DUNGEONS OF DREAMOR
PC
“Just one more game wouldn’t hurt, would it?” pleads the “quit” screen of Dungeons Of Dredmor. The silly gamer humour is a reminder of exactly why I like “indie” games, not to mention a highly effective way of persuading me to plunge for yet more hours into a game where the perverse appeal is the fact that you always lose in the end.
It’s only a matter of time before my other half makes the connection between the tinny synthesizer soundtrack playing from my headphones and the fact that my cooking has been even more perfunctory than usual. Ever since I downloaded Dredmor last week, I might as well have been superglued to my laptop.
Dredmor was a huge surprise - it’s £3.49 (about R40), not bad for a game that absorbs entire weekends with contemptuous ease. The graphics are crude: hand-drawn, blocky cartoons. But the game’s eccentric style - the monsters emit speech bubbles saying “I hate you so much” or “You festering poltroon” as they close in - conspires to create a geeky charm that beats most multi-million-pound blockbusters hands down.
With about 85 percent of earnings going direct to the creators of “indie” titles such as Dredmor, PC download services like Steam (store.steam powered.com) are hopping with quirky, home-made alternatives to the £50 blockbusters of mainstream gaming. And they usually cost less than £5 apiece.
Browsing the “indie” section on Steam is like visiting a second-hand book shop: it’s by no means guaranteed that what you take home will be great, or even good, but there are enough gems to make browsing a pleasure.
Dredmor, I should make clear, is an acquired taste. This is a turn-by-turn game, like chess, and it’s utterly merciless. There are no extra lives: death is permanent. Even on its easiest difficulty setting, Elves Just Wanna Have Fun, you can still be killed within a few steps of the dungeon entrance.
I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve died, lured back each time by the hope that I’ll survive a little bit further. Perhaps once I stop giggling at the doom-laden intro screen - “Unfortunately, this hero is YOU!” - I can move on and play something else. - The Mail on Sunday