Darkest Dungeon®

For a side scrolling game, this game is actually pretty heavy with tactics. Everything is based on who is in your party and what their position is relative to the enemy. It's basically dungeons and dragons, or better yet, Pathfinder for your PC, without the complications of moving around the board or having a large sandbox to fall into. Gunslingers. Paladins. Clerics. Assassins and more populate this game and are at your command for hours and hours and days and days of immersive dungeon crawling. Don't wait to purchase, your torch is running low and death is permanent.

What can I say, the art is simply wonderful and the gameplay really attractive. I never was a strategical player, but you have to think twice what to do in every turn because the consequences are no joke. As I said before, I'm a nooby of this kind of games, and even in the easiest difficulty, this game is really challenging (something they warn you in the very beginning of the game), you'll have to suffer hard defeats in order to progress. I don't find this a bad point of the game, but probably other players as green as me could see it really frustating and I don't blame them for that. Difficulty apart, a must-play game for dark atmosphere fans.

even though unbalanced is the name of the game this is going to be a fun and unique experience even if you don't have the patience to beat the game

There are certain mechanics I expect in a game, like tool tips. Your characters exist in the world, one would expect them to understand how to do basic things. You should be able to access that knowledge as well. I don't need to know what an unidentified treasure is, but when you can't even see what you're purchasing from the 'general store' on a first go round in a town, and the tutorial doesn't give you any hints about what you're doing? That's a huge red flag for bad design. I'll happily log hours on a rogue-like and take my lumps, but if I'm getting frustrated enough to have to google what the hell I just clicked on because the game doesn't give me a way it see what my items are or how they operate? Yeah, 25 minutes and I was done. Seems based on some other posts I found, I'm not alone in wondering what things do and it seems to be largely a PC-port problem. I don't care how innovative your game is. If you can't be bothered to run a basic tutorial that actually shows how to deal with inventory and character skills in the version I am playing, you're wasting my time. I'm not going to do a whole run through for the express purpose of "guessing" what the designers intended things to do.

First off: This game may not be for everyone. If you're looking for games to hand you regular progression without much effort, and never dare to set you back, stay away from this game. On the other hand, if you're looking for a game where failure leads to persisting consequences, then this game might be for you. But be also warned that the variety of random systems can still be quite rage inducing. The gameplay alternates between base management, planning and executing missions, changing up the pace in a natural way. Each of these phases offer their own interconnecting strategic challenges and lots of interesting decisions. These decisions get especially tense when you're in a dungeon. When the mission doesn't go so well: Do you abandon the mission to save your characters from persisting ailments or permanent death, but also risk missing vital ressources for planned tasks at the base? When the mission is going well: Do you risk exploring more? Character death or ailments often necessitate you changing up your strategies, because their strengths and weaknesses change. Each run into a dungeon is influenced by many different things: Where do you go? What's the mission? what level? Which characters do you pick? What combat and resting skills do they have? Who goes in what position? What provisions do you take with you? Probably more that I'm forgetting And last but not least: Great combat system! For each venture you choose up to four different characters of about fifteen unique classes, with four different combat skills each. Position plays a big role, as most skills can only be used from certain positions and influence with certain positions. Lots of them also change your or an enemy's positions. Same goes for the enemies. And I haven't even mentioned the light system! That said, I haven't finished the game myself, but stopped in the final dungeon, just because other games got in the way. Still, I loved the time I spent with this game!