As a fan of pretty well all things roguelike, I’ve seen quite a number of genres and subgenres work to spice up traditional play by adding those elements. In the case of dotAGE, you have a mix of a city builder and management sim sitting at the base, with you trying to help a small group of Pips who’ve decided to follow an old prophet to try to build a community and survive. What’s a bit nasty is that the roguelike element in this case is tied to an upcoming and nigh-unavoidable apocalypse, with the town’s old man popping in periodically to warn of a coming catastrophe, which you’ll then try to do your best to avoid, or at least diminish.

Where the challenge comes in, especially until you’ve played a few games and have the experience and a few run-spanning upgrades to help, is in how wildly unpredictable your crisis of the moment may be. You could be lucky that it happens to require resources you’re already pretty flush with, or it could be a complete detour that you simply won’t be able to properly prepare for… and thus the dangling dagger of the RNG gods tends to play quite a role in things especially early on, perhaps more often than some may prefer.

Your weapons to combat all of these upheavals will be effective resource management, getting started by establishing your core town, assigning your workers to productive tasks, and slowly building up your community. As is always the case, a balance of building up productivity, versus growing your population, versus developing science for new structures and upgrades needs to be found. Moving too far with one, without backfilling the others at the right times will tend to lead to disaster, especially when new miseries are heaped upon you by chance. It may trend towards being a bit too unwieldy and chaotic for the average gamer, but for people who like to try to manage an unpredictable challenge it does stand out in the space.