Combine the endless permutations of all the above options with the tonnes and tonnes of items, places, and monsters on the map, and you could be playing DDA for the rest of your life. What perhaps isn't as clear is just how much variety all these options give you. You'll have a fair idea what you're starting out with even on your first game, and it's easy to set things up more or less however you like. If you've played your share of traditional roguelikes or even just a lot of RPGs, this will all sound fairly familiar in principle, and even if not, it's an intuitive system with decent help text. You can also spend or gain points by choosing a background or scenario that determines where and in what condition you'll start out. This is done by distributing points across four basic statistics, skills like Melee, Cooking, and Electronics, and/or investing in traits giving unique twists on your character's behaviour or abilities. Much like Minecraft, more land is created as you travel, but first you'll need to create a character. Some parameters can be changed, most notably the size of and distance between cities, but each is broadly similar save for the local details. Each is procedurally generated, and based on the climate and urban development of New England.

It is an enormous thing, densely packed with options, challenges, and an immense volume of stuff. That's a tricky problem to get round here, because in this analogy, Cataclysm DDA is less of a dish and more of a theme restaurant. Rather than convey the delicious flavour of the dish, you might give an impression of a hideous gloopy mess of vegetables, fish, and uncooked pasta. There's a danger when describing an expansive game that you'll make it sound like a mere checklist of parts. Let me tell you about my latest character, a 12-year-old girl who is surviving the apocalypse by jetting around on rollerblades, pelting monsters with a sling, and studying mechanics so she can hotwire an electric van and run over someone who stole her bag of precious salt. So I am actively irritated that Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead an ASCII zombie survival roguelike, has taken over my life. Plus, somehow in just a few years we've gone from having next to no survival games to having so many of the godforsaken things that you can barely move without tripping over a hunger bar.ДЄll this and the keyboard-heavy ASCII affectation would, you'd think, make for my nightmare game. I don't like roguelikes and, like all real people, I was sick of zombies years ago.

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