Darkest Dungeon®

This game feels like 50% skill and 50% pure luck. Your hero has 5 Speed and the enemy has 1? Doesn't matter. The enemy can still act first, sometimes even twice before your team gets going. Then comes the chain of bad luck: attacks miss despite having high accuracy, enemies land multiple critical hits in a row, and suddenly a run you've invested 20 hours into is over. The biggest problem is that Darkest Dungeon often feels like it punishes the player regardless of their decisions. You can lose because: -The game gives you a streak of terrible loot. -Enemies get multiple favorable turn rolls despite being slower. -Several critical hits happen back-to-back. -Enemies repeatedly focus your healer while your tank is marked and supposed to draw attention. Any one of these can be devastating. Several happening in sequence can completely destroy a run. What makes it even more frustrating is the lack of transparency. The game doesn't clearly show turn order, initiative calculations, or enough information to let players understand why things are happening. I enjoy difficult games. I don't mind being punished for mistakes. What I dislike is losing because the dice decided it was time for my campaign to end. If you enjoy heavy RNG and the possibility of watching hours of progress disappear due to factors outside your control, you may love this game. I didn't.

Fun game as long as you remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.

My experience with the Darkest Dungeon can be likened to a really dizzying rollercoaster ride. I received the game from a great friend of mine and decided to go in completely blind to the experience. On my initial playthrough I quickly fell in love with the amazing hand-drawn artstyle, the superb Lovecraftian inspired creature and environmental design, the soundtrack and the marvelous voice acting of the Ancestor (RIP Wayne June) however, the gameplay to me was extremely decisive. The combat looks pretty great despite the limitations of hand-drawn sprites and has a large amount of complexitiy to it. It's got all of your basic turn-based RPG elements such as stuns, debuffs, dodging, DOTs and the like. This is fine as I have played a fair amount of similar games but what Darkest Dungeon does to separate itself is taking the RNG to its true maximum. It's all about percentages. Percentage to hit, to miss, to crit, to apply DOT, to apply debuffs, to dodge and to resist an attack that would put your hero in the grave. This results in the most randomized gameplay that you could think of. Sometimes you'll crit the boss to oblivion before they even do anything special and at other times, your backliner is pulled in front and critted four times in the first fight of the dungeon. It can feel brutally unfair. The worst thing is that progress is permanent. Your heroes level up over time, but when they die they stay dead and all of their equipment, levels, quirks, trinkets and skills are gone with them. It can be incredibly frustrating to spend multiple real life hours to painstakingly level-up a team of four heroes, only for the dice to roll against you and have your entire team die, pretty much making you lose, possibly, an entire days progress. The game will absolutely curbstomp the ♥♥♥♥ out of you if it feels like it. This is what initially made me quit the game for pretty more than half of a year. But just like the Ancestor, there was an insistent gnawing in the back of my mind. What if I just didn't *truly* pay attention? What if, just like the people say, the game's RNG can be mitigated by smart team compositions, good play, proper trinket and quirk management? What if I'm not yet done, with the Darkest Dungeon? So I went back. I started to truly pay attention to what the game's mechanics are about and even though there was a lot of anger, lot of deaths and lots of struggle, I managed to beat the game on its normal difficulty. It was an absolute triumph. Then I decided to push myself to the limit and gradually completed all content of the Color of Madness and the Crimson Court DLCs. Not long afterwards, I decided I will not be satisfied until I complete the game on Stygian. Now, that I beat Stygian, I'm slowly starting to think about a possible Bloodmoon run. This game is truly an incredible experience for people who like challenges and are just relentlessly at them until they're conquered. The game has taken a lot out of me. There were tears, shouts, screams and most importantly, broken furniture. But there was also a sense of accomplishment, relief and genuine joy that you can truly rarely come by these days. If all of this sounds good to you, I implore you to give it a try. If you come to take your time to truly, truly understand the game's mechanics, what'll await you is an incredibly fun and brutal game filled with love for the genres its inspired by. [b] Great Adversity has a beauty, it is the fire that tempers the blade. [/b]

