Note: I wrote this last week before this was announced. As far as I can tell, this will be, for all intents and purposes, Dungeon Keeper 3. I figured I’d post it anyway.
Let me preface this with the confession that I have never actually completed Dungeon Keeper.
Then again, I’ve never had to.
There is no other game like Dungeon Keeper, except it’s sequel. Sure, you can see where bits of it came from; it has resource management like a Tycoon game and the building of your base and management of your army like an RTS. Where it differs from your average RTS is that you have no direct control over said army.
First, you have to attract them. Some creatures, like the lowly fly, just require your dungeon to exist. Ideally, they’d have a place to kip and something to eat, but they’re not too fussy. On the other end of the scale, you have the Mistress. She requires a Torture Chamber to be enticed into your lair, but to be kept happy, she has to spend some of her time torturing poor souls and part of it being tortured herself. Oh, and she has to be paid a high salary too.
A small interjection here – I was the tender age of 13 when I first played this game. Dungeon Keeper is, for lack of a better word, mature. To a point (there’s a lot of immature humour in there too). Between the BDSM queens, the disgusting bile demons, and good ol’ Horny himself, it was quite the wonder I came out the other side relatively uninfluenced. I do suspect, that if I were to go back and play it (supposing I had an old enough PC to run it), there would be a great deal of references that would shock me – “how could I ever have been allowed to play this?!”.
Like I said earlier, I never beat Dungeon Keeper. It got brutally hard later on, and all I wanted to do was get rich and train my dudes up to the max so I would have the ultimate dungeon, so I stayed on some of the earlier levels that had infinite gem supplies. (This is a trait that has haunted me my entire gaming career – “Must. Be. Perfect.” – I was the sad pathetic person who uprooted all the trees from the first level on Black and White to take to the next one.) So while I never saw the entire game, I don’t think I ever needed to – all the character and the joy and the humour is evident right from the very beginning; and what a character it is.
It saddens me every day that Dungeon Keeper 3 will never materialize. Out of every series on every platform that should have a sequel, this one is at the very top. There is nothing else like it in the entire world.
Irrelevant Ideas 