Darkest Dungeon®

Darkest Dungeon has plenty of strengths that many games lack. It benefits of a strong ambiance achieved with a mastered artistic direction and writing, good original soundtracks and a story that is as simple and classic as it is catchy. The game mechanics are interesting and make the experience even more thrilling. You'll find yourself getting quickly addicted to the management of your not-so-heroic adventurers. It is one of the rare game that makes you re-check everything again and again before starting a mission, letting you ask yourself if you didn't forgot anything and if all is truly ready, as you know that a miscalculation can easily lead to either the defeat and/or the death of your characters, to whom you've attached yourself, despite the introduction of the game warning you that you will loose a lot of them. And it is where the game starts to waver. Darkest Dungeon wants to be an hardcore experience, giving you challenges all along your campaign, preventing you the luxury of saving your progression whenever you want, making the reloading of a previous state impossible for only letting you reload where and when you left your game. This choice is perfectly justified considering the setting ; and this aspect is totally okay as challenging games that ask players to beat them with wits and skill are a thing. But Darkest Dungeon is not one of those games. All the actions of the game rely on probabilities, letting even the most skilled player with the best possible preparation at the mercy of Lady Luck all the time. Being defeated by bad luck is a thing in this game. Because of that aspect, Darkest Dungeon cannot claim to be a hardcore experience, but only a frustrating game. It lacks game mechanics designed around skill to reward the best players and punish the bad ones, as any decent hardcore game does. In the end, even if the game offers enjoyable moments thanks to its good traits, sadly, it is overall ruined by a single bad choice on Game Design's side.

I got this free and fired it up for a go - it had a good atmosphere and a striking art style, and I played it enthusiastically for quite a while. Unfortunately later when moving on to a different area the game got stuck endlessly on the level loading screen - I couldn't exit the game or tab out, and ctrlaltdelete froze the computer solid until I did a hard reset. When I booted the game up again, my save was gone. Apparently this is a long-standing known bug. Given the unforgiving nature of this game and how heavily in relies on RNG, the chance of having all my progress wiped every few hours on top of that really killed my interest.

I have read the most critical and most loved reviews, and I respect them both. I have been playing for several months, and have had a Love/Hate relationship with the game. I have started over countless times, and each time learned something valuable about the game mechanics, enemies and random encounters in the Hamlet and on missions. This is a game, as in my title, that requires patience and a hefty load of masochism and obsession. Once you reach an understanding of party composition, trinket distribution and game mechanics, you will love this game. That being said, this is by far the most difficult game I have ever played, and I have been gaming since I was tall enough to reach Asteroids in 1979.

So this game is fun in the first 3 days but from there on its not. If you want to call this game a waist of time you could. Every game needs a price to entertainment balance. The game has an amazing idea going for it. I am fine with losing charcters for good. But you lose guys you put time into for some of the stupidist reasons. The monsters get so much more brutal than you get. I understand making a game hard to try to keep players from beating the game too easy. The laziest way developers can make a game hard is by making everything totaly random. The problem is the game is like this idea. You start off with a d6 and challenge me to a battle while i use a d4. but if every level I am given a +1 then you can keep rolling a 1 at level 4 but im rolling at least a base of 4. Not sure how the code is writen for this game but im just saying thats what it feels like. Then your guys go insane. Why would an adventurer go insane? The idea of a skilled fighter and adventurers going crazy is like a person afraid of heights applying for a job building sky scrapers.

...But also one of the most frustrating. It's easy to admire Darkest Dungeon. Its mastery of atmosphere and ambience is unsurpassed. Wayne June is a phenomenal voice actor and a herald of what quality VA work can mean for videogames. The writing and worldbuilding synergize perfectly with the medium. Darkest Dungeon has that kind of passive, subtle narrative that you absorb without noticing it, until you're up to your elbows in horror and it suddenly clicks what's going on, why you're fighting these people, and why their faces are shaped like molten cheese fondue. This art and style and voicework haunts me to this day. How many games from 2016 can say that? I am still thinking about Darkest Dungeon, in a way that no other game can rival. But it's also difficult to recommend Darkest Dungeon. It is a stressful and frustrating experience - on purpose. The latter half of the game is unfun, unfair and unrelenting. On the highest tier, enemies hit for half your health before you take a turn, your characters often miss, and before you know it, several party members are on deaths door. This happens basically all the time and deaths are hard to avoid. Any character lost requires significant grind to replace and it's just this unending slogfest, for what feels like no reason. That's what the game is about. Stress, loss and trauma. In an era of skinnerboxes and live service, I think that's a worthwhile experience to center your game around. I wanna validate the haters here: this probably isn't what you play videogames for. The Darkest Dungeon endgame will crush you and leave you demoralized. I can recommend levels 0-4 to most people interested in squad management RPGs. Level 5, 6 and the Darkest Dungeon? You probably won't enjoy them. I didn't enjoy them and neither did my friends. Buyer beware.