[Vespasian]

For me Dwarf Fortress demonstrates why good and accessible UI / UX is required and is an art of itself.

I repeatedly tried DF and despite having spent hours in similar games, this one eluded me to this day due to it's borderline unusable UI (for me at least) and art style.

I'll be happy to give it another go since the mechanics seem to be supremely refined.

[mabbo]

Dwarf fortress should be in the UX hall of fame as an example of how an incredible product can be made completely inaccessible to 95% of it's target audience purely through bad UX.

And I say that as one of the 5% who still played and loved it.

[forgetfulness]

Same, I was a big fan of character-based roguelikes (and at the time, in the late 2000s, that was the format of most roguelikes), and while I was unfazed at the time by the character-based interface, the inconsistent menus and micronamanagement tired me out of Dwarf Fortress.

It needed various external tools to alleviate the painstaking manual labor that went into managing the colony, like macro generators for floor plans and the memory hacking of Dwarf Therapist to have high-level management of the colony, and all that with wacky menus.