Darkest Dungeon®

The equivalent of an abusive relationship with a hot lover, Darkest Dungeon is not designed for easy enjoyment. There are layers upon layers of complex mechanics to learn which are barely explained accompanied by a level of micro-management normally associated with running a nuclear facility. Besides the steep difficulty curve, there is the RNG which can reduce the best-laid campaigns to ruin and make characters insane or dead. The game practically requires a spreadsheet, notepad, and chartered accountant to handle; it’s a game for the obsessive player and it makes this crystal clear with its dark presentation, brooding voice acting, and repeated emphasis to expect failure and death. Either it will click with the player who will love exploring and dying in its doomed world or the complicated system will turn them off, there’s no real middle ground. The DLC packages offer even more options and depth (and death) but are best bought after coming to grips with the base game.

Sadly the authors disallow downloading mods from the Steam workshop without owning the game on Steam and do not keep the GOG version up to date with the Steam edition, many mods will thus be unavailable to you.

Darkest Dungeon is a great and original RPG for those who seek hardcore gameplay, autosave only and frequent character permadeath... though there's something off in its balance. Out of nowhere you can find yourself watching your party die after falling into the dark pit of madness without being able to do anything about it, all thanks to the invisible random throws (and I really want to believe they are random) that can give you horrible misses while the enemy hits non-stop. On top of that, one can choose to flee a battle but then there's stress and illnes and other quirks (I like the sanity system, it adds more flavour to the RPG genre) that take money to heal and at some point it turns really hard to take care of most characters in order to get a good party ready for adventure, so one ends up sending botched teams to a very likely awful fate. The gear is another issue, the torchs last ridicoulsy too short and carrying plenty of them takes part of the very narrow loot inventory space; same thing can be said for other consumables. The graphics are nice, all set in a barroque 2D Diablo-esque version through the hand of a lesser Mike Mignola wannabe, a bit more cartoonish than mature to my liking than the tone of this game should have. Darkest Dungeon delivers hard, complex and mature gameplay but, before anything, a game is supposed to be fun. I can take hard, what I can't take are arbitrary invisible killjoy rules.

I was very sceptical about this game but then I bought it and boy, if it's good. Many possibilities, good amount of characters and an excellent atmosphere is what your're looking for. This game will really bring you to hell, mostly thanks to its soundtrack and its fantastic narrator, but also because your enemies will try anything to put your heroes down. Infact, the AI is above average and will usually attack vulnerable targets without mercy. And remember: there can be no bravery, without madness.

I love this game.It can drive you to despair and yet motivates you to play a new round over and over again.