Our 4Xperiences With KeeperRL

4 Things You Should Know About KeeperRL (Plus a Bonus!)

Hello, eXplorminate fans. My name is Vivisector9999, and you may have seen me comment occasionally on articles here. Today, I’ve been invited to speak to you about KeeperRL, a quirky strategy/roguelike hybrid game that is often described as “Dungeon Keeper meets Dwarf Fortress“.

That does sound like a winning combination, particularly if it manages to be more modern and complex than Dungeon Keeper, yet less obtuse and unfriendly than Dwarf Fortress. (Don’t even argue. We can all agree that for its virtues, Dwarf Fortress demands a particular investment from the player.)

First, though, a little history. KeeperRL has been in development for the better part of a decade now, entering Early Access on Steam in 2015. Before that, it first appeared in an April 2014 IndieGoGo campaign that promised a 1.0 release for… December 2014.

Obviously, things didn’t go entirely to plan, but the developer never gave up on this game, carrying it from April 2014’s Alpha7 version (which was already playable) to February 2023’s Alpha36, adding and tweaking and optimizing all the while. That’s almost half a Dwarf Fortress right there!

So did all those extra years pay off? Is this a labor of love we can respect? Does this title indeed combine aspects of two beloved games into a proverbial peanut butter cup of dungeon sim goodness? Most importantly, if you were to buy KeeperRL today, would it not immediately end up rotting in your gaming backlog?

I’ve spent roughly 25 hours playing KeeperRL‘s Alpha36 build, the last version of the game we’ll see before its 1.0 release in Q1 2024 (for real this time), and here are my attempts to answer those questions.

#1: It Actually *is* Dungeon Keeper Meets Dwarf Fortress

In KeeperRL, you take on the role of a Keeper, who can be a variety of “evil overlord” types. The Alpha36 build supports wizards, black knights, white knights, necromancers, gnomes, and dwarves.

Your choice, naturally, influences what kind of minions you will be able to recruit. A wizard or a black knight will have imps, goblins, vampires, demons, beasts, and other horrors to carry out their brutal campaigns, while a white knight will have peasants, archers, mages, knights, angels, and other forces of “light” – and their campaigns will be no less genocidal.

Whatever kind of Keeper you are, your ultimate goal is to crush the four “main” adversaries on your randomly-generated world map or die trying.

That’s right, the only victory type here is domination, and the only “science” Keepers can learn is black magic, alchemy, mutation, demonic rituals, trapmaking, exotic metalworking, and maybe a little animal husbandry. So you can take all your touchy-feely culture, tech, religion, and diplomacy wins and go sacrifice them on the altar of the Ruinous Powers.

Of course, as powerful as a Keeper is (and yes, your Keeper is an individual unit who can fight in battles), it’s still dangerous to go alone.

Like every evil overlord before you, you’re expected to build your own dungeon and fill it with enough monsters and traps to starkly annihilate any party of would-be heroes who dares to take a shot at you.

So we have the Dungeon Keeper part, with you directing your starting squad of imps to dig out rooms and collect whatever you find, while building the objects you need to support the minions you want immigrating into your dungeon. If you want an army of Vampire Warriors, for example, you better make sure you have enough coffins for them, and you’re going to need demon shrines to lure a promiscuous Succubus into your ranks.

Before we get too excited about that last thing, though, I do have to call out the imps as a great feature. Like in Dungeon Keeper, they’re a distinct class of servant from all other minions. They can’t fight worth a damn, but they don’t count against your dungeon’s Population Limit, and they handle all the gathering, tunneling, and construction, leaving your real monsters free to fight, craft, and explore. I would have killed to have these guys in Rimworld, where your few colonists just have to do everything themselves.

No, the only bad thing about the imps is that unlike Dungeon Keeper, you can’t cursor-slap them to make them squeal and work harder.

Thankfully, the actual base-building is a bit more involved than DK’s “Yo, build a 5 x 6 Torture Chamber here” deal. KeeperRL has more of the DIY approach of Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, with you populating spaces with specific furniture, workshops, traps, and more.

Want to put your adamantine training dummy next to the torture tables in your prison? No problem, your hapless captives can watch your Werewolf grind her melee skill while your minions are working them over. (My first prison had the Werewolf’s beast cage in one corner, too.)

Want to squander all your granite to put boulder traps in every corridor as an extra “Take that!” for invaders? Now you’re thinking like a Keeper!

Want to make your dungeon’s top floor just one colossal room with all the beds, training objects, workshops, statues, altars, and traps haphazardly scattered everywhere? Wow, that actually sounds really awkward, but you’re the Keeper.

