Darkest Dungeon®

Grinding is real. You fight mostly the same enemies in few different types of dungeons. Sometimes there is one fight in whole dungeon, sometimes they surprise you everywhere. Good thing is it runs well on my old non-gaming pc and crashed twice, but good thing is, it threw me back where I ended. Stress is greatly affecting your heroes. When they reach 100 stress, you lose control over them, they hurt themselves, allies and resist healing from healers and eventually die if they reach 200 stress. If hero receives damage and has 1 HP, enters Deaths Door, every other damage can kill him, he only needs to be healed to 1 HP to not get killed by one hit. There are four slots for 4 heroes of 14 different classes. Some heroes can only fight in front, some are effective in the back. I play on Easy (Radiant) mode and it is unbalanced because when I entered level 3 dungeon with level 5 heroes, I lost 2 of them just in 2nd battle, in level 5 dungeon, something similar happened. Because enemies have much better stats, resist your attacks and are faster so while your hero misses once, he hits you twice and you need to remove his debuffs, heal yourself. You must trade wisely with your moves. I also fought boss, he took my hero to his side, the strongest one, she attacked my heroes under enemies command and got them on Deaths Door. I retreated and lost the strongest hero despite, she was almost on full health and not stressed at all. This game is so random I hate it. More I play it to get better at it, more I find randomness ruins my achievements and the game itself does NOT resolve into more fun and addicting. It stays same and you grinding again to get your low level heroes up and spend money into their stats buff.

Basic: Think twice before buying this game, because: the game is crippled with too much random and the game seems to be build on principle that learning dozens of monster attacks and special place events is much more important than strategic and tactical planning. Detailed: 1) The game's mechanics are is counter-intuitive. Planning ahead will become more and more dissapointing with game's progress. The reason for this is devastating random. For example: missed or dodged stun attack, or failed heal, because of some epic random reason. As for failed strategic plan, here is a common example: you party order, but some party member got lost(random event) just before enemy invation(random event). 2) You will have to learn alot of sometimes stupid and counter-intuitive junk about ingame content or suffer severe penalties. Some games have content that is fun to learn(even when there is a lot of material), but this is not this kind of a game.

To survive and enjoy this game you have to try to get into the mindset of a guy whose job it is to try to destroy the rot that will eat the world from the inside out by launching human-shaped weapons against it's creepy-crawliness. In a way, getting into that mindset is a sort of roleplay in itself and it's just one of the charms of this monster of a game. There's persistent progress, team tactics, dealing with "real" stress, reasonable consequences (at least when dealing with unnameable horrors not of this world) , and thick, Gothic horror atmosphere unlike anything I've ever seen before (since Diablo I at least--that thing was monstrously awesome). If you'll only be playing one game this year, play this one.

Darkest Dungeon is a risk/resource management game. Think of it like Cthulhu poker. Overall, it's a strategy game, but from moment to moment, it's a game of luck. And luck isn't always fair. (It's not always unfair, either... Point being it's random.) The game's randomness can be ridiculously punishing. A perfect expedition can turn into a disaster in 30 seconds because of nothing other than a string of pure terrible luck. Using poker analogy, it's like when you started with a pair of Aces, but somebody else got the Royal Flush in the end. It can feel terrible. The thing is, the game lets you fold your hand and cut your losses. You can retreat from battles. You can retreat back to town instantly when you're not in battle. You don't lose anything other than the initial investment into the expedition and the cost of nursing the team back to health. If your whole team die permanently in a dungeon, it's almost always because you went on tilt and took more risks when you were already in a bad situation. The flip side is, if you never take any risks, you'll never get enough loot in return for your investment into the expeditions. Your expedition fund will slowly dwindle away as a result. The balance of risk and return is the crux of the gameplay. If you don't like it, you probably won't have a good time with the game. Overall, the risk/resource mechanics, and how well they tied into the theme and atmosphere, are what makes this game–admittedly an otherwise good but not spectacular dungeon crawler–a fun and truly unique experience.

There's RNG heavy and then there's putting the player in the role of doing the background tasks while RNG itself is actually playing the game, and DD is far over the line into the latter. The one tool the player has to deal with the RNG in dungeons is the ability to retreat, which is penalized so heavily that it may as well be a fail-mission button. Unlike the notorious Dwarf Fortress, in Darkest Dungeon losing is not fun at all and really quite frustrating and you find yourself wondering why a heal spell that can be chain cast in battle indefinitely is bafflingly unavailable for use between battles. The combat RNG being heavy enough to kill a full health character before he is able to act in a battle - a couple of quite-common crits plus a third hit of any kind to deal the death blow can do that to any character - makes the incongruity of healing mechanics all the more glaring. Not to mention the characters will be going mad all the time and a common feature of almost all types of madness is refusing to be healed. The RNG is also doing the character development, by its Monty Haul assignment of significant traits. Rarely are the rewards from dungeoneering as significant as the effects of traits, which are applied to every character almost every time. So while your characters are developing, you the player though really have very little to do with it. You can alter these traits, but only quite expensively, and nowhere near the rate at which the game applies them on its own. And spending all your wealth to fix the traits on one or two characters does nothing to guarantee or even limit being RNG-slain in a manner that cannot be prevented with any player action or foresight. If you buy this game do so aware that it will be primarily for the production values, and that you will mostly watch and click along while RNG plays the game for you.