Darkest Dungeon (2016)

~25 hours, unfinished main story, played on the easiest mode Darkest Dungeon quickly goes from gripping to monotonous, back to gripping, and back to monotonous. Here are the pros and cons to this small dungeon crawler as I experienced them. Do note: the game is balanced exceptionally well, my preferences are going to be different from someone who wants a challenging crunchy dungeon crawler.

Pro

• The gameplay loop in the early game is really effective.
• Death of characters for the most part is a minor set back.
• The games only as challenging as you make it for yourself. If you’re like me and can’t afford the time commitments for an overly challenging game doing something simple like setting the difficulty low and using a guide for provisions and curios will get you quite far.
• Every job class is dynamic and presents lots of solutions to the problems at hand.
• Given the challenge of the game, I expected soft-locks to happen easily, they do not because the game is well balanced.
• Atmosphere = amazing.
• The narrator = amazing.
• Quotes and story telling = amazing.

Con

• The gameplay loop does not feel like it evolves enough for the slow mid-game.
• Some of the games mechanics feel buried. Curios, for instance, have a great in game mechanic that allows you to learn their solutions. However, if you miss this fact, you might become frustrated with curios.
• The four-person party makes the choice of who you take with you very tough. This is good for controlling the game difficulty, but if you’re like me, it’ll force you into a routine in which experimentation becomes a costly allocation of time and resources.
• The build mechanics of the town progresses too slowly.
• Dungeons feel repetitive.
• Character growth feels primarily numeric, not offering much in the way of advancing gameplay. Oh you leveled? You can fight more leveled things, but it’ll feel like an arbitrary step up.
• Anything that could be done to speed up preparation, such as team load outs or better menus feel necessary.

Conclusion: Given that this is not a “full priced” game and the amount of time one could easily spend in here, I think the value is there for the money. Most of my associated cons are purely preferences. Nothing felt like it didn’t work, as much as it felt like it just didn’t fully work for me, personally. This is certainly a game I feel that most people need to rely on outside resources to really get the mechanics. Nonetheless it’s a solid recommend from me.

After having played for 40 hours and dying with my 4 strongest heroes in the Darkest Dungeon, I decided it was time for me to quit this game. I stopped enjoying it after 15 hours either way, so it was probably for the best.

Darkest Dungeon is an amazing game on paper, and somewhat succeeds in presenting a compelling story about the darkness of greed told by gameplay mechanics. Forcing you as a player to gradually sacrificing your morals by making it expensive and time consuming to care about your heroes, and more efficient to abandon traumatised party members and only invest in the strong, makes the initial 5 hours of the game a compelling allegory of the faults of the modern day labour market.

If the game had the courtesy of focusing on this theme and building a 15-20 hour game on this concept, expending it through the mid-and endgame, this would be a completely different review. What happens instead is that the game, despite unique and fun dungeon crawling gameplay, turns into a mobile style grinding game.

After the initial thrill of the concept, and some fun time experimenting with strategies and team compositions, the consequences of permadeath becomes more drastic the higher level your characters becomes. Having your team of level 0 characters die can be easily remedied with recruiting 4 level 0 heroes from the stagecoach, but having a team of your max level characters dying will result in a setback so large that the only way to get back to the same spot, will be to grind other heroes to max level and gain enough resources to cover for the loss in items and trinkets (equipment that improves stats). This will approximately take 5-10 hours, depending if RNG is in your side during the grinding - otherwise you could be set back even more.

Stuck between concepts, Darkest Dungeon fails to capture the strength of either of its main genre roots. It lacks the permanent progress and more heavily crafted gameplay experience found when playing a role playing game, but fails to capture the fun essence of more condensed run-based burst of gameplay sessions in a more pure roguelike experience.

In the end, I felt as empty playing this as one would feel like in a free to play-mobile game gathering resources to be able to continue. It just became a time sink, and the feelings of excitement when succeeding or horror when failing in the early game was replaced with boredom and indifference.

