Darkest Dungeon®

Pros: Really great and dark art style. The concept of drawing on a huge pool of expendable characters for a Rogue-like dungeon crawl, using them up in a meatgrinder as they die or go insane is a fresh and fun sounding idea. Upgrading the town instead of your party was also a neat idea. Cons: All those great ideas quickly fall apart. Biggest issue is TIME and GRIND. This is NOT a typical Rogue-like where you can finish a run in 1-2 hours. The grinding is horrendous. Even after over 10 hours you still won't have a stable roster of max level party members. This becomes an issue because your characters die (or must be retired) so easily. It's common to lose party members in 2-3 hits out of sheer bad luck that you cannot avoid. This only gets worse as you climb in levels because of how imbalanced the scaling is. Your level 6 characters in a level 6 dungeon are going to die more often than level 1s in a 1 dungeon, yet they're infinitely less replaceable. Get an unlucky high level party wipe? That'll be 10 more hours of grind to get them back. The 2nd biggest issue is the game never changes. No new strategies, no new mechanics are opened up as you advance. Level 1 characters have the exact same skills as max level. The only thing that changes is the numbers get slightly bigger. 4-5 damage instead of 3-4! But the enemy numbers get bigger too so what's the point? Actually the enemies always outpace you. Gone is any sense of advancement like your ship gaining crazy new abilities in FTL. The first hour is exactly like the 20th. There's other things: the town economy is whack (trinkets are a waste of money, the only upgrade item that matters is deeds), bleed/blight become crap as the game goes on yet the game acts like it's still viable with high physical resist enemies, a lot of the trait/quirk mechanics are poorly explained, the classes aren't balanced well but you're stuck with what you randomly get. tl:dr- Too much grind, not enough sense of advancement

This game is a brutal, beautiful masterpiece. It can be too difficult, or random at times to be considered fun. If you are willing to let yourself have fun the way you want, the game offers a slightly faster/easier mode and there are mods out there that allow you to tone down the challenge. I played through it on normal and found that some parts were a little too much for me and it became more frustrating than fun. I tweaked some of the settings and dabbled with a few mods and it became a game that was brutal, but not hair-ripping frustrating.

Yes, I consider this the most fun game I have ever played, closely followed by Fallout NV which is also a big favourite of mine... It is hard yes, and RNG can be a pain, but in fact, it is the RNG that contributes to excitement when it comes to risk and risk-taking. Shall I go forth to the boss with my heroes in somewhat shabby condition and maybe reap the rewards if luck is on my side or die? Or abandon the expedition and lose the invested dungeon cash and get extra stress? Sometimes you are lucky and sometimes less so. But the major part of the game is to learn the mechanics and strategies. It requires heavy investment in experimenting and/or (for me at least) reading, but the reward when you finally master difficult situtations (sometimes made extra difficult by the RNG) is so great. I love it, have played about 100 hrs (!), and I'm halfway to completing a Stygian run. Well worth it if you like tactical battles, management of scarce resources and dark aesthetics.

Can't really recommend unless really into dungeon crawlers, perma-death and being spiteful; Boring to play, interesting setup, brutal to the point of meaningless. Optimization is key here, and most of my entertainment was from the base/character management while my frustrations lie in the combat. Even then, most strategy comes from compensating the random percentages that happen with every attack and which seemed skewed to make artificially tense moments. Use 2nd character's 1st attack to stagger enemy, use 3rd characters 3rd attack to do extra damage to staggered enemy. Some parts of the complex web of stats vs other stats require some critical thinking with the order in which you perform them, but the random number generator will most likely ruin your excellent plan at some-point; Which does build tension the first time, but after a while it gets aggravating. The selling point being the way the game calculates sanity as "stress", get over a hundred stress points and your character will sometimes be afflicted with AI making poor decisions such as: skipping a turn, hurting themselves or other teammates, or forcing a retreat, all while pilling more stress onto your other characters in which you can rarely compensate for even while breaking to camp. Ways to relieve stress are not signposted well, if specific afflictions make for certain behaviors they're really not signposted well, to the point where I think the game's just random. The game goes for a purposefully miserable and grim aesthetic, but it really just falls flat for me. Character dialogue is repetitive and serves no other game-play purpose that requires intuition. I wish they left it out, as I started disassociating the characters being human beings in the story and more of just a game-play element as they rightfully are. The morality of just abandoning reckless "stressed" droids is just par for the course. Imaginatively designed but lacking in just any sense of fun. PS: the witch boss is garbage

Mixed reviews below, but I feel there is some confusion about the game by people not reading the game description. So, allow me set the record straight: First, this is not Final Fantasy. Many people are complaining about the frustration of Characters dying... Well, the game description tells you this, so it shouldn't surprise you. (And... that's usually what "Rogue-Like" entails....... Or have I missed something?) Absolutely shouldn't take any starts away for that... Also, though this is a Rogue-Like, you have a Hamlet from which you can upgrade your warriors and buildings to improve your future expeditions. You slowly, painstakingly, improve your Hamlet so that you can take on harsher expeditions. Yes, some characters will die along the way, but that's to be expected. What I love about this game, though, is how it forces the player to balance finances and the mental health of the warriors. Should you upgrade the Armory? Or should you allow your stressed warrior to relax from the hardships of the fight? Push your warrior too hard and he'll snap mentally, and could put others in harm... But spend the money on his relaxation and you might not have enough supplies for your next expedition! It's rough, but soooo fun. Finally, the atmosphere and world are fantastic, as well as the story telling. Also, I currently have 12 characters, all different classes, and there's other classes that I still don't have on my roster! Plenty of diversity to figure out how you play best and work out different strategies. Lot's of variety in skills for each class to set up each specific warrior to how you think they should operate best. All in all, I really like this game. Yeah, it's difficult, and I would agree that it is only for those who like a challenge, but that shouldn't affect the star rating in my opinion. Know what you're getting, and judge it on whether or not it accomplishes it's goal to be what it says it is. This game excels at that, so I gave it 5 Stars.