Darkest Dungeon®

The mechanics and story intrigued me, but it was the game play that kept me. I wasn't sure I was going to like it when I started, but once I figured out how everything worked, I learned to really appreciate the game. There is no save and re-load feature of the game... you literally have to plow through and get an unlimited stream of new recruits to help you on your mission. Lots of quirks to playing the game well... very much an enjoyable game... highly recommend.

I own this game on steam, but I played with the thought of buying it again on GOG but decided against it because of the reasons below. The games strengths lie in the superb atmosphere and punishing combat system. Especially the narratr and sound design draw you into the game and perfectly amplify the ups and downs during combat. The combat itself is turn-based usuallly you facing 1-4 enimies at a time with your 4 heroes. It heavily rewards forsight and knowing how to tackle certain enemy compositions, be it through stunning priority threats or apllying DoTs to wear down enemies with high physically resistance. Additionally enemies and heroes can use certain abilities only when standing in a certain position, same as enemies. Minimizing the amount of wasted turns through displacements and exploiting the mechanic against your enemies is another way to get through the combat. Which leads to my biggest complain. The game heavily emphazises from the beginning that you will lose battles and puts it upon you to manage the losses and bounce back. The reason being is that it is heavily RNG driven from the missions you can choose at any time to the combat with hit-chances, crit chances, damage ranges and turn orders. Enemies especially in more difficult missions will frequently outspeed you, frequently dodge your attacks and will heavily focus down vulnerable and/or low health heroes. This all comes together in the infamous four spider encounter who combine all the mentioned aspects and lead quickly to a dead hero. Unless you heavily exploit certain team compositions combined with high knowledge on the combat mechanics and AI behavior or simply having absurd luck, you will lose heroes, often without any error on your part. This becomes frustrating because over the course of the game heroes need investment through upgrading abilities and equipment. Losing those investments lead to a frustrating grind that cannot be avoided even on the lower ("radiant") difficulty.

A very poor game in a genre I usually love. I'm surprised to see it so appreciated. This is not a game with intuitive mechanics. The only way to win is to memorize every enemy and their skills in every area at every difficulty. Yes I said memorize: you can't just hover over the enemy and see what it can do, even after you've seen them do it tens of time. You gotta look it up in the wiki. None of your own characters' skills are intuitive either. You also have to memorize arbitrary things like "if in position 3, Crusader can use Lance to attack enemy positions 2-3-4 and advance by 2 positions". It's all too artificial for me to be enjoyable. The mood is lovely, but is wasted on this game. There's no characterization or dialog, heroes and enemies are just cardboard cutouts with numbers on them.

At first it was fun but as how the game is you need at the end a perfect team to beat every specific boss at the champion level and darkest dungeon. And that leads to the point the game becomes boring because this is just an administrative and time taking task to do so. You play dungeons all over again and it happens nothing until you have your 4 hereos lvl 6 ready, without very bad quirks, illness etc. for the specific dungeon and boss so you put them into your buildings and wait until they are perfect. If you don't do that it is possible they die or at least some of them escaping the boss and you put more time into that so you better do as I say. The biggest mistakes they made in my opinion is, it's take too long to build up new champion level hereos you really need to make the game faster and less repetitive.... or, you cannot customize every class as far as you need them for specific bosses. Also, you cannot escape from this mechanic by buying other DLC, the Crimson Court e.g. will make it worse. The focus of the game is: Failure will be painfull. So I had a lot of patience playing this game but at the end there are other games you can play if you don't like sending hereos into a senseless dungeon mission just to wait until they are healed from deseases and quirks which would ruin your boss fights.

I want to start by saying this is one of the best and most well made games I have played. The art, the theme, the music, the classes, the VO, the story gods the story, the combat. Everything about this game is so very well made and refined. And you can play it forever. I have been playing it since it came out in early access and am literally playing it again now. And that I must digress. I am adding to the conversation of this game due to nonsense reviews being considered helpful. If you don't like games with RNG it's not for you. If you don't like games that punish you. It's not for you. Don't leave a negative review because the game isn't what you like in games. I hate survival crafting games. They are the most pointless waste of time on the planet to me. Same with mobas. So I don't review those games as some people enjoy that type of game and at the end of the day they are not for me quite clearly. People are griping about being inflicted with position changes in combat. While several classes have skills that answer this. Or status ailments. Same thing. These are core mechanics in the game and you can do the same to your enemies tripping them up as well. The combat is extremely well balanced. Punishing with more dificult enemies. Yes. But that is half the point. You will lose people and at times it will be devistating. People will break, die, cause terrible problems for the whole party under stress. You will be punished for mistakes and sometimes RNGesus will step on you and destroy your favorite characters. And it's wonderful in that. It gives a feeling of hopelessness at times. Instills dispondance in a run. Ramps up the tension. Do I attempt another room? Do I stay put? Can we survive? If Just one survives I can get past this. I don't want to play a game where I can just turn it on and win. What's the point? This, you have to claw your way to the end through a path made of the corpses of your friends. That is beauty.