P.S. please stop having over convoluted UI:s games

I've gone back and forth, playing Darkest Dungeon off and on, since it entered Early Access 8 years ago. Now that I've finally completed it, I can recognize it as a near masterpiece. Darkest Dungeon has possibly the best turn-based combat system I've played, only potentially tieing with Etrian Odyssey V. As a life-long lover of Turn Based rpgs, my biggest issue with the genre is that most games that utilize are simply too easy and forgiving, making it completely unnecessary or even a waste of time for the player to learn true mastery of the systems, regardless of how deep they might be. Darkest Dungeon absolutely shatters this convention with grueling difficulty that highly rewards strategy and tactics. In addition, said combat never gets old due to the almost limitless amount of customization and experimentation available due to the dozen+ character classes, each of which can perform dramatically different roles depending on their chosen abilities and position in battle formation. Even after playing well over a hundred hours, I was still experimenting with new team compositions right up until the final quest, often with surprising results. The presentation is top notch. Darkest Dungeon commits to an exceedingly morbid, grim, eldritch horror setting and dials it up to 11, giving life to even the most played out and generic horror tropes by pushing just a little bit further into extremes. It's artstyle is simple but striking, making heavy use of pitch-black shadows to leave many details of its characters and environments up to the player's subconscious to fill in the gaps. The extremely limited animation of the battles, which consist mostly of characters snapping in and out of static poses, are made exciting by some absolutely top-tier sound design. Every attack feels like a massive strike due to the sound effects, and most of them are. Music is also highly atmospheric, though it's effect can wear thin over time due to the heavy amount of repetition the game relies on. The sound, whether it is music, sfx, or the ever present narration, has a way of getting into your head and subtly framing every experience, making the game far more atmospheric than could possibly be achieved by it's visuals alone. Though my praise is quite high, this game is very much not a game for everyone. You have to be someone who is excited by grueling challenge, willing to permanently lose characters you've spent a lot of time and resources developing, and not be dissuaded by very repetitive gameplay (though the game does a really good job of making that repetition never BORING, when a few poor decisions can turn any mission to ruin).

I first played Darkest Dungeon when it was in early access, and unfortunately that kind of ruined the experience for me for years. With no endgame and significantly more repetition and lack of content, I kept going back to the game, getting frustrated with the small changes since my last check, and quitting again. That's why I've played the game half-a-dozen times before finally beating it. But after leaving it untouched for four or five years, and coming back when it was truly finished, I found basically all of my issues with the game had fallen away, and I adored the experience start to finish this time.

Note: I did not play with any of the substantial amount of DLC available.

This game reminds me a lot of a boardgame called Arkham Horror. You move through places infested with horrors, gain some loot, get screwed over by RNG and eventually your character will probably die or go insane. If you're lucky you'll make it until the Old One shows up. If you're really lucky you can even prevent it from rising at all. I don't think we've ever actually managed to beat it once it showed up.

I like Arkham Horror, but i don't love it. It's all a bit too dicey (get it, because you roll dice). But it has fun random encounters that give it flavour. And after setting up the board (takes like half an hour) you can just play it. Also, when things go south you have your friends to sympathise with you.

Darkest Dungeon has none of those things. You take your randomly generated characters to randomly generated dungeons, barely survive and bring back a tiny bit of loot that you can spend on excessively expensive estate upgrades. After a few hours the dungeons feel kinda samey, they lack flavour. The grinding is so bad that it apparently takes 40 hours to complete the game on the Easy setting. And you have no one to complain to when you get screwed over by RNGesus.

The actual gameplay is kinda fun but because of the positioning system it's so limited that it becomes mechanical. Even worse is the fact that you can only have 4 active skills at a time. They shot themselves in the foot with that choice. You're fighting the same battles in dungeons that all have the same-ish features too many times.

I really wanted to like this game. A friend of mine played it and it seemed so cool. I even cheated and edited the text files to speed things up. Yet i still lost interest after 4,5 hours. There isn't even an interesting story to keep you going. Oh god, and the fact that you sell all your torches/food/etc for 5% of their value after each run is so fucking stupid. What a waste of a cool concept.

I tried picking this up again after putting it down years ago. Now I remember why I put it down the first time...

I like this game, but that's about as far as it goes. The gameplay is a bit of a slog. Returning to town after every delve is slow and tedious with the amount of healing you have to constantly do with all your characters. The progression also seems too slow. I often would get out of a delve still without having enough artifacts to be able to level up any of the town abilities.

The worst part however are the console controls. DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME ON CONSOLES. The controls were very poorly adapted to consoles. I had to go to Google just to figure out how to equip characters with items. And the thumb-sticks are much too sensitive. You're required to use the thumb-sticks to select your allies and enemies in battle, but pressing left or right often goes two positions left or right instead of one, making it very frustrating. There's no option to use the D-pad instead.

