Darkest Dungeon®

I actually liked the game style and the game idea about dungeon crawling with mental health mechanic. But there are too many game mechanics I didn't like at all and which are totally overlooked in so many game reviews. The straightforward dungeon crawling makes gameplay fluent, but it's still has artifictial difficulty. Backward movement in the corridors is punished. In combat it's not clear how does the turn order work. Sometimes enemies get lots of turn and you barely can even start your own turn. Besides, the challenge of the game is all about RNG: dodge, miss, resist... The inventory is way too small which is very strange in a game in which resource gathering is a big element. You need so much supplies to carry with and you also need to gather lots of resources, and there is simply not enough room for that. The maxium stack for torches, food, money and such is way too little. Also, you cannot pick up items later from chests and containers after opening them which is SO stupid. In the hamlet everything is so expensive and most of the time you cannot upgrade anything with the limited resources. And I really hated how the caretaker occassianlly takes one of the few slot in the tavern or in the abbey, how does some slots in the tavern and in the abbey become unavailable suddenly and how some heroes become unavailabe for a week. So you end up having bunch of low-level stressful heroes with all kind of diseases, negative quirks, unavailbility and so on. The game is not that awful at all despite my review, but I still had not much motivation to keep playing this game that much.

Back on steam in early access, the game had a great deal of promise with a great premise and gameplay loop. Then an immediate paradigm shift kicked in one day, and the game decided to add unbelievable amounts of RnG that drags out playtime and screws you over in ways completely out of your control. Instead of committing to making something fun with progressively more interesting mechanics, it instead seeks to string you on by beating you down and dangling things in front of you to give you the idea that you're getting somewhere. From what the game was before, it is a frustrating, unfufilling game. For all its style and art, it's not brutal in any sense of the word, merely just cheaping you out of a good experience by dragging it on.

Extremely annoying game which only purpose is to keep you playing. Also hugely repetitive. Don't get me wrong - I played plenty of old-school games and enjoyed many of them, but this one is WASTE OF TIME.

Great Atmosphere, Poor gameplay. A lot of the negative reviews are posting how the game is too heavily focused on RNG, while the positive reviews are mostly "Pfft, you just don't get it, the game IS rng!" And that's true, it is RNG, but that doesn't make it good. To elaborate, the game is almost pure RNG. There's nothing to learn. Open a book in a dungeon, something good happens. Open the same kind of book in the same dungeon, something bad happens? A good roguelike will let you learn, example collecting a red potion will change effects on different runs, but on the same run will consitantly do the same thing, so you only need to drink this particular red potion once to know what all red potions do for the delve. In Darkest Dungeon, it's artifically difficult and ungodly levels of padded, being a rogue-lite rather than a rogue-like by compensating its pure RNG formula, by giving you the ability to grind your characters to more powerful states, and enhance your home city over time. There's a reason the game is getting bad reviews lately; a lot of people are looking back at the game and seeing that, through it's admittedly amazing atmosphere, it kind of sucks in terms of gameplay. And I know, I know, "I only have 10 hours in it, what do I know" I know a bad game when I play one, still, good art, good soundtrack, but $25 for a 10 minute experience stretched so thin that I have friends with 42+ hours who still havn't beaten it? That's rediculous when the game was already feeling repetative after the first hour.

On a first glance, the game looks simple. It is not. It pushes you to make decisions on the spot, no looking back, and then it punishes you for that. You will face so many situations that are just unfair, like you have to have already died several times there in order to know how to save your but. And you're going to die a lot. Still, you're going to try it out one more time, and die again two steps further. Rinse and repeat. It's a strange feeling of love/hate that will definitely get you entangled.