After only a few more tries, and a few more dead adventurers, I finally started to figure it out, and was soon marching through the halls, slaying diggles left and right (little squeaky bastards). Make no mistake, Dredmor is not a “simple” roguelike. Unlike many roguelikes though – and besides the aforementioned clickable interface – it boasts beautiful, hand-drawn graphics: your character stomping around not unlike a Mr. Threepwood, spells causing bursts of smoke and flame, creatures of all sizes, shapes, and colors shambling towards you. The effort put into the art of the game is astonishing, and one can tell that the project is truly a love-child of its creators.
Another area in which the game provides more than the standard roguelike experience is in its humor. With every item and creature having an informative mouse-over entry, there is a good amount of text, and the developers took it upon themselves to make it worth your time to read it, if not only to inform you, but to get a good laugh or two as well from a bad pun or a witty, self-aware comment or a sudden, unexpected Mortal Kombat-style voice-over. Even the general atmosphere of the game blew my mind in its wackiness: wait, there is a god-shrine to the Lutefisk God?! And you’ll know you need better armor when you’re either constantly gobbling down one of the game’s 10 varieties of life-giving cheese or using a bucket or a safety-cone as a helmet.
