Sonant

Yeah, the interface can be a bit of a steep hill to climb, but i guarantee no other game will be as rewarding as this one for your effort. As for the graphics, you either work with the original ASCII and use your imagination (the game is pretty good at catering to this) or take the other way out and use a tileset, which makes things no easier to understand than ASCII, but the tiles are more familiar in form, making it marginally easier to tell what things are.

Dwarf Fortress was best described as a Dwarf simulator. You tell a bunch of guys what to do for their benefit, because they would much rather be drinking and having parties at the local statue garden than doing anything productive. The game itself is remarkably complex; it contains realistic water pressure, parabolic arcs for projectiles and bodies, and allows you to do pretty much anything you can imagine, so long as you provide for the welfare of the dwarves (this in itself has been expanded by clever players to include some truly diabolical things). Dwarves will also sulk and work slower if they are not drunk. Dwarves have feelings, and will become upset if their pets or friends are killed in battle, or by local wildlife. Sometimes this results in Fun; a case of highly contagious mad called a tantrum spiral that often leaves about 10 survivors to pick up the pieces. The game logs events, and this is usually where the best of everything comes from, like the guy that had a minotaur slaughter his fortress with a mitten. if you can get over the initial effort to learn how to do things, it's highly, HIGHLY rewarding, and about as addictive. the difficulty usually comes from the sheer amount of weird things that can go wrong that you didn't even consider possible, but a seasoned player can usually perfect a fortress (though some often abandon one because they discovered a feature they improved on and wanted to incorporate in a fresh fortress). P.S. that's just fortress mode, adventure mode is just as crazy