Also, I understand that the theme of the game is supposed to be dark and depressing, but... wow... I never feel relieved or rested or like I had fun after a play session. I'm fine with that in games where the narrative is impacting me in some way, but that's not the case here. It's just a standard Lovecraft story as far as I can tell and it's certainly not the focus of the game.

Beneath all that though, there is a lot of really cool stuff here. The character classes and abilities are all cool and fun to use. Quirks and stress are cool factors to consider with your characters. All the parts of the town are interesting and it's fun to upgrade the town and your characters (even though it's not nearly as often as you would like). And the combat itself is very satisfying.

If there's a game out there that's like Darkest Dungeon, but avoids many of the pitfalls I've mentioned here, I'd love to check it out, because I think this is a game structure I'd very much enjoy if just done a little differently.

Darkest Dungeon, for PC

Rating: 8.0/10; Great

Played 2020 without dlc

Darkest Dungeon is a strategy rpg that has you manage a roster of heroes that you take in groups of up to 4 into 2D sidescrolling dungeons with brutal turn based combat. Deaths are mostly permanent (there is a random event that offers resurrection) and the rpg mechanics are towards the lighter side, putting more emphasis on tactics and strategy. Preparation and planning are important while the random nature of hazards and combat itself can very suddenly turn a promising mission into a nerve wracking desperate struggle.

The game begins with a dungeon and combat tutorial before introducing the heart of the game; the hamlet. Here you will manage your heroes and spend resources to gain advantages. Gold is the most important. Not only is it needed to buy provisions for each mission but is also needed to buy weapon, armor and skill upgrades for each hero. Gold is needed to fund stress recovery (binge drinking, gambling, whoring, meditation, prayer and whippings), cure disease and lock in or remove quirks. Dealing with quirks is an optional and expensive way to squeeze more effectiveness from your heroes but curing stress and disease is the major cost of going on missions and can be kind of considered a salary that you pay. Gold can also be used to buy trinkets, but you can get plenty for free in missions. The other resource is 4 types of heirlooms which can be converted amongst themselves and are used to upgrade the hamlet for more powerful hero upgrades, more effective recovery and lower gold costs. One important thing to note is that the player and town crier can randomly occupy the stress recovery facilities, which start off with only a single slot. So if you have heroes that will only use a certain facility then they will have to stay idle for that turn (each turn is a week in game) unless you unlock a 2nd slot. Each week you can take a single group on a mission in 1 of the 5 dungeons. The early game gives you the same 4 heroes and new dungeons and hamlet facilities are unlocked over time, kind of like a drawn out tutorial. After this the game opens up and it will be random what heroes and rewards are available. Missions are random, with random objectives, rewards and events, all of which are clearly displayed before accepting the mission (though I think some features are linked). This allows you to view all available missions and choose the one that benefits you the most. The goal of the game is to complete missions in each dungeon to increase a progress bar that will unlock a boss mission. Each dungeon has 2 bosses with 3 levels of difficulty, so there are a total of 6 bosses per dungeon. The 5th Darkest Dungeon is different and is the hardest part of the game, being rated at the highest possible hero level; 6. Except on Radiant difficulty (the easy setting you pick upon starting a new game), heroes will refuse to go back there. So 4 missions there mean you will need 16 different max level heroes to beat the game. Thus it is important to fill out and progress your roster. The other dungeon missions are rated at levels 1, 3 and 5, with no even numbers. Heroes will not go on missions that are 2 levels below them and suffer increased stress for being under leveled. Even level heroes are the best situated to beat bosses so you may want to hold them in reserve rather than let them level up. Level 3 and 5 dungeons are particularly difficult because new types of enemies are unlocked and old types learn new skills, meaning you have to learn appropriate tactics again.

Once you choose a mission you have to decide who to bring and what supplies to bring. The game offers a few warnings for if you forget to bring trinkets or food, but there are many other things you can forget that could cost the mission. Heroes can equip 4 combat skills out of 7 and come with a random 4 unlocked. There is considerable variation in builds, tactics and synergy to explore. The game clearly displays the stats of each skill and what it does. It also shows what party positions the skill can be used from, what enemy positions can be targeted and if multiple targets are hit. It can be a little overwhelming at first but once you get used to the detail you will be able to make informed decisions. I found it annoying that you cannot rearrange the slots though. One hero could have a skill in the 3rd slot allowing you to press "3" on the keyboard to use it, but another hero might have it in slot 4. There are also camp skills (again a random 4 out of 7) that are used on dungeons that are longer than "short", where you will be given 1 firewood item for each allowed rest. You have no control over how many rests are allowed. Each class has a few unique camp skills and everyone has access to a few generic ones. You choose when and where to camp inside a mission (only in rooms) and have a certain number of time points to spend on camp skills. Healing, stress reduction, combat buffs, scouting and keeping watch to avoid being attacked while sleeping (this is very bad!!!!) are your options. The point limit means you have to carefully decide which skills to use.

Food and torches are the absolute minimum supplies to bring on missions. Food can be used to heal out of combat but is mainly used for camping and hunger checks. You always have the option to not eat but heroes who go without food take health and stress damage. Not bringing enough food could cost the mission, or worse. Torches are needed to light the way. This has no effect on the player's ability to see but the light level gives specific buffs and debuffs. In short, combat is more difficult and thus characters are more likely to die (take more health and stress damage) in the dark, while loot drops increase. Light also improves scouting, which is a random chance of revealing the position of traps, enemies and loot. The variety of other provisions are used to help keep heroes alive and/or to interact with hazards for more positive effects. Curios are objects that can be interacted with to provide randomly positive or negative effects, and sometimes certain provisions can be expended to change the odds. Provisions cost gold and the inventory is limited with found gold and other types of loot only stacking to limited amounts. You also do not get 100% return on unused supplies. So there is an in depth system of risk vs reward here. How well stocked do you need to be? Will you discard supplies in favor of loot? Once you discard something it is gone for good so these are very important decisions. You can also continue exploring a mission after completion to try and squeeze more loot. Or abandon the mission at any time outside combat, which might be the right call if things are going poorly.

The missions are set up like a 2D board of rooms and corridors. Navigation is very simple with only forwards and backwards being options, and rooms are more like fixed points that you click on to travel between. Going backwards causes stress, so it is something to be avoided. Enemies do not move around but wait at fixed spots for you, though new battles and traps can appear in previously explored areas. I once had a mini boss ambush me during a camp, and then attack me again in a corridor after I fled, camped again and tried to take another route. Combat is very tactical with a turn order that shuffles every turn, so you can't fully predict it. Enemy stats are clearly displayed, as well as how many actions they have left this turn. Their skills are listed only after you have experienced them (which can make first time encounters harrowing), but the stats of skills are not shown beyond little icons that show what nasty effect the skill has. Beyond simple damage, enemies can inflict damage over time (bleed and blight), stuns, disease and stress, change the position of allies and/or enemies and cause a variety of debuffs. The good news is that hero skills can do the same things. Many of these effects can be incredibly debilitating; a stun to a healer that prevents a life saving heal or changing the order of your party to the point that an entire turn (or more) is lost. Stress is one of the most important features of the game and you will learn to hate enemies that cause it. Quite simply, stress is like mental damage that depletes mental hit points (only it starts at 0 and goes up). Once a hero depletes their stress points (measured as having 100 stress), they will have a mental breakdown and the true game begins. These breakdowns cause afflictions (such as paranoia, selfish and fearful) or less commonly virtues. Afflicted characters will make speech balloon comments that cause stress to other characters, attack party members, act on their own including changing position and skipping their turn, refuse healing, refuse to eat, refuse to use camp skills and refuse to change position. If all that is not bad enough when their stress goes up to 200 they will have a heart attack, which if it does not kill them outright leaves them at 0 health with very high odds of death from any damage. Heroes who drop to 0 health do not automatically die, but they have a % chance to die from anything, including enemy attacks that inflict 0 health damage. This does give you a chance to save people but simply dropping to 0 health (called at death's door) gives incurable penalties for the rest of the mission. This is a really neat feature that both helps to offset the brutal nature of combat and increase tension. Virtues on the other hand significantly reduce stress, automatically grant buffs to the party and make the hero less likely to die. A single virtue can turn a hopeless situation into a victory. Stats like health and damage output do not increase anywhere near the amount in traditional rpgs so heroes are always at risk. Add to everything difficult mini bosses that can appear at any battle and the gimmicky main bosses whose locations are hidden.

