Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a rather popular roguelike, quite possibly one of the best, and now it's available on Steam.
This is an official release from the developers too, with the Steam release being handled by one of the developers most involved with maintaining it. Although it's free and open source, the Steam release is paid to hopefully keep development on it going even further.
Features:
- Complex and diverse enemies from ever-mutating legions of the undead, to giant insects, to existential horrors from between worlds.
- Unparalleled vehicle building and customization system.
- Immersive, exquisitely detailed crafting system covering everything from smithing and soldering to keeping your sourdough starter fed.
- Build almost anything you can imagine, from a wattle-and-daub shelter in the woods to a tower of reinforced concrete and living alien resin.
- Populate your base with NPC allies that help you craft and keep you company.
- Explore one of the most detailed and immersive skill and proficiency systems in any RPG.
- Ever expanding content, with new major updates released regularly.
- Challenging, rewarding game balance that forces you to evaluate every step, or pay the price. You'll soon see why most of the world's population is dead!
Have you played it? What do you think to it? I know plenty of people who love it and it's in the top 30 survival game list on RPS even. Hopefully the Steam release will make it more accessible than ever, and bring a new audience to it, it's a game that deserves to be played — if the style is your cup of tea. We even had a contributed article a while ago talking about it.
Find it on Steam to support development, or via the website as before.
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7 comments
Cataclysm: DDA is such a marvellously great game.
And at least to me it was surprisingly easy to get into - of course, it is ridiculously detailed and some stuff (like the actual viability as a weapon of nearly every single item from a napkin to a kitchen knife) just makes you laugh at that.
But other stuff is surprisingly nice and full of QoL features - like automatically using nearby items in crafting; many more visually "polished" games still require you to have every single item in your very pants to start crafting.
... and then come the mods adding in magic, scifi, etc.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 11 April 2023 at 3:16 pm UTC
And at least to me it was surprisingly easy to get into - of course, it is ridiculously detailed and some stuff (like the actual viability as a weapon of nearly every single item from a napkin to a kitchen knife) just makes you laugh at that.
But other stuff is surprisingly nice and full of QoL features - like automatically using nearby items in crafting; many more visually "polished" games still require you to have every single item in your very pants to start crafting.
... and then come the mods adding in magic, scifi, etc.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 11 April 2023 at 3:16 pm UTC
1 Likes, Who?
I played it first when it was a hidden weird stuff from Whales, yeaaaaaars ago.
Since then, i played it i think at least a few times every year with the unstable branch, and it’s so full of everything sometime you may think it’s too much, but it’s simply not too much, only too full of possibilities..
Playing even great games like Project Zomboids now is feeling... empty ? A few months ago, i was walking around in Zomboid, trying to find again the greatness i felt with the first alpha i played years ago (with the wife dying upstairs and the bandit coming), and i could NOT grab a rock or a stick on the ground, haaaaaaaa ! Heresy !!!
However, i don’t like the mony from the Steam version is going into the pocket on one guy. Sure he is working a lot, and taking on its shoulders the Steam weight, but CDDA is a "open large team" project, and taking money from it, for me, it feels off. At the same time, i don’t see how any system could reward fairly all the people doing "something" for CDDA to be alive.
Last edited by Tchey on 11 April 2023 at 3:52 pm UTC
Since then, i played it i think at least a few times every year with the unstable branch, and it’s so full of everything sometime you may think it’s too much, but it’s simply not too much, only too full of possibilities..
Playing even great games like Project Zomboids now is feeling... empty ? A few months ago, i was walking around in Zomboid, trying to find again the greatness i felt with the first alpha i played years ago (with the wife dying upstairs and the bandit coming), and i could NOT grab a rock or a stick on the ground, haaaaaaaa ! Heresy !!!
However, i don’t like the mony from the Steam version is going into the pocket on one guy. Sure he is working a lot, and taking on its shoulders the Steam weight, but CDDA is a "open large team" project, and taking money from it, for me, it feels off. At the same time, i don’t see how any system could reward fairly all the people doing "something" for CDDA to be alive.
Last edited by Tchey on 11 April 2023 at 3:52 pm UTC
0 Likes
mr-victory Apr 11, 2023
The price is a bit high for "supporting the developer" IMO.
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I tried to play this game once, I was quickly overwhelmed by its complexity. 
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Quoting: mr-victoryThe price is a bit high for "supporting the developer" IMO.Dwarf Fortress costs even more.
And both of them could cost three times as much and would still be worth it as they'd still blow other games out of the water at that price point.
When you buy a game, you always (well, usually, anyway...) "support the developer".
All that said, I hope they'll add workshop support, and that all the usual mods continue to work with this version and it won't cause some weird divide into two incompatible versions.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 11 April 2023 at 7:55 pm UTC
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Sounds like it's a really great game. Impressive how it manages to look incredibly boring, though. There's something about the colour scheme and extreme rectangularity of everything that is yelling at me "Pay no attention to the gameplay! This is boooooring!"
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Quoting: TheSHEEEPQuoting: mr-victoryThe price is a bit high for "supporting the developer" IMO.Dwarf Fortress costs even more.
And both of them could cost three times as much and would still be worth it as they'd still blow other games out of the water at that price point.
When you buy a game, you always (well, usually, anyway...) "support the developer".
All that said, I hope they'll add workshop support, and that all the usual mods continue to work with this version and it won't cause some weird divide into two incompatible versions.
I agree, I spent to much time in games like Dwarf Fortress and CDDA that it's worth every penny. I played even more Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and would pay even more for that but they don't have a Steam release, yet. :D
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