Dungeons of Dredmor is a roguelike with a good sense of humor and tons of customization options to give you incentives to try again over and over. While I feel the items are overwhelming and the maps are too full with stuff, I think it's one of the best dungeon crawlers I've played.
You start with many skill branches, perhaps too much.
Whenever you start a game of Dungeons of Dredmor, you choose 7 skill branches out of 35. Skill branches range from weapon mastery, passive-type abilities, magic schools and crafting abilities. Each skill branch comes with about 5 to 7 skills you can gain when leveling-up in the game. Some of these skills are passive, some grand a chance to do something when you attack, some modify completely how your character works (Such as vampirism, making you stop regen health naturally but instead by killing enemies), all and all because this is a roguelike you probably won't max out a single tree during your playthrough (Because you will probably die) So I'm left wondering, why can you pick up that many skill trees if you're not going to get far most of the time?
I'm playing a melee character so I decide to focus in swords. I take sword fighting, dual wielding, dodge, berserker rage, perception, assassination and armor mastery. All of these things improve melee fighting capacities in their own way and if I die and want to try melee again, odds are that I won't have seen everything in those branches so I'll be compelled to pick the same ones again (Maybe I'll switch the weapon type or add shields) but chances are, I'll still go with these. It's not a great thing to have that many choices if you have too much of them to make and you won't see the result of these choices.
How I would fix this
I have two ideas in mind, either you allow a smaller number of skills to be chosen from (Like 4 or 5) or you separate it into categories. You can select one weapon skill, two passive skills, one magic branch skill and one crafting skill. That way you'd see a bit of everything!
Everything feels so overwhelming
The sheer number of stats in Dungeons of Dredmor is staggering. You have your basic levels (Fighter, Rogue, Mage) and then six main stats, 18 sub stats, resistances, damage types, it's hard to keep track of what's useful and what isn't. Then again, this is a roguelike, it's normal that things always seem out of hand, that being said, I'm not too critical of the stat system, they are well explained and well represented.
Maybe it's with the items I have more issues, you get tons of items in Dungeons of Dredmor and they have various impacts on your stats. Most of the time they increase some of them but they also can decrease them dramatically (Having 0 mana regen instead of 1 makes a lot of difference). It's never clear why things are going some ways, are you getting killed because of that item? Are the enemies doing special types of damages that you're weak against? What stats are affected by your skills and what should you focus on?
There are different item types, crafting items, food, wands, equipment, accessories, bolts, misc items... It's all very confusing. Food regenerates your health (or mana) over time, potions have various random effects such as killing you or making you do fire damage when you attack.
How I would fix it
The game already knows how you're playing your character (With your Warrior/Wizard/Rogue levels) so it wouldn't be impossible to show red borders around items you can equip but that aren't as good as the ones you have and green borders on better items. Maybe better split the items by categories or add more ways to get rid of useless item.
Such as the crafting system
Also the crafting system is too much for me, you have lists of all your recipes and what they do, and you have eight different branches crafting, from alchemy to smelting to wand smiting. There's so much to craft and since there are so many items, it's difficult to only carry what you need for the recipes you want to make. Also you find hidden recipes in bookcases through the game. Some of your stats and skills influence crafting in some way, although I'm not sure how (Beside you needing a high skill rating to craft high level items).
I proceeded to never craft anything because you find items everywhere and it's hard enough to know what to keep already, I'm not going to bog myself down trying to make every little thing in the game as it might or might not be useful. You might die from a trap in five seconds, what's really the point of a deep crafting system? It's well realized and you can go at it for long if you want, but I didn't regret not crafting anything when I just explored the dungeon, getting items from the ground.
How I would fix this
Any way to make the whole process quicker and more streamlined would help, having more simpler recipes where two items will only mix together to create a third item would help (So you just see if you can do that one recipe with any given item) or even add a separate inventory for your crafting items so you know what's used for crafting and what's just random junk.
And all the roguelikeness of it.
But that's not a complaint, DoD is a great roguelike and it gets crazy at times, there are traps, random monsters everywhere, shrines, pools of acid you can drink, locked chests, eyeball altars, the whole roguelike nine yards.
Combats are fast-paced and confusing sometimes, you're not sure what's hurting you and why, is that a poisonous gas cloud? Did it come from a trap or an enemy? Can you run away? Where? When you see a bunch of text explode on screen (Overhand! Haywire! Critical! Block!) you're not always sure if you're being dealt damage or if you're killing the enemy faster.
The humor is funny, the maps are well designed and there's variety in the location and enemy types, you also have quests where you need to kill specific enemies or destroy certain items. They add to the progression of your character and I would recommend doing them before going to later floors where enemies get tougher.
Dungeons of Dredmore is the roguelike I play when I want to play roguelikes even tho I feel there's too much I can't get to see.