Darkest Dungeon®

There's a ton to like about Darkest Dungeon. It delivers a strong experience during initial hours and hooks you up. Visuals, audio, and onboarding flow are great. However, it ultimately ends up on a sour note, filtering the Players in the most toxic manner possible: by not respecting your real life time. The game has two core pillars: one centred around constant metaprogression that carries between the runs and unlocks new stuff; the second one is a more classical roguelike experience, to enter and clear out dungeons on limited resources. If you fail, you lose your characters permanently. And both of the loops are incredibely engaging and rewarding on their own. Until they're not. Both are not compatible with each other for a longer run. And in case of Darkest Dungeon, you will know that only after already investing a lot (dozen hours and more) of your time, and most probably you will churn. You progres through the content steadily, even if a bit grindy manner. You create your roster, you level it up, gather trinkets, enhance your hub, tweak your characters' perks, figure out optimal class compositions, etc. Real fun and satisfying to fight a boss you had to flee from the last time, maybe losing one character in a process. Not a big deal, you have a huge roster, and you can train a new character along the way. As long as you know how to create your party for specific regions and enemies, you will manage. After hitting only 5 and 6 level dungeons, you hit THE wall. Enemies start getting ridiculous resitances and stat increases you simply cannot work around with your resources. And you will lose parties of 4 in a span of one or two turns exclusively on the base of a roll that disregards everything you were building up to that point. One, two, three, ten times in a row. With each 6 level character lost, the game disregards hours of your progress. Just to resume on the same level, you now have to repeat most of the grind you already passed. This is awful.

Good artsyle and music, complex mechanics, tedium, completely random obsicles and despite all your efforts there is absolutely no feeling of satisfaction or progression. It's like working retail, except you don't get paid. If you are a determined masochist who wants to put 50+ hours into understanding every little mechanic it's a must buy for everyone else, avoid.

After investing many, many hours into this game, I gave up. I watched playthroughs, read guidelines and tips, and even listened to a podcast where the creators, Red Hook, were interviewed - just to get where they were coming from. Pros: This game has a wonderfully Lovecraftian aesthetic, which I love quite a bit. As someone who enjoys turn-based games and plays tabletop RPGs, I can appreciate the battle system and strategy that's needed to succeed in a game like this. It's more about being a thinker than having fast reflexes (i.e. fighting games or shooters). The story is engaging; the characters fascinating. (The leper and plague doctor are my favorites.) Cons: This game kicks you when you're down and keeps kicking you until you're in a death-spiral. I understand that the creators wanted to cultivate a tense atmosphere where stressors and debilitating conditions stack if you don't prep or take care of your characters properly. However, I found that even when I took great pains to manage my characters responsibly, I wast still punished in a way that I found unbalanced, where the game was hard just for the sake of being hard rather than being fair. Even my friend, who has repeatedly beaten Bloodborne, all 3 Dark Souls, and Demon Souls, gave up on this game in frustration because he found it unnecessarily hard and unbalanced. (Lastly, the narrator at times was a bit much, and the game should reduce the frequency of his comments.) Overall, I found that the positive and negative traits of this game roughly cancelled each other out with the negative traits sapping whatever enjoyment I did get out of it.

I've really tried to enjoy this game and it was fun in the early stage. Then everything becomes repeatable not in a fun way (like in eg. Loop Hero). The game is not that hard as described, it's just terribly random and feels more like a gambling. No matter how well you are prepared, sometimes things are going wrong just because. That's ok, however in this game that means loosing characters that you've spent hours to develop. Yeah, other will come etc, but it costs real live time, that you have to spent again, and again, and again mindlessy grinding.

I got it on sale, which is a good thing. At first it seems fun. Difficult but enjoyable. It's got a lot going for it: great soundtrack, awesome art, and atmosphere. You can tweak and manage your party to your heart's content. The turn-based combat allows you to plan your attack. All is good. Then you hit the higher levels and it becomes an unbearable, grindy slough. The level scaling is a near vertical cliff of difficulty. There will be those that chime in "git gud" or whatever. Hey, good for them, they were persistent enough to stick with it for weeks (or months?) to find the fun again. Personally, I think a couple weeks of solid play should reveal whether a game is good or not. If you're the type of person that likes to beat their head into bloody, gooey mush against a wall, this might be for you. Otherwise, this game ain't fun.