A waste of time and money, an accurate description of the game both as a purchase and its play style. A sadistic punishment game disguised as a pleasant yet challenging experience. You'll regret every decision in game as the R.N.G. and catch 22 choices force you to create new profiles over and over in the pointless pursuit of progress. Heroes you level up will die faster than the noobs you can hire, and negative stats will swiftly outnumber positive ones. The stress mechanic will swiftly snowball and the cures will swiftly drain your resources. Trinkets that your supposed to use on your heroes are instead sold to barely fund the next delve, leaving you with nothing. This purchase isn't my greatest regret, but it is definitely in my top 20.
You know that most enjoyable part of a game where you can't possibly win anymore, or leave, and have to waste 10+ minutes of slow fight scene until you can finally die and leave the game?
Man, if you like that, you'll love Darkest Dungeon. There is a run away button, but it doesn't do anything if you need it to. And there's no option to just lose, so you need to keep hitting buttons until you finally do.
Outside of that, it has a moderately interesting legacy mechanic where surviving members of your teams (winning or not) unlock new abilities in your building, like being able to level up.
You'll lose all of the resources you spent, including money for the expedition, characters, equipment, etc. But the game won't respect you enough to let you give up, unless you uninstall and refund the game. Although yo ucan find out which enemies you can or can't handle by closing the game and asking the internet. No fair if the game gave you warnings or clues beforehand.
I have played this game back when it was on early access over steam, so I have had some previous playtime before it went live. But now that it's finally complete I have to say the ride was a good one, i've watched the features of this game come to life - and the challange become a reality. This game surely falls under the tactical roguelike category in which your every decision could cost you the lives of your heroes and everything you fought for. It's one of those games that truly tests your pride - where retreating really does have it's benefits to live and fight another day at the loss of saving face. If you are into the unforgiving nature of roguelikes with the "dying is fun" attitude then this game is for you. What can I say more? Roleplay, strategy, tactics , and certain characters you will slowly start to love for their abilities and then you decide to push them one more time only to find it will be there last adventure :( Get this game!
It's a good game, really. It's simple, composed of a town section where you buy and equip a band of characters (and take care of them when they have problems). You can choose to do this and that with your people, and have various concerns to think of when venturing in, that usually come down to 'yes I can dungeon' and 'no, I need a day or two.' When you are ready you choose four of them to venture into a dungeon for various reasons and do battle with the baddies within.
If you like the look of the artwork, I'd say that would be the main reason to get this game - It's a very nice style. And if you like stat-based games, this game will satisfy your meticulous need to build the ultimate party of four, chosen from a good number of choices.
The game does suffer from the 'phone game' syndrome, in that it's built for a phone UI, meaning there's little outside of point-and-click and scrolling, so don't expect miracles (although sometimes the enemies will perform miracles and all your people will die, a'la the darkest dungeon where terrible things happen)
It's worth a laugh and a swing of the sword. While writing this it's discounted to under $10. I believe this to be a very fair price.
One last thing: be prepared to hear "confidence surges as the enemy crumbles" eighteen billion times.
This game is very thematic, with very nice hand-drawn graphics, puzzly combat systrm which I adore, good music, nice story and the narrator with a superb voice, on par with Sean Bean's performance in civ 6. The game itself is easy in resource management but very unforgiving in the dungeons, though this feature really is part of its charm and its built into mechanics well: your heroes will die, your heroes will go mad, your heroes will gain bad quirks etc but you'll still get new ones, gain resources and items every time, resulting in constant progress no matter what. If you treat it like a rougelike and avoid save scumming, you'll have a lot of fun with it. Base game has enough features, but if you would like more variety, The Color of Madness expansion is pretty fun.
The worst thing about this game is: when you finally learn your combos, playstyle and compose your perfect party, you have almost no incentive to change it and when the game forces you to do so, you'll most likely replace the old party with the same composition of rookies all over again, at which point the game becomes grindy and samey and the forced change to your squad is pretty irritating. Town building part is also pretty grindy starting about mid game and it never stops. Some classes are pretty useless, so after you learn that, your real options to compose your squad are much more slim. And The Crimson Court DLC I really disliked: long grindy maps, frustrating blood mechanics, mediocre rewards... The only cool thing about it are boss fights, but overall this DLC isn't worth it IMO.
Overall, if you like thematic rougelikes with puzzly unforgiving mechanics, you'll have great fun with Darkest Dungeon. I had, and I rate it 8/10. But if perfectionism is your sickness and save scumming is your thing, then this game will frustrate you to the point you wouldn't even want to finish it.