As you’re getting comfortable in your hole, though, remember that making an epic dungeon is only half a Keeper’s job.

The other thing evil overlords do is descend upon their enemies with hordes of ravening monsters, leaving only blood and ashes in their wake – and so will you, because all those demonic altars and gold statues in your dungeon aren’t going to pay for themselves, and there’s only so much wealth Keepers can mine out of the earth before they, too, have… dug too deep.

Unfortunately, while Keepers can attract a nice variety of monsters to their cause, your minions remain the faceless, souless monsters they are in all the other fantasy games.

You have to keep up their morale, they have levels in specific skills, they can have random quirks that make them stronger or weaker or hate a specific target more, you can give them all kinds of equipment and consumables and buffs, their limbs are simulated in combat (and can be severed)… but they have no dreams or interesting psychological quirks or relationships with other minions. If this is what you loved about Dwarf Fortress, then KeeperRL might not be for you.

On the other hand, if you played Dwarf Fortress and thought “I wish messing with other territories was a more hands-on process”… oh, boy.

One of the best things about KeeperRL is that you can control any of your minions at will, rather than the usual “set an order and hope someone gets to it” in these games. Even better, taking over a minion switches the action to turn-based, letting you do things with precision while still keeping track of what’s going on.

This system especially shines when you’re raiding, controlling any or all of your minions and calling their every move. Even in Early Access, even when your minions are just slaughtering a settlement who are in no way equipped to fight back, raiding in KeeperRL feels satisfying – and assaulting rival Keepers and other major villains can be a real nail-biter.

Not that you can be totally mindless throwing your monsters around, because once you start causing real damage, your adversaries are going to take notice and see you (correctly) as a threat. Or better yet, your last raid didn’t go so well, but you still killed a lot of their mooks, leaving their side howling for revenge -while you’re scrambling to replace your own losses.

Either way, it’s only a matter of time before they come knocking with their own raiding parties – and then we’ll see how good your Keeper’s dungeon really is.

Did I say “nail-biter” up there? No, the real nail-biter is raiding another villain’s lair, getting your horde wiped by some dire super-monster that you didn’t even know was in the game, and still be in the middle of rebuilding your horde when that same villain raids you – with the super-monster up front and center.

Unless, of course, you were totally expecting that, and built lots of boulder traps near your dungeon’s weakest breach point in a mad (if blatantly obvious) bid to smash that super-monster into dire paste.

What I’m saying is, there’s some entertaining cat-and-mouse thinking that can happen in this game.

#2: It’s As Much A Skirmish Game As A Simulation Game (If Not More)

I know we’ve already made a lot of references to Dwarf Fortress, but in reality, KeeperRL‘s complexity is more akin to Rimworld – a bit simpler than Rimworld, actually.

There are only a handful of resources to manage: gold, wood, granite, iron, adamantium, adoxium, infernite, and corpses. Like in Rimworld, you don’t have to smelt ores after mining them, but KeeperRL goes one easier in not even requiring your imps to haul resources to construction sites or workshops. If you have it in a stockpile anywhere, your minions can magically whip it out of their pockets the instant they start making something.

While that convenience does hinder immersion a little, it does reveal the focus of this game, and how it is more like Rimworld than Dwarf Fortress. Yes, you’re building a dungeon, but KeeperRL wants you to pay attention to the rest of the world map, too.

Those other factions on the map aren’t just your targets – they’re the flavor of raiders and monsters that are inevitably going to test your colony dungeon.

Between the more streamlined construction and having imps to build everything, you can set up your dungeon much more quickly than you’d expect coming in from other sim games – and that’s because KeeperRL wants you to get right into the action.

As much as it wears the clothing of a simulation, it has the heart of a skirmish game.

That’s also why, once you have the right infrastructure built, you don’t have to pay to recruit or upkeep your minions of choice. Building (or rebuilding) a horde requires only that you wait for enough minions to appear in your recruitment pool. Because from Lord Dunsany forward, we’ve seen a zillion stories, movies, and games where heroes go up against evil overlords, and almost never do we hear the question “So what is Sauron even paying all these orcs, anyway?”

Now that you’re the evil overlord, it’s only right that you receive the same courtesy – and it only helps you concentrate on remaining an active threat, too.

Finally, the skirmish focus is why research in this game is tied to Malevolence.

What? You expected that a self-respecting Keeper would waste time standing at some research bench like a boring mortal?

