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Times Completed: I own Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper: Gold Edition, Dungeon Keeper 2 and Black and White – and I’ve never finished any of them. Once it became an RTS my 12 year old self would lose interest and go back to pouring over the Dungeon Keeper strategy guide for snippet of game lore. There was a clear middleground for each of them, where you could experiment with the game as a sandbox and create elaborate boulder traps or only hire the worst doctors, but eventually I always reached the point where finding the right strategy was the most important part of the game. When I sat down to play some Dungeon Keeper I wasn’t interested in playing an RTS, I wanted to exist in that beautifully realised world of Knights of the Realm, Bile Demons the levelmap that slowly corrupted more and more as I spread my pestilence.įor me, the fascination I had with those worlds fell apart the further into the game I went and the harder the game became. The games hung together with their own twisted, crazed consistencies and that’s certainly what I fell in love with.

The Bullfrog games each manifested their setting differently, making you either feel like some literal overlord with a huge hand you could slap your imps with or like a crazy inventor who made increasingly dangerous rollercoasters. It was the continued chance to exist in the strange world of Horned Reapers and Dark Mistresses, of Bloaty Head and Invisibility Disease. Yes, there was a lot of little fun bits added in, like riding the rollercoasters in Theme Park and shooting rats in Theme Hospital, which gave the game that irreverent and very English sense of humour – but that wasn’t what kept you playing. In Theme Hospital you’d actually feel like an NHS administrator. Playing Dungeon Keeper, you could actually feel like a bad guy. What those games did have that other games didn’t though was a proper sense of setting and character. The games were definitely fun, but there were lots of much better balanced RTS games available even back then. None of them are particularly well-balanced games and, even when I used cheats to get unlimited everything, I always had problems finishing Theme Hospital. It’s obvious when you look at the most successful games they made – Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper.