One of the games that I have an on-again, off-again relationship is Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

For those who haven't heard of it, Cataclysm is one of those ludicrously complex set-a-timer-or-you'll-lose-ten-hours roguelikes that still remembers what Rogue was and how to build on the genre.

What is Cataclysm?

Cataclysm takes a departure from the "traditional" roguelike formula in two ways:

1. It's post apocalyptic.
2. It's hyper-detailed.

Cataclysm isn't quite as complex as Dwarf Fortress, but the only reason for that is that its post-apocalyptic wasteland doesn't have quite the same focus. It's open source and development is rapid (if you are new to the game, get the launcher or the latest experimental branch; the game's still pretty stable, and you'll miss out on a lot of features if you don't), so it's grown a lot over the past couple years.

It's a game that has layers upon layers of emergent systems, but it's still a fairly newbie-friendly roguelike (in the sense that you'll still die a lot, but you can still get stuff done). Most of the complicated elements of play happen through a common context menu, and knowing that you can go into the inventory and select an item ("i" -> arrow keys to select -> enter) and use the smart activation menu ("a" -> arrow keys to select -> enter) to do 90% of complicated actions is usually enough to give a good starting point for novices.

Getting Started

Like Dwarf Fortress, a fairly comprehensive wiki exists for Cataclysm, though I've spent most of my time trying to explore the world without relying on it. There are guides to get into play, and a whole lot of other little bits and pieces that come together in interesting ways that make logical sense.

For instance, you can throw a grenade, and nothing will happen unless you pulled the pin first. This is a common newbie mistake (and has gotten me killed), but it can also be useful; grenades make decent throwing weapons in a pinch, and if you need a silent way to take down an enemy without the risk of close-quarters combat they can be okay for that.

There's all sorts of other things that work in incredibly complicated manners. Time and weather are simulated. On my current playthrough, everything's frozen all the time, so I have a hard time even getting drinking water because I only find ice. However, where things aren't frozen, they've begun to rot. Characters' needs are simulated, including basic happiness, and the injury system, though not as complex as Dwarf Fortress's, provides a lot of opportunities to wind up with debilitating injuries and sickness.

Vehicles are also in the game, as well as customized weapons. Almost all terrain can be destroyed, intentionally or inadvertently. Other clever interactions exist, like using a stethoscope to crack a safe, and there's a whole suit of crafting skills and more recipes than I care to count.

Also like Dwarf Fortress, the game is set up so that you make characters inside a randomly generated world created before the game even begins, so each life gives you a chance to contribute to something (like, say, a base or a rockin' death machine of a vehicle) that you can keep between lives. This is a single-player feature only, as far as I know. Some people may share world files, but Cataclysm doesn't support any multiplayer features.

Modding and Customization

Unlike Dwarf Fortress (at least the last time I played it), however, Cataclysm has native mod support that isn't a permanent overwrite method, with mods being configurable for individual worlds. As a result, you can tailor a lot of the elements of the game to your liking. Cataclysm by default is sort of a weird-apocalypse setup. You have a lot of elements that will be familiar to people well versed in apocalyptic fiction and B-grade science fiction, like Lovecraftian horrors, anomalies with artifacts, fungal manifestations, giant ants, radiation hazards, zombies, and more.

However, if you want to play a vanilla zombie apocalypse, all you have to do is activate a mod to remove the parts you don't like.

My most recent game has been a heavily-cheating (yay for Wizard mode) playthrough of Bright Nights, a near-future mod that adds in a lot of new features, trying my best to discover all the game's secrets with a relatively limited fear of death and almost no idea what I'm doing.

I've also been trying the tiles version and some soundpacks. Right now I'm using the CDDA-Soundpack (available through the launcher) and the MXotto+ tileset, which is really cool because it transforms Cataclysm from a traditional roguelike to something with more visual parsing for novices. I personally actually find it less useful than the original ASCII for making snap judgments, but you can see that the UI on the right shows me the original ASCII codes of enemies, which makes up for it. There's something like a dozen tilesets, including an isometric view (which works as one would expect, though it's very lo-fi 8-bit styled, which may not appeal to everyone).

Pictured: The power of the dark side Wizard Mode. Normal people do not have mid-800s HP.

To give a feel for how customizable the game is, I run in borderless windowed fullscreen mode, have it pass turns in real time, which adds to the challenge, and makes driving harder than one would think it should be.

Build and Explore

While I tend to explore and not to build, most of the other people I know who play Cataclysm do so with the intent of building a base. This is possible because Cataclysm has a tremendously deep crafting system that also permits building. It's similar to the roguelike UnReal World, but a little more freeform due to how Cataclysm is set up.

The various places I've explored include banks (while there aren't any survivors manning them to make for an ideal heist, you can pretend–though trying to loot ahead of a zombie horde is pretty much the same as a heist, right?), caves, giant honeycombs, office buildings, churches, cemeteries and mass graves (which come in various flavors), military bunkers and underground laboratories, FEMA camps, National Guard outposts, and more.

In the course of these adventures, I've seen characters develop into hardened combat cyborgs, terrifying (or terrified) mutants, and martial arts masters.

The sheer volume of content in Cataclysm puts many other games to shame, a testament to the flexibility and complexity of the roguelike genre. With open source development and a very active modding community, you can even find things like magic and dinosaurs added to Cataclysm in one form or another. There's a rudimentary quest system, though my experience with it is somewhat limited by my difficulties in keeping NPCs alive, and fellow survivors to find among the hordes of various types of monsters.

Why do I love Cataclysm?

So, in short, why do I love Cataclysm?

Simply put, it is the model for many things I aspire to as a designer. It's easy enough to be played by a marginally skilled player, but difficult enough to challenge a master (or so I've been told; I'm not nearly to that point with my limited exposure). Emergent systems drive almost all the action in the game. There's all sorts of stuff to explore and mess around with, and it's only grown more and more interesting every time I return to it after giving it a break to save my social life.