No. You’re an evil overlord, and spreading carnage is the only way you learn anything. Every settlement or villain or rival Keeper you wipe out increases your Malevolence rating, and every time you earn enough to level up, you learn a new “tech” that will make your dungeon or your monsters more dangerous.

Even your lowly Goblin Warriors get a lot less laughable if you have the knowledge to give them high-tier gear head to toe, or tons of buffing potions via alchemy, or master Goblin Sorcerers for backup, or you’ve phased out the goblins already because you’re WAY past alchemy and your succubus breeding / mutation game is just out of control.

I like this system because it encourages you to be aggressive, and can lead to situations where you’re only a few Malevolence points away from your next level, yet you’ve whacked all the easy targets on the world map, so you’re forced to take a risk to continue your pursuit of ultimate dominance. It’s always nice when a game has a theme, and its mechanics actually reinforce that theme.

#3: It Does Have Roguelike/lite Features

That “RL” is in the title for a reason: aside from all the randomly-generated maps, permadeath is mandatory in KeeperRL. There’s no option to switch it off, and I don’t expect (or want) the developer to change that. Whatever happens, there’s no going back to an earlier save.

Particularly, if your Keeper unit dies, the game is over – Mordor didn’t get a pass on this, and neither does your lowly dungeon.

Another roguelike thing is that KeeperRL doesn’t particularly care about fairness.

That mystery point next to your starting location, or the first thing on the next z-level you’re tunneling down to? It could be a wussy tribe of kobolds you can slaughter for some easy Malevolence points… or it could be a pool with a Kraken that can easily drag all your minions and their gear under the water, never to be seen again. As they say in Dwarf Fortress, losing is fun!

Personally, I’ve always liked permadeath and curveballs in games, because makes your decisions tense and meaningful.

However, I concede that you might have the opposite stance of “So I can spend 10 hours building my dungeon, get wrecked by a tentacled curveball, and lose everything? PASS.” That’s fair. Back out of this article now, let this game take the L, and move on.

But then you’d miss out on another of KeeperRL‘s standout features – retired dungeons.

That’s right, players who finish a run can “retire” their dungeons for other players to download and raid in their own games! Once perfected, this feature will doubtless add a lot of longevity to KeeperRL. While there are issues with retired dungeons that I’ll discuss in a minute, I still enjoy downloading them because I keep seeing things I never knew were in this game – and then I try to figure out how the original player did it!

Perhaps this game is closer to Dwarf Fortress than Rimworld after all, though, because if you get bored of being a Keeper and building dungeons, there’s also an Adventurer mode where you just roll up a lone adventurer and explore retired dungeons like a traditional roguelike.

I’ll be honest. In the current build, the Adventurer mode is a novelty, but not much more. There’s only two classes, one of them a novice that starts with minimal gear and almost no skills. You have no quest or goal other than waste all the map’s villains like you’re still a Keeper. Starting with so little, this is very difficult, and there’s not much room for experimentation.

The other class you can play is… the Evil God Adoxie.

Wait, what?

No kidding, the other class is a giant god’s head that is tougher than anything you’ll ever see in Keeper mode… but you cannot improve your traits, learn new abilities, or even pick up anything.

If you download the right kind of retired dungeons, this can actually become kind of an intricate challenge, but in the end, Adoxie’s rampage plays less like a RPG than a puzzle to complete a run with the only powers (and the only unit) you’ll ever have. You can’t even start your own apocalypse cult or seduce villains into being the Zio to your Dark Force or anything like that.

Neither of these classes are really something I’d want to play again and again -unlike the regular Keeper mode.

It exists, though. KeeperRL‘s Adventurer mode is in the game, you can select it, and as far as it goes, you can play it. Damning with faint praise those words may be, but at this writing, it’s more than you can say for the Adventurer mode on a certain other game’s Steam release.

#4: There’s Still Roughness Around The Edges…

I’ve said a lot of good words about KeeperRL so far (outside of Adventurer mode, at least), but it would be irresponsible of me not to remind you that it’s still in Early Access… and I can see places where there’s clearly more work to do.

As you might expect, there remain QOL hassles, like how commands have hotkeys, but you can only see what they are if you dive into Settings/Keybindings. And it would be nice if the player could select which message types trigger game-stopping popup notices. And could I please be able to move things after I’ve built them? Or at least get back some resources if I deconstruct them?

Because I just made a cheap dig at Dwarf Fortress, and that’s meaningless when DF players can retort “What was that? Sorry, we couldn’t hear you over the sound of BEING ABLE TO MOVE OUR BEDS.”

