A very unique game that sadly falls short the more you play it. While playing smartly and taking your time will save your band from certain death, this is not a rule. Mostly, you will die because of rng. Losing level 1 characters might not hurt, but loosing your best one that took a month to make just because he decides to miss three times in a row is just boring.
That being said, it's a fun game with great graphics. Get it on sale.
(I don't own this game on GOG, but I put probably 50 or more hours into the Steam version)
There are some things about DD that are absolutely fantastic. The stellar art direction, the music and the Narrator's voice all create an incredible mood that I have yet to see in any other Lovecraft-inspired game. It's because of those that I gave the game the 3 stars that you see above. I simply couldn't rate it lower when it looks, sounds and feels so good.
And in the beginning, it plays very nicely too. At its core, it's a turn based dungeon crawler: you assemble a party of 4 heroes and send them on a quest into one of 4 dungeons. If they succeed and come back alive, they gain XP as well as fetch gold and resources that you use to improve your Hamlet.
This is initially very fun and addictive - your base is developing fast, your heroes are getting stronger, the dungeon crawls are quick and intense.
The problems start emerging after about 10 hours. First, it's dimnishing returns: your Hamlet and hero upgrades are more and more expensive, but the amount of goods you earn per quest stays roughly the same, so you have to grind more and more to actually achieve anything.
And then it turns out the game is not as fair as you thought it was when your party suddenly fails in what should be a perfectly manageable battle, because all your characters randomly missed and all enemies randomly scored crits. The game has permadeath, so if a character dies, that's it, and you can find yourself forever losing heroes that took long hours to build - not because you made a mistake, but because the RNG messed you up.
Yes, you can always recruit and level up and upgrade new ones, and in 10 hours you'll have a new party like the one you lost, but the question is, do you care? The core gameplay gets really repetitive by this point (it's the same 4 dungeons over and over again), and its grindy economy makes it feel like a mobile game that someone forgot to put microtransactions into.
I'm am so DONE with these procedurally generated, looter games. Takes FOREVER to grind enough resources to make any meaningful progress. The player is under-rewarded for success and over-punished for failure. These games just feel like they're testing my patience rather than my tenacity or resourcefulness.
As rogue-like games go, Darkest Dungeon is pretty amazing. I really love the world that Red Hook Studios has created; very stylish and atmospheric with a lot of character. I also really like the mechanics of the game play and the combat system. I also quite enjoy the push your luck aspect which often forces you to dwell upon your investments in the characters themselves and whether it's worth risking costly insanity, injury and even death if you just push that little bit further.
My only real problem with the game is that it is just so time consuming. You can spend the better part of an hour slogging through a dungeon only to find that a particularly unlucky series of events has cost you more than you gained. This requires that you then spend even more time trying to rectify the situation. Ultimately, it just takes a very long time before you have enough resources and strength to even consider tackling the difficult bosses let alone the final, horrifically difficult dungeon. This is fine if you have endless hours to play, but even if you do, you might reach a point where it isn't particularly fun anymore.
A very solid three stars from me, but this is the perfect game for you if you like:
- A difficult, punishing game
- Being at the mercy of chance
- Grinding and slogging to upgrade your characters and resources
- Inevitable defeats and setbacks (which are hopefully character building)
