Darkest Dungeon®

People who hate this game will tell you it's all about the dice rolls and people who love this game will tell you strategy is the key. Neither of them is entirely wrong, You must put together a team of heroes with complementary skills, put them in the right order, and make the right decisions during combat and exploration. You can't just level up overpowered heroes to plow through the content. Sometimes you have to give up and sometimes you have to let heroes die. That would be okay, but the random element is pointlessly brutal. You can build the perfect team, execute flawlessly, and still get obliterated by a random string of bad dice rolls. This wouldn't be so bad, but the random beating this game delivers is relentless. You can be destroyed by bad luck in combat, pick up random debuffs or lose items while paying to get your heroes healed, and even take a string of Ls just walking from room to room for no other reason than that the dice didn't land on a scouting event and the next hallway is filled with traps and fights. Games that put you into unfair situations by chance aren't a bad thing, I just don't think they work for me in this format. FTL and Binding of Isaac worked had a short-form, self-contained nature of each game. If you start, get a bad run of luck, and die, you just start over. Getting almost all the way through then getting rocked by bad luck doesn't really feel that problematic. But here, because progress is saved over time across a longer narrative, and there are no real consequences for failure (like the game being over), it just winds up feeling like you're grinding through a progression that's unnecessarily slowed by the deliberately harsh dice rolls. It doesn't feel so much challenging as just cheap and artificially slow. I can understand why some people like this game, but, to me, it just feels like gambling in Vegas. It can be fun at first, but eventually losing just stops being fun and it's time to go home.

I like the story and I like the Attmosphere. The Fighting Mechnics are decent but has loads of room for improvement. Now for the bad... which really hold the game back. Bad Mechanics in the fights and over the top difficulty which come from arbitrary difficulty gimmicks like Scouting is a random thing. You can only carry a very limited amount of supplies and you have to lose that all at the end of the mission making you spend money for nothing. Every mechanic in this game is intentionally designed to put you at a dissadvantage for no "plausible" reason, from members of your roster disappearing for 1 week randomly, to character instantly being stressed out from one single curio. I mean seriously, don't put this stuff in your game and then try to make me believe that this town residents have not already burned everything down and murdered everyone in madness by now. Debuffs are cranked up and Buffs are toned way down. Gring Grind Grind, too much pointless grinding and boring same room, same hall, same enemy, same things over and over agian. You can easiliy run into a boss enemy in just the 2nd mission. I barely played this long enough to get my moneys worth out of it. Another game that is only interesting because of it's difficulty which also only serves to make it less fun at the same time.

The title really emphasizes how silly this game has become. Basically, you are forced to grind-grind-grind, not only for the characters to level up, but also for the chance to actually have them reap any benefits from leveling up (first you need to unlock several things, and then buy them for each individual character, usually putting you back to 0 cash before everyone has everything). That won't keep the enemy from sharply increasing in difficulty, though. That would be worthy of 3 stars due to the otherwise really involving narrative and pretty art style, so why 1 star? Because the RNG in the game is so off the charts it is possible to lose weeks of progress in 1 combat - before you take your first action. It's not gonna be your fault, it just happens that enemies have a tendency to focus fire one of your party members 'till he/she's dead. So now you have 3 characters at level 5 - who are not useful anymore until you train up a replacement, who you have to train up with a new party starting at level 1. This may sound bad already but trust me it's even worse with the enemies having high-damaging attacks targeting all your ranks from every rank and your later inability to manage threats due to incredibly high scaling resistances (you will practically only get weaker thorough the game). Going to dungeons is usually a zero sum game if you intend to keep using the characters, because they will randomly rack up debilitating quirks (such as taking more stress) or diseases (that prevent you from hitting your oponents). The gold cost to treat these things are insane and also scale up with level, so you usually have suicide parties to bring in the gold just so the higher level ones can keep on going until the RNG finally gets them. So I hope you enjoy hiring and firing level 1 heroes all the time. This is NOT meant as a "the game is too hard" kind of post - hard games are fine. But there is a difference between challenge and an exercise in futility against grind and RNG.

This game has so much potential but falls short. The art style and sound are great and the combat system is pretty good too if not sometimes nonsensical. For example it makes sense that some abilities such as using a sword can only be done on the front line but not being able to cast a healing spell from the front? When 2 front characters are killed and your healer jumps to the 2nd slot they are completely useless. This like this are annoying. I love challenging games, when it's fair, but in the case of Darkest Dungen it's just hard for the sake of being hard. For example, your charagters get stressed and lose their minds. Good mechanic but not when it's so easy for this to happen to so hard to counter it. Some characters have abilities which heal steess but so far the best I've found is an ability to heal one other character for 10 stress, just for the enemy to use an ability that hits all 4 characters for 20+, it's just pointless to try and counter it. Oh and even if the enemy doesn't use such an ability, one of your own stressed out characters will say something randomly that drags the whole parties stress down. You'll sometimes come up against easy enemnies and think 'great, an easy fight' just to find that your characters start missing or the enemy dodging, all the while pummeling your stress levels. The game is a constant slog to get through, always spending almost all of your cash to heal characters between battles, just to not have them available for the next dungeon. It's seriously just a pain. Like I say, this game could have been great, it's got all the ingredients. It's unfortunate that the developer decided to add such unfair artificial difficulty that can't be overcome by skill or planning, there is too much randomness to the game that constantly sets you back even when you think you're prepared for the low level dungeon you choose.

You can play this successfully for 40 hours, and then if the game decides that you're going to lose, you'll lose everything. In the late game, you're just a couple bad rolls from losing everything you've accumulated. No strategy can compensate for missing 10 attacks in a row. And there's a non-zero chance you will. Any positive review you've seen of this game is from someone who just avoided the pitfalls of rolling poorly in a late game mission. If you spend money on this game, good luck. I hope you get lucky and avoid having 40 hours of gameplay wiped out by poor dice rolls.