I like Darkest Dungeon, and this feels like basically the same game in a new, fresh setting. Great! Unfortunately, the game design is very harsh and unforgiving. While the first few hours are easy enough that it doesn't matter, the game later becomes more difficult, and the unforgiving mechanics just ruin the fun. The game has two difficulty settings: normal and a special super hard mode. It desperately needs an easier baby mode that will cut you a break and just let you enjoy the story without perfect mastery of the game's systems.
The game is pretty interesting, but it has too many bad and intentional design decisions that make the game feel like more of a chore. Save points are very few and far between, and you lose all your money if you die unless you can recover your ghost. This is made much worse by the fact that when you enter a new area, the game doesn't allow you to map it out until you find the hidden map vendor of that zone. And several of the game's pretty difficult boss fights are far away from the nearest save point, making it a huge pain to have to fight your way through several screens of enemies before you can try again. This kind of design just makes the game more frustrating to play, and it's completely unnecessary. Not a fun game.
A lot of criticism has been raised against this game, and most of it is totally valid. The game is essentially just a string of very similar grid- and turn-based fights using a party that you level up. You manage a caravan outside of the fights, but it doesn't matter at all gameplay-wise, and you'll be no worse off if all the farmers following you around get killed by monsters. However, if you're a very specific target audience, you should like this a lot! The fighting system works well, and the tactics required are quite different from what you usually see, you want to gradually weaken the entire enemy team rather than pick them off one by one. I thought it was great, but some have said that they hate the combat system. The 2D graphics are also absolutely beautiful, though the non-combat animation is pretty pathetic. The setting is neat, but the writing is trite and unengaging. All I can say is that it's definitely not a game for everyone, but it was certainly one for me!
