Once upon a time, there was a game called Dwarf Fortress. It was a magical game that spawned infinite stories for those willing to read its tea leaves of finely-detailed content, from the most epic slaughter by rampaging elephants down to the tiniest thoughts and details of its dwarven citizenry.

And the masses looked upon Dwarf Fortress and said, wow, these stories are fantastic but are you really going to make me learn hotkey controls to use this mess of a UI? And you can't see a hill except as a series of layers of dirt?

And so many, emboldened by the newly-released Steam Greenlight and Steam Early Access, took it upon themselves to remake Dwarf Fortress in their image. Some of these early attempts died on the vine, like Towns and Spacebase DF-9. Gnomoria is the most long-lived of these early re-imaginings, releasing to 1.0 status after three years of early access. Instead of dwarves, it's gnomes, and instead of ASCII and tiles, it's 3D isometric graphics, and instead of a hotkey-driven UI, it's a graphical mouse-driven UI.

And Gnomoria, in many ways, delivered on its promise of being "Dwarf Fortress, but properly 3D." Players create a colony, dig underground (but not too deep or too greedily), create an economy piece-by-piece, and defend themselves from unruly neighbors.

However, time has moved on, but Gnomoria hasn't. Gnomoria's feature list at its 1.0 release in 2016 is still nearly identical to Dwarf Fortress circa 2013, without nearly so much of the flavor that attracts so many to Dwarf Fortress. And more games have come along that evoke the magic of Dwarf Fortress without resorting to mimicry - Rimworld for small-colony storytelling, Factorio for intense production optimization. And even Dwarf Fortress itself continues to evolve and outpace Gnomoria, not only through the development of its core gameplay, but also the development of mods like Stonesense (isometric 3D, like Gnomoria) and Armok Vision (fully 3D visualization).

As a game releasing to early access in 2013, Gnomoria made sense. As a game up for purchase in 2017, Gnomoria no longer makes sense except for those interested in the history and design of Dwarf Fortress and the games surrounding it.