As others have said DF is very different than Nethack. Although it is often put in the roguelike category for a variety of reasons, I think of it more as a sto

As others have said DF is very different than Nethack. Although it is often put in the roguelike category for a variety of reasons, I think of it more as a story generator/doll house than as a game like Nethack. It basically allows you to create a world and then live in that world. You can play in adventure mode, which is somewhat like most roguelikes or you can play in fortress mode which allows you to experience the lives of a group of dwarves as they build a fortress. There is no purpose to the game, so it's basically all up to your imagination. You do whatever you want with no restrictions, but also no real added motivation. The main thing about DF is that it is full of bugs and/or strange coding artefacts. You need to have a kind of hacker mentality to play it because it's a massive puzzle to figure out how to do anything. It's surprisingly rewarding because you often think, "I wonder if X is possible" and after you hack away for a while you discover that it is. Or after you hack away for a while you discover that something even more wonderful is hiding away in there, the product of some weird unplanned generative properties of the massive game engine. For me, it's really this latter thing that is most compelling about the game. In Nethack it's said that the developers thought of everything. In DF it's more like the game engine has so much complexity that it has taken on a life of its own. I doubt there is any game that has the depth that DF has, but you have to tease out that depth. I think the game is well worth playing, though whether or not you will like it depends on a number of things. It is a massive time sink and requires endless fiddling, planning, and grinding. Sometimes it feels like a chore to play. But it is also massively rewarding. It depends a lot on the person.