Darkest Dungeon®

poorly designed game that isn't playable

Darkest Dungeon is a party-based dungeon crawler with some nasty twists. Characters develop quirks, which can be positive or negative, and characters will die permanently. It takes a good while to understand the underlying mechanics of DD. And until you do, you will be overwhelmed by despair and possibly even toss the game out in pure frustration. But even in that time of despair, most likely you will have many a moment of joy, of hope, false hope, and of incredible luck. Just as likely, you will make an immense amount of mistakes, leading to the death of your whole party, those four fellows you loved and invested so much into... Most likely, you will hit rock bottom in your first playthrough - that is, you will deplete your gold, you will be unable to bring a set of torches and food supplies into your dungeon run, and you'll be overcome by that feeling of despair. And that is precisely where this game wants you. Get desperate, and you will find new ways to overcome the challenge. Get beaten down, and you will learn the degree of creativity this game asks of you. At some point you realise that all this time, you *have* been progressing after all, just in different ways. Your little town has been reconstructed quite reasonably, and you've been steadily learning mechanics and party setups. So with that knowledge, you tell yourself, 'Now, I'll do better'. You start planning ahead - not for one run, but for the next two or three runs. You get 'spare' heroes. You consciously start upgrading them, selectively and carefully choosing how to spend your earnings. And almost inevitably, you will once again be caught by despair as your next party wipes. All this time, you've been struggling, and going through emotions beautifully guided by a brilliant voiced narrator. That moment you crit at the most essential time in battle, or that moment you are praying to survive a death blow. It is those moments that this game wants to show you. How long will you last?

Superb. Tremendous writing and vocal performance. The best 2D art and animation I have ever seen in a game. Yes, the game is hard and I did get frustrated a couple times, but reading the wiki and strategy guides helped me to reconsider my tactics to complete the game. The game's difficulty provides a sense of accomplishment upon success rarely found these days. My only complaint is that battles don't vary that much, but the simplicity of the game play is part of what keeps me returning. My next playthrough will be using the 'Radiant' game mode with the Crimson Court DLC.

It's funny, at first, when I was looking at whether to buy this game, it looked like a Rogue-like and I've been having a ton of fun with those. Many of the ones I've played have had a more whimsical tone (except for FTL), so I thought it'd be fun to play one with a darker, Lovecraftian tone. But then I finally played the game and it turns out to be a lot more like XCOM - although one could certainly ascribe certain Rogue-like elements to the newer XCOM games - the perma-death, the randomness of your soldiers. Like XCOM you also have the ability to slowly level up your base, which allows you to better finesse your unit population. The difference from XCOM is that instead of a 3D masterpiece, it's a vector-animation sidescroller. It's also, of course, heavily influenced by fantasy and D&D. This brings me to the one thing that I found difficult, but not enough to remove a star - there's a LOT of stat acronyms that don't mean anything to me and make it harder to understand what I should expect from any given attack. Part of the reason that I didn't remove any stars for that is because there's a glossary included. Overall, I really love the creativity they're bringing to this space - we don't need yet another Spelunky or FTL clone. We need new and creative games out there! I don't expect I'll ever beat this game - it looks like a lot of the negative reviews have to do with that. But why should everyone get to see an ending to a game? Maybe these reviews are by younger guys who never played Nintendo-Hard games? I never beat any of the Nintendo Era games (while I beat everything from the N64 onward). If you're on the fence, wait until it's on sale. It seems that Steam, GOG, and Humble Bundle are now having year-round sales. At $5 who cares if y ou only play the game for an hour - that's still a better deal than going to the movies.

I liked the game, I didnt like the numerous negative levelling down that occurs frequently due to all the psychological trauma your character endures. I understand that is supposed to be part of its charm, but i couldnt get past that aspect.