I gave this game a tremendous try. I really did. I even 100%'ed it and got all the achievements, just to make sure I wasn't missing something. It's so highly received, I thought that I must be the problem. But I'm not. This game is just... mediocre. I don't even hate it, I just spent 60 hours of my life over the past few weeks exploring every inch of the damn thing. I just don't like it. The moments where I had fun or felt like I had overcome a challenge were few and far between, which is ironic because this game is notoriously difficult. Even I have to agree that it's hard. And it's not even a "good hard", either. I never felt like a lot of the difficulties I came across were my fault or that I was unprepared or anything like that. I simply got unlucky. The game doesn't use difficulty appropriately. It's not like other infamously "hard" games, where if you mess up, it's typically your fault. Not in Darkest dungeon. If you get railed by the game, it's because the game rolled a dice and decided to not fudge the numbers to make the players have fun, as if it were a terrible dungeon master in D&D. Every single time I got frustrated in this game, it was up to chance and fortune didn't favor me. Failed death rolls, ambushes that shouldn't have been there, every single chest in a dungeon being a mimic, among other things. I never felt like I got screwed over and went, "Well, that was my fault." Not once. I always entered quests as prepared as I thought I could be, and yet I was still caught unaware. Maybe that's the point, maybe the game is trying to display some sort of philosophy of chaos. I'm sure others like it, it just doesn't seem like a particularly innovative title for all the chance-based difficulty. I wish Steam had a sideway thumb for "meh", but because I have to pick a side, I'm going with a thumbs down. If you're expecting to have fun with Darkest Dungeon after playing other "hard" games, I would warn you to not bother.

The art is what drew me into the game initially. It's so gritty and dark and heavy on the shading in a way that really emphasises the gloomy and macabre mood that's being set. Love the story, love the characters -- I don't think any of the designs are a miss. They're all unique in their own ways and stand out, making each character easily recognisable imo. The game can get a bit frustrating at times but to be fair I think that's the point. Darkest Dungeon isn't supposed to be a cake walk y'know? It's gritty both in the atmosphere and the gameplay. You're supposed to suffer, to struggle and feel the burden of loss and the consequences of your errors. That aspect of it is depicted really well, and I think it really makes you feel like you are there in the dungeons. Overall love the game, very enjoyable! I made my ex-boyfriend play it and he really enjoyed it too (I promise I did not hold him at gunpoint to say that ;D). Also the Flagellant is so hot oh my god the things I'd do to that guy are so unfathomably insane my lawyer (me) has advised me not to comment further.

I have to say, I'm totally addicted to this game. Even though I get frustrated with my character dying so often, after all the effort I put into developing them, when I think about how to act like the villain in the game not caring about my character's fate, or just seeing them as mere pawns it's actually a great way to protect my own sanity . . . 100%. Highly recommend it.

This game taught me a valuable lesson in which not everyone comes out alive, heroes can and will die whether you tried your damned-est or not. But that's the beauty in it, it forces you to think, to make decisions you may or may not want to make. 10/10 would recommend

This is game has so much going for it. But the design is horrible. If you don't look up how a boss fight dungeon is before hand. There's a high chance you might not have a decent composition for it and will just force lose the boss fight. I like punishing games, but this game genuinely feels bad consistently A lot of the basic combat feels very nice, you can pick a ton of different compositions and win reliably if you know what you're doing. But the developers have forced trial and error into the game, which I don't like. I would not recommend it to anyone whose even remotely close to a casual gamer. You will get a lot of good runs going and then just get hard stopped and lose.

I wanted to like this one so badly. The art and atmosphere is great. But the grindiness combined with the degree of randomness in such a punishing setting is simply too much for me. It just feels like an excercise in frustration. I don't want to spend hours leveling and gearing a hero for them to die in seconds to no fault of my own. Only 4.6% have completed the game and that includes the easiest difficulty. I think that tells you all you need to know.

I don't see any terms on the home page which might be why I missed this but a EULA popped up for me recently on this game and despite being primarily a single player experience it characterizes it's self as an "online game" and requires you to agree that they can take it way from you at any time. Basically they're asking you to pay for a game that you won't own after you pay for it. You'll just get to borrow it as long as they let you. It's a fun game. Don't get me wrong, but there's no way I would have bought this game if I knew that I wasn't actually getting a game for my money, but just a chance to play it as long as the game makers let me. Steam really should make it clearer when they sell you a game that you aren't getting a game for your money but just potentially temporary access to one.