I’m also not real fond of how the groups you destroy don’t have actual names. “The tribe of Gloi the dwarf is destroyed” or “The tribe of Cala the dwarf is destroyed” or “The tribe of Undead in cemetery is destroyed” gets pretty bland after a while. Something like “You have defeated an outpost of the Mountainhome empire” or “You have annihilated the remnants of the lich Deathmeister’s horde” would help me feel like I’m wrecking an actual world here.

And speaking of KeeperRL‘s world, more variety for the world map would be nice. Other than you and your four rivals, you’ll only ever see minor groups who can be killed for some quick Malevolence or (more rarely) allied for another source of minions. There is a hidden block puzzle dungeon, but it would only help KeeperRL to have more points of interest (hidden and otherwise) that aren’t just something else to curbstomp.

I also had some tutorial issues, like how your dungeon’s Population Limit isn’t explained up front. So my starting limit is 10 minions, but how can I raise that? Just a little tooltip with something like “Building statues or thrones will increase your Population Limit, as will investing in Farming techs” would have saved me a headache here.

And laugh if you must, but woe unto the Keeper who techs into mutations, learns they’ll need a “pregnant” minion, and wonders “Uh… how do I get my minions pregnant?” Because KeeperRL is in no hurry to give you its equivalent of The Talk, either.

If I had only one wish for this game, though, it would be more player control during map setup.

When you start a new run, every villain and ally on the map is totally random, and there’s no way for you to customize that.

If I want a Demon Den among the main villains, or I don’t want frigging Driads anywhere, my only recourse is to re-roll the map until I finally see the combination of things I want. Perversely, the game encourages you to download a retired dungeon for every map, but you have to choose one – there’s no way to tell it “Surprise me”, or give it a pool of retired dungeons to pick from.

The lack of options there? That’s this game just not being the best game I know it could be.

Oh, and while the retired dungeon feature is really cool, there’s the issue that you simply don’t get enough information before you download one.

The game will tell you the toughest four creatures in a dungeon, which at least gives you some way of estimating its difficulty… but you don’t get any data about how much treasure the dungeon had when it retired.

So you can end up conquering a dungeon that has stockpiles with like 10,000 of every resource and a huge pile of end-game weaponry, making the rest of your run trivial – and boring.

Or just dungeons that, independent of minion levels, are an intricate maze and/or a deadly trapfest… the system currently can’t hype (or warn) about these ahead of time, either.

As I said above, the retired dungeons could really help KeeperRL stand out from the pack, but right now picking one is unfortunately a crapshoot. I definitely hope to see this improved for 1.0.

Finally, there’s just so much more meat that could be added to Adventurer mode. More classes than “blank slate novice” and “Evil Rampage God Head”, more interaction with settlements, more abilities, more quests beyond “same thing you did as a Keeper, only no dungeon and no backup”, more something.

#5: …But It’s Still A Lot Of Fun!

So this section was proceeded by over a thousand words pointing out all the places where KeeperRL (in its current incarnation) falls short. By now, you might even have the impression that, for all this game’s focus and ease, I might not actually be all that fond of it.

Little could be further from the truth!

I binge-played KeeperRL for almost 25 hours in the process of writing this article, setting all other games aside, and with all respect to the Explorminate crew, they’re not paying enough for me to grant such effort to a game that sucks. I was in the zone as those hours flew by.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about KeeperRL is that even though its world and its “dungeon simulation” are indisputably simpler than Rimworld (much less Dwarf Fortress), it keeps finding ways to surprise me. I’m not just talking about the moments where I saw some creature that I had no idea was in the game.

I mean things more like the first time I found a ring of spiders.

It’s just this ring that constantly generates a pack of giant spiders to follow the wearer. The first time I had one of my creatures equip it, I freaked out at seeing these monsters appear out of nowhere – until I realized that they’re your giant spiders. They’re not actually that tough, but you can put that ring on your Keeper and watch them go all over your dungeon with a pack of giant spiders as an entourage.

How cool is that?

Almost as cool as when I assaulted a dragon’s lair, had my leading minion drink an invisibility potion as a defensive measure, and the dragon actually quipped “Well, thief! I smell you, I hear your breath, I feel your air…”

A cheeky reference to The Hobbit, yes, but I was still surprised the developer would throw something like that in, and I’m still kicking myself for not screencapping that. It’s obvious that Electric Succubi are having a blast putting together this game.

And I think I’ll have just as much fun seeing what KeeperRL 1.0 brings.