At the moment GOG rates this game as 4.2, which would make it a very good game, but when you actually look at the reviews (all of them), the actual score is a much more realistic 3.2, which is a very mediocre game (which it is in fact in my opinion). This really smells fishy. Anyway, I am a long-time RPG and strategy gamer, and my tolerance toward grindy games is relatively high. I also don't mind difficult games too much. But I am nevertheless very disappointed with Darkest Dungeon after having played it for 20 hours on Steam. Grindy games can be saved by things like a compelling story or a cast of interesting characters, but DD doesn't even attempt to give you either. You do find journal pages in the dungeons, but since they are obviously not connected to the actual game, I didn't bother reading them after some time. There is no other story to speak of. The characters are just replaceable collections of stats and skills with absolutely no personality, so you can't get attached to them. Which is just as well since they are going to die anyway, all the time, just because of sheer bad luck. Basically all reviewers here (whether they gave DD good or bad ratings) stressed how great the art style is. I don't agree with this at all. Sure, the drawings are nice, but also just as repetitive as the gameplay is, which makes even this aspect very boring in the long run. You basically have 10 or so village screens that stay the same, boring dungeons that aren't that different from each other, and a smallish number of adventurer and enemy types. Adventurers of the same class look exactly the same, as do monsters of the same type. When you see them for the first time, they're interesting, but not for the 100th time. Many others have explained what's wrong with the gameplay because of randomness, unfairness, the grind, repetitiveness, and so on, and I absolutely agree. This is already apparent in the lower levels on easy difficulty, so I can imagine how bad it becomes later on.
