So you think that Dwarf Fortress has an unimpressive gameplay? You’re really saying that a game that had a bug that made cats die because when a dwarf drinks alcohol he sometimes spills some amount on the floor because dwarfs are messy drinkers, cats walk past it and get alcohol on their fur, cats lick themselves clean and so consume alcohol, and since the smallest amount of alcohol was lethal to a cat they were dying has an unimpressive gameplay?
Graphics and gameplay are completely unrelated, a lot of AAA games stand on graphics alone, and a lot of Indies have great gameplay even if the graphics are not great.