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[LibidoMax]

The damage system makes it really unique. There are plenty of other games out there that try for an equally grim atmosphere and a few simulation games with comparable insane detail, but none of them do what DF does.

Look at Skyrim. Why can I not cleave heads from bodies and collect skulls, or stab people in the throat and then watch from the shadows as they bleed to death? Dragons hit you with balls of pretty flame but you can't bleed to death from your wounds or see you fat melt off and you don't need to run for a river or roll around in the snow. The damage system in most games is completely unchanged since I was a little kid, so shooting an enemy in the knee with an arrow means nothing. I demand meaningful progress in making games more gory and tragic!

'Course, this would keep the kiddies away because they'd get shot in the knee and then have to restart. I think I'd steal Planescape's plot to explain why the player character can eventually recover from any wound. Yes! Planescape's sequel!

If I were a major game developer I'd brazenly steal Toady's addictive concept, shoot all lawyers and marketing people who tell me it is impossible to sell a gory game because of Christian vermin, and immediately start work on the best-selling and most horrifying RPG of all time. The things you could do... the spells you could create...

*NonconsensualSurgery claims a computer*
*NonconsensualSurgery scribbles pictures of a game development team*

I'd appreciate you not calling people who follow a certain faith vermin.

The man was stating a fact! 

[nenjin]

I tend to think of Dwarf Fortress as tone neutral for the most part. The exceptions being the title and the embark screen. DF always describes things in a way I'd call clinical. Excusing the odd exclamation point here and there, most reports and announcements just present information. Which frees us as players to frame how things happen in our own way.

[Muz]

I never felt like DF has a tone to it. There's no real history to the world. I mean, I know it generates one, but there's absolutely no culture. They worship these random gods, but all you know about their gods are their battle stories. For all their personality, they don't really have ambitions. They don't struggle for power. They just... make stuff. Their whole lives revolve around stuff. Build stuff, mine stuff, ask for stuff, sell stuff, defend their stuff, explore their lost ruins for stuff.

Killing things doesn't make it grim. There's nothing depressing about it. The song isn't particularly happy/creepy either, it's quite neutral.

I think it'd have a tone if the game actually tried to speak to you. Like if the dwarves start carving their bedroom walls with the story of how their brother fought an elephant and was crushed and later on brought back as an undead. Or if they write petitions. Or make temples and shrines to their gods; their chosen deity is even less significant than their favorite food. I heard they do stuff like this, but I never really experience it.

Hoping the upcoming version will give it some kind of tone

[Sallen]

On top of what the OP said, I sometimes get a strong feeling that I'm the Architect of some cruel Matrix gone wrong.

God I love this game.