Darkest Dungeon captured my attention at once with its gorgeously hand-drawn Lovecraftian aesthetic, and then it stole away 150 hours of my time with its streamlined yet brutally tactical gameplay. While I had some issues with its extremely long progression and grindy midgame, I always enjoyed delving into the various dungeons full of grotesque and formidable enemies.
The choices I was presented with during the dungeon expeditions and hamlet management always felt weighty and consequential, especially in the early game when I was building up my roster of meat puppet—uh, skilled adventurers. I was especially impressed with how Red Hook added great emergent stories and tactical decision space with its stress mechanic, setting Darkest Dungeon apart as a unique experience in both theme and gameplay.
The one negative that kept this game from being perfect for me was the length. I’ve read that the radiant difficulty fixes some of this, but in normal difficulty I often felt like I was on babysitting duty for low level adventurers, because of the odd level gated access to certain areas. The titular Darkest Dungeon also constantly required fresh high level characters in order to complete its quests, which only added more grinding hours. I enjoyed the game enough to work through it, but I was feeling exhausted after the credits rather than excited for another foray into the dungeons.
I would recommend this game to the masochists out there who love unforgiving, deep games that demand that you learn and master its systems. The kind of people who only play XCOM on ironman mode because it just doesn't have that high anymore without the threat of utter annihilation. If that sounds like a fun time, you will enjoy Darkest Dungeon.
The choices I was presented with during the dungeon expeditions and hamlet management always felt weighty and consequential, especially in the early game when I was building up my roster of meat puppet—uh, skilled adventurers. I was especially impressed with how Red Hook added great emergent stories and tactical decision space with its stress mechanic, setting Darkest Dungeon apart as a unique experience in both theme and gameplay.
The one negative that kept this game from being perfect for me was the length. I’ve read that the radiant difficulty fixes some of this, but in normal difficulty I often felt like I was on babysitting duty for low level adventurers, because of the odd level gated access to certain areas. The titular Darkest Dungeon also constantly required fresh high level characters in order to complete its quests, which only added more grinding hours. I enjoyed the game enough to work through it, but I was feeling exhausted after the credits rather than excited for another foray into the dungeons.
I would recommend this game to the masochists out there who love unforgiving, deep games that demand that you learn and master its systems. The kind of people who only play XCOM on ironman mode because it just doesn't have that high anymore without the threat of utter annihilation. If that sounds like a fun time, you will enjoy Darkest Dungeon.