I May Never Be Horny Again

By Paul Munn | June 23, 2008

It’s been just about 9 years since I possessed Horny, the monstrous, red-skinned, ultimate summonable demon available to slay goody-goody invading heroes in Dungeon Keeper 2 and no Dungeon Keeper 3 has been made. So where has evil gone since then? I finally played the Overlord: Raising Hell demo on PS3 this weekend and it looks like it’s the state of evil, and it’s not half bad…or do I mean good? Anyway, I like it, and it’s headed to retail this week with expansion content bundled in after appearing on the 360 some time ago.

The title character is something visually similar to the old Warduke character from the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon but he’s silent. Instead of the gravelly-voiced unseen advisor of the Dungeon Keeper games you get a scruffy old version of your minions to squeak and whine a bit. He’s suitably evil, but he makes me wish we’d get another fully evil Dungeon Keeper game to sink our claws into.

There was a lot to Dungeon Keeper 2, and you could get as far into it as you wanted. You could micromanage your imps by giving them a good right-click slap, but slap them too much and, well, you’d need a new imp. Slapping would also improve the mood of your spiky and leather-clad mistress of pain. She and other monsters, from basic goblins on up, would come from monster portals and would settle in rooms they liked in your dungeon. Build the library for the mages, build the torture room for the mistresses, set up a training room for them to level up outside of combat, and include a hatchery where chickens would grow and be eaten whole by the goblins and others when they got hungry. Any one of your minions could be possessed as well, letting you fight with their special abilities or lack thereof when push came to shove and the good guys came tromping in to try and put an end to your evil empire. Alas, with Bullfrog long since split off from EA to become Mucky Foot, with their decent Startopia game apparently ending their sim game career, I may never be Horny again.

The history of Dungeon Keeper is from Kotaku, and tidbits on what DK3 could have been are from Wikipedia.