Level 1 dungeons: enemies' hits miss half of the time. Not a lot of challenging battles, unless you're still figuring out how things work. Main challenge is managing resources to build up your town. Level 3 dungeons: Swinetaurs and Unclean Giants make battles more of a challenge. Upgrades and training are more expensive. Level 5 dungeons: Enemies rarely miss and when they hit, it's usually a critical hit (>50%). Your heroes miss as often as they hit. Even if you upgrade them completely. You may think I am exaggerating above, being rhetorical, but no. I've been playing the game just 15 minutes ago and got four crits in a row on me. Not even from nimble spiders/dogs, from big fellas. In fact, I am leaving this review so that when I feel like taking another crack at the game sometime around 2023, I remember why I stopped playing in 2020. (And 2017) The game has undeniable appeal. Dark atmosphere, beautiful art, original mechanics, addicitive gameplay loop remeniscent of XCOM. (Fight and gather resources to build up your base, build up your base to make your heroes better at fighting and gathering resources) But it's strangely unbalanced. Relatively easy in the beginning and exceedingly murderous at the end. And worst of all, there is little skill involved. XCOM: Enemy Unknown was challenging throughout, but I never felt like I was completely at the mercy of RNG. Sure, I lost several soldiers on ironman (no save) mode (those blasted robot frisbies) and even the weakest monsters there could drop you very quickly, but with the right approach I could handle most things the game threw at me. And here it's "tough luck, would you like to play another game of loaded dice?"
This a game about a girl who walks really really really really slowly. The poor thing has artritis in both knees, so don't ask her to crouch, the transition animation will take solid five seconds each way. It's like reading the Lord of the Rings, but with one sentence per page. And after reading that sentence, you have to flip through ten or twenty empty pages to reach the next one. In the game, I explored one wing of the house and gathered some intriguing information about hero's father and sister, even though it took me over an hour to do so. But then I had to go back to the entrance hall and that was just too much effort. The hero was obviously in need of rest and forcing her on this 25-meter hike would be plain cruel. If that sounds like your cup of tea, you can recreate the experience by yourself. In a library, borrow an LGBT-themed book for teenagers. Then read it while doing five pushups after each paragraph. It will be healthy, energising and totally free.
I have a love/hate relationship with the no-save feature. It can work when the cost of failure is relatively small. For example, in Hollow Knight dying means you respawn, go find your corpse, fight your own ghost and upon defeating him get your wallet back. (Unless you don't mind re-starting broke) Usually takes under 5 minutes. In FTL you restart the campaign, but the whole campaign takes something like an hour to finish. In Hotline Miami you restart the chapter and an average chapter takes 2 minutes to complete. In XCOM and Darkest Dungeon you loose your soldier(s), but continue playing while leveling up the new ones. In all those games I didn't mind loosing because I would learn something and almost immediately go apply what I learned. Try, try, try again. In This War of Mine, I failed because I didn't figure out exactly how the combat mechanics work. So I started again, played the same lumber-shuttling simulator on repeat, gave the same 2 hackneyed youths 2 bottles of medicine for their mother, produced the same 15 bottles of moonshine for sale and went to face bandits, this time armed with a hatchet, a helmet and a firm intention to backstab everyone into oblivion (thanks online wiki). Only to stumble on a different part of combat mechanics and die ingloriously. I do feel like taking a stab at those bandits again. (No pun intended) But I cannot be bothered to spend another 3 hours to get there. To run around every location five times to collect all the lumber again, to brew all that moonshine again... and if I hear 2 hungry youths say "our tummies hurt" again, I'll punch them and repurpose their tummies for fertiliser.
A lot of people commented on different aspects of the game, but one extremely annoying quality wasn't mentioned. Namely, you can have only one game in progress. I went third of the way through the campaign and realised I was getting bored with the gameplay, so I'd thought I'd try "ranger" mode. But that requires erasing the progress I made on the regular run. I wanted to try some of the side stories from DLCs, but that requires abandoning progress in the main campaign as well. Bloody ridiculous.
