I tried this game yesterday, and man, it is crazy.
I like how you interact with the world through commands. (It remains me of the old good days of Snatcher, but with like 300 times more complexity.) Contrary to many people, I don't think I would enjoy mouse control or a streamlined UI. I like how it works now, at least technically. I tried some graphic mods (for the previous version), even 3D stuff, but didn't add anything. I prefer the simple ASCII style. (The fact that this guys are making so much with so little fascinates me, and I have a personal obsession with minimalism, even if this game can't be described as minimalist in anything but the graphics.) So I'm playing the last version without mods of any kind.
It's like a crazy parallel world with rules that look recognizable but in a twisted way, when characters are not characters but small rudimentary creatures with a life of its own, a weird story generator that works inside of your head, a virtual reality universe to inhabit for as much time as you may want. This is food for your imagination.
I watched a video of a guy playing adventure mode who killed a poor fisherman cutting his hand with a sword and following his blood trail next, finding him, exhausted, resting on a tree, and cut his head off and then started extracting his organs and eating them. (He was unable to eat his intestines because it was too full.) Then he took his money and other stuff. Gross. And then this games ends up in the Museum of Modern Art in New York but people talk about GTA violence in TV. How unfair.
I don't know how much time I will dedicate to this, but it seems like the kind of thing that may give you a lot of fun once you learn how to move around and do stuff. People would have loved this on the eighties or nighties. (For people who don't like ASCII graphics, imagine this with the visuals of Ultima VII. Cool, ah? But I would accept graphics like the ones in the intro video. I like that kind of low resolution pixel art a lot. However, in your head, you can have whatever graphics you want. You can see yourself doing all that stuff, and imagine the dwarves interacting with its environment, having always something to say, feeling everything around them. That level of detail will certainly be hard to beat.)

"Playing" is not simply a pastime, it is the primordial basis of imagination and creation. - Hideo Kojima