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.
