilarious surprise of 20 rabid dogs tearing apart the fish people invaders coming from below

- Had the herbalist's guild become so powerful it comprised fully half of my fortress, absorbing my military and making it into a military-industrial-berrypicking complex

- Had a polyamorous adventurer come to my fortress to fight monsters and instead spend his entire tenure as a "monster hunter" roaming the halls sleeping with dwarves like some kind of beard-fetishist sex tourist

- Had my two best bone doctors get in a fistfight over an argument during a surgery and break each other's bones and there were no bone doctors left to set the bones so they died in a broken heap on the hospital floor

- Had all of my YouTube advertisements replaced with hentai, which I am fairly convinced was the algorithm's rational response to seeing me become the kind of loser who plays Dwarf Fortress.

20 years of development, 20/10 game. If you have the tolerance for these kinds of infinitely-granular simulators, you owe it to yourself to play this legendary fever dream of a title.