I remember playing the demo as a kid, when this just coming out, and being very excited about getting the full game for my birthday; alas, my parents could not find a copy anywhere. As it turns out, it might have been a blessing in disguise. Diggles has an admittedly interesting premise. Years before Dwarf Fortress, it tasks you with creating a colony of dwarves (or gnomes, depending on translations), meet their needs and fight against other denizens of the deep; Your goal is to descend in the underworld on a quest from Odin to defeat the mythical wolf Fenris. As you delve deeper, you discover new technologies and new resources advancing from the stone age to a steampunk industrial world. On paper, it could be a great and quite unique colony builder game, predating many classics of the genere. In practice, it's a soul-crushingly boring slog as your dwarves - held back by atrocious AI and general incompetence, will ignore obvious tasks in favour of traveling all the way across the map for a low-priority delivery; they will starve because they fail to realize that they should eat food when hungry; they will change profession back and forth accomplishing nothing for days. Even when you can wrangle your Diggles into doing something useful, tasks often take forever, as even the most efficiently-built mountain home will force you to ferry resources across long distances just to allow a crafter to sloooowly do their job. Bottom line, even though the game technically has complex mechanics (the unique experience system, the work turn assignments, the tech progression, the various unique setpieces found in each level) this is a BORING game. Yes, some mods exist to improve the quality of life somewhat, and while you can (well, must) use console commands to fix a few of its problems, there's no escaping how long and dull this game is. It might have been revolutionary in its day, instead it became a cautionary tale of how bad pacing can ruin an otherwise good game.
A decent city builder, with simple rules whch the game explains very well. Beyond that, there's not much to it. If you're looking for a game that's relaxing and does not challenge you in any way, you might give it a try but a lot of times the game seems to just play itself. Craftsmen will just gather resources from all over the map, requiring no imput on your part to designate zones or even build cleverly to allow for better supply routes; building pyraminds and other monuments is a hands-off experience as most of the process is automated. Even warfare barely requires your involvement. It's clear that this is trying to be a successor to Pharaoh, but where its predecessor was brutally (and often unfairly) difficult, Children of the Nile barely requires any imput from you to create a functioning city. Is it bad? Not really. It works fine and allows for quite a lot of freedom in construction, but the lack of challenge often makes it so uninteresting; in many missions you'll just be going through the motions until the scenario solves itself.
There's not much to add beyond what has already been said; a game that can keep the tension high without cheap jumpscares would already have been a great accomplishment, but Darkwood goes above and beyond. Not only does it have impeccable gameplay with a mix of resource management and frantic, desperate combat but it also delivers a story and setting that inspire a dark, dismal fairytale feel, and gives you barely enough breadcrumbs to understand what's going on without resorting to pointless exposition. Your actions matter, but not always in the way you'd expect; characters are odd and otherworldy while being strangely relatable. And the feeling of defending your cabin from whatever goes bump in the night by any means necessary - from guns, to molotovs, to broken glass to just blocking a doorway with a wardrobe - is scarier and more tense than virtually every other horror game ever published.
The developers have completely given up on fixing the software, resulting in a game that crashes within minutes or sometimes seconds of starting. From what i have seen, it could have been a decent game but even with fully updated drivers and every possible workaround, the game simply does not work. Don't waste your time with this broken game; it's very likely that you won't be able to experience whatever postive it may add because it will crash before you can see it.
