Enlarge / There is something so wonderfully obscene about having a town with hundreds of people living their lives, running into conflict, hoping for better, and your omnipotent self is stuck on which bookcase best fits this living room corner. (credit: YesBox)

Naming a game must be incredibly hard. How many more Dark Fallen Journeys and Noun: Verb of the Noun games can fit into the market? And yet certain games just appear with a near-perfect, properly descriptive label.

Metropolis 1998 is just such a game, telling you what you'll be doing, how it will look and feel, and what era it harkens back to. You can verify this with its "pre-alpha" demo on Steam and Itch.io. There's plenty more to come, but what is already in place is impressive. And it's simply pleasant to play, especially if you're the type who wants to make something entirely yours. Not just "put the park inside the commercial district," but The Sims-style "choose which wood color for the dining room table in a living room you framed up yourself."

You start out in a big field with no features (yet) and the sounds of birds chirping. Once you lay down a road, you can add things at a few different levels. You can, SimCity-style, simply plot out colored zones and let the people figure it out themselves. You can add pre-made buildings individually. Or you can really get in there, spacing out individual rooms, choosing the doors and windows and objects inside, and realizing how hard it is to shape multi-floor houses so the roof doesn't look grotesque. You can save the filled-out house for later reuse or just hold on to its core aspects as a blueprint.

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From Minecraft and Terraria to Rimworld and Oxygen Not Included, the creative freedom offered by the best sandbox games is tough to match. While there’s plenty of big names to choose from, perhaps the most important among them is Dwarf Fortress. Its deep, intricate simulation has been spoken about in hushed, reverent tones, and now a big Steam sale lets you snag its updated and polished version, complete with the newly overhauled roguelike adventure game mode, at its lowest price yet.

Dwarf Fortress - the hugely influential, dizzyingly expansive colony sim that's been in development for over 20 years - has just released its roguelike Adventure Mode over on Steam, albeit initially in public beta form.

Adventure Mode gives players an alternative way of exploring Dwarf Fortress' ludicrously in-depth, procedurally generated worlds - specifically in the form of a roguelike RPG, complete with procedural quests, NPCs, and turn-based battles.

It's a component of Dwarf Fortress that's been in the free ASCII version for years, but when the game made the jump to Steam in 2022 - as a paid release, complete with sprite-based visuals, a mouse-driven UI, and Steam Workshop compatibility - Adventure Mode wasn't included, although developer siblings Zach and Tarn Adams were clear it would eventually arrive.

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Dwarf Fortress - the hugely influential, dizzyingly expansive colony sim that's been in development for over 20 years - has just released its roguelike Adventure Mode over on Steam, albeit initially in public beta form.

Adventure Mode gives players an alternative way of exploring Dwarf Fortress' ludicrously in-depth, procedurally generated worlds - specifically in the form of a roguelike RPG, complete with procedural quests, NPCs, and turn-based battles.

It's a component of Dwarf Fortress that's been in the free ASCII version for years, but when the game made the jump to Steam in 2022 - as a paid release, complete with sprite-based visuals, a mouse-driven UI, and Steam Workshop compatibility - Adventure Mode wasn't included, although developer siblings Zach and Tarn Adams were clear it would eventually arrive.

Read more