Retro Games Beaten

Dungeon Keeper is an RTS from 1997. The setting is world of where heroes venture into dungeons to kill monsters and make the land safe for everyone. But you don’t play as these heroes. You instead play as the monsters who want to kill all the heroes and make everybody miserable. Dungeon Keeper’s narrator speaks in a mustache-twirlingly evil voice, underscoring how this game delights in the diabolical.

I compare all RTS games to Warcraft II, since I esteem WCII as the genre’s gold standard. Unlike Warcraft II, which takes place in fields, mountains, woods, tundra, etc. Dungeon Keeper’s stages are all subterrainian. So, gameplay mechanics include tunneling through solid rock into new areas, reinforcing your tunnels against encroaching enemies, and shaping your tunnels to control traffic flow. You can also discover power ups if you dig in the right places. This feels somewhat like the secret rooms in Doom. But in Dungeon Keeper these hidden secrets can be so powerful as to completely tip the odds of an entire battle in your favor. Exploring every nook and cranny is not just for completionists.

In Warcraft II there’s no way to “airlift” troops into a given area. Your forces need to trek everywhere on foot, costing valuable time. But Dungeon Keeper lets you reach into the battlefield with the “hand of God”, plucking as many as 8 units at a time and dropping them to far-flung corners of the map. Of course, it isn’t possible to drop these troops directly into an enemy base and achieve checkmate right away because you’re only allowed to drop your units onto ground tiles which you have already claimed. You claim tiles by having menial laborers paint them your team color.

Dungeon Keeper also features traps; death tiles which dispense poison gas, lightning, or even boulders straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. One can combine these with tunnels built to selectively shape traffic and lead enemy legions into a Rube Goldberg machine of death. I had to employ tactics like this to prevail in the final two stages.

Troops in Dungeon Keeper are way more “needy” than those in Warcraft II. In WCII, all you have to do for your troops is pay an up front cost to train them, then they’re yours forever. There’s no recurring upkeep costs after that. But in Dungeon Keeper your monsters need unfettered access to gold for wages and chickens for rations. If they can’t freely reach these things, they’ll get angry, start misbehaving, then run away, leaving your army in shambles. They’ll take it upon themselves travel ridiculous distances for these things, too, irrespective of more pressing matters you want them to take care of. This incentivizes designing dungeons with all amenities as close as possible to keep your war machine well-oiled. The way I describe this makes it sound like a hassle, but it actually made Dungeon Keeper feel more alive, almost like an RTS with virtual pet simulation elements.

Dungeon Keeper is DIFFICULT. I started off with the intention of beating each stage in one go without saving until I cleared the stage. I had to break this resolution on the second to last stage. It was just so long that I had to save halfway through and pick it up later. Then on the final stage I just gave up completely and began save scumming. There was just no way I could beat it from start to finish without everything going haywire. It was way too involved, time intensive, and chaotic.

Dungeon Keeper asks a lot of those who set out to beat it. But it is challenging, made me think critically, has personality, and brings plenty of original ideas to the table. I also love its MS-DOS era aesthetic and sensibilities. This game gets my ringing endorsement.