Darkest Dungeon®

This is not an easy game. You have to always prepare for the worst and hope for the best. However the game is great and the voice of Wayne June is just perfect (could listen to it for days).

Some tips for new players in the early game: - Get the Crusader or the Jester as soon as you can and unlock their stress relief skills. This is the biggest game changer early on, because now you can play around the stress mechanic. - Take as few risks as possible. Don't open objects that you don't have the right reagents for. Keep torches fully active at all times. Don't clear out rooms you don't need to. - Healing is only needed when a hero is seriously dropping low. Don't waste turns trying to keep everybody topped off, it is not effective. - Gain an advantage by choosing the lowest and shortest dungeons possible and add one or two party members who have some upgrades. - Stun skills are really powerful, especially if they can reach the casters who most typically cause stress. Try to maximize their accuracy early on. - Don't waste your money on quirks and stress relief early on, if you manage your party right you will be able to focus mostly on upgrading your heroes and this is the best way to make dungeons easier. - The first few dungeons are by far the toughest since you have no stress relief and no advantages at all. Losing a few heroes is absolutely fine. Try to not lose the Crusader. The game really isn't that tough and you can gradually take more risks as you become more powerful. But yeah, the game is obviously a recommend from me, it's a tons of fun and super addicting. Love how it flows, there's no messing around with checkpoints or save scumming, skill and class design is great, difficulty is well balanced, awesome art, I could go on, just buy it.

The game is terrible. Continual snide comments by the narrator. Very lopsided. You get new recruits after every mission because your party dies so easily. Not pleasant or relaxing. A 1 step forward 2 steps backward game. After every mission your party suffers mental breakdowns. Your adventurers who show up in town in search of adventure suffer mental breakdowns just walking. If they become selfish they rush to every possible treasure location and steal the treasure. Somehow, even though you control the adventurer, and they took the treasure you lose it. Your party can be nearly full health and winning a battle and they will suffer a mental breakdown and badmouth the party which causes more mental breakdowns. A mentally brokedown adventurer will pass on turns, refuse healing, refuse help, choose their own attack, or move to the back of the line exposing your defenceless characters. I'm unsure of anyway to reduce the constant mental breakdowns. They fight amongst themselves and sabotage you as the player. It is as though the developer set out to ruin your day. A regretful purchase. I want my money back. I uninstalled the game.

I heard this game was difficult, overly so, which usually isn't my thing. It was on sale, so I figured I'd give it a try. Battle consists of: miss, miss, miss, hit, miss, miss, crit, miss, miss. One of my characters, in the first dungeon after the tutorial, was killed in the first round by three critical attacks. My party responded with two misses and a hit. I thought maybe this was tough because of strategy, or a learning curve, or maybe outright grinding. It's tough because of RNG. Sorry, I'll throw dice at casinos if I want pure RNG.

You're really going to have to learn to play this game like an instrument if you want to see the end. Every time the game went up in difficulty I had to completely revise my entire strategy. I would probably recommend you play this game with prior knowledge of what the bosses can do, as characters can take quite a while to be ready for action and their death means you'll have to start over again with a fresh one, potentially losing hours of progress. This fear of losing progress often keeps you from attempting new bosses, which I found were usually not nearly as difficult as I'd imagined. So depending on how recklessly you decide to play this game can vary wildly in length.