There are a few special events that mix up the gameplay, but for the most part the gameplay is repetitive. Do a mission, check upgrades, cure those heroes and then repeat with the next group. On the other hand missions are fairly short so the game lends well to just playing for an hour here and there. The atmosphere deserves special mention. From the constant comments of the narrator (who seems like he has his face buried in a thesaurus) and the ambient sounds that get scarier as light decreases, to the way the simple art style and animations increase tension by making every hit feel visceral and every miss feel either heartsinking or ecstatic, depending on who did it. Darkest Dungeon is a game about stress, both the heroes and yours. You will feel uncertainty, trepidation, frustration and despair. I personally felt discouraged from even playing sometimes, especially late game, due to the possibility of things going horribly wrong and losing my investment in characters, resources and items. But that is the nature of the game. People die, things can be lost and setbacks can occur. The question is; can you persevere?

Pro

• Low system requirements
• Great atmosphere
• Excellent display of information, from difficulty levels, goals, stats, skills, items, heroes, enemies
• Quirks (especially negative ones) and afflictions give heroes character and make the game more interesting
• Excellent tactical depth for builds, heroes and combat
• High odds of fleeing from combat (does not allow hit and run cheese)
• Can freely abandon missions
• Unpredictable and highly tactical combat
• Heroes who return from the darkest dungeon no longer count towards the hero limit

Con

• Saving and loading cannot be used to undo bad things (there should be an easier mode that allows traditional saving)
• Hamlet interface is a little awkward. Ways to quickly view and perform frequent tasks would be useful (like remove all trinkets, favourite trinkets and sort by that, auto assign stress recovery, see everything that can be upgraded at a glance)
• Putting a hero in for stress recovery or the sanitarium does not refund the cost if you cancel
• Game loop is repetitive
• Provision costs are not fully refunded upon completing a mission
• Can’t drop loot to pick it up later
• Constantly using torches and watching the light level is annoying. Be nice if there was an option to automate it
• No way to rearrange hero skills
• Can only take 1 party out each week
• Some enemies feel a bit too OP or focus on weak targets too much

9/10

Though I am not necessarily the hugest roguelike fan--mostly because I don't actually enjoy having to replay things since I grew up in days where when you died that was it-- I'm impressed by Darkest Dungeon. This was a very hyped up game for a lot of people but I purposely avoided any information about it because I knew I'd play it and I wanted to go in blind.

This is deep and it twists roguelike conventions around in interesting ways. There's perma-death but you constantly recruit new people when you're back in town. Sometimes these people won't journey with someone else because certain aspects of their character don't clash. Is that frustrating sometimes? Yeah it is, but in a way that makes you think ahead like it's a game of chess. On top of that, everybody has their own personalities, both good and bad, and these affect the outcome, whether it's how they cure their stress or how they interact with others and deal with issues in the dungeons.

Around town there are different ways to cure stress, there are buildings to upgrade by using things you find in the dungeons, and it just blends together light strategy elements in an effective way. It can be a little overwhelming but it makes you think, something most games of this ilk don't really do. It's a genre built on repetition but Darkest Dungeon feels less so.

When you're actually exploring all kinds of shit can go wrong. There are stress levels and your characters will react in different ways. There are traps to deal with, enemies to fight, and you never know what exactly is going to happen... or what you're going to find. The combat system is noteworthy as well: your characters are in a line and attacks only go so far, so placement is key. It makes it endlessly frustrating when an enemy hits you and rearranges your party because something so simple could literally fuck up your battle. There are plenty of status ailments, like bleeding, that you need to tend to, and if your light goes out then things get harder. You have to feed them, heal them, keep torches, etc. By the way, your characters will die. This is not easy.

It also has a really endearing, comic book-y (in a grittier sense) art style to it and music that perfectly fits the impending doom that awaits you.

I've thrown around the worlds "overwhelming," "frustrating" and whatnot because this game is all of those things. It stressed me out, it made me tense. I barely escaped a dungeon with all my characters once, and I felt so good about it. Making preparations before entering was stressful because you only have so much money and you need to prepare adequately or it may spell failure. The only flaw I can see is that sometimes the difficulty will ramp up randomly and that's a little discouraging because a steady increase is always better than sudden spikes. I'm aware that it's a roguelike, but being punished is not enjoyable to me most of the time.