Not Recommended
Darkest Dungeon is addictive and genuinely fun to play. Seriously, you will probably have a great time for at least 50 hours. Managing your party, experimenting with different character combinations, and watching those setups work as intended is extremely satisfying. Going on expeditions, gathering loot, and succeeding in difficult battles—especially against bosses—feels rewarding. Upgrading the town, managing resources, taking care of your heroes’ health, and improving their equipment are also engaging parts of the game.
So why do I not recommend it?
Because only after 50 hours did I realize how much of that time had been consumed by artificial difficulty. That is where my negative criticism begins.
At a certain point, the grind becomes excessive. You start earning money, but often find yourself stuck within the same limited amount of gold. You cannot afford to take too many risks, so you end up trapped in short, low-paying missions that barely allow you to progress.
Character progression is slow, and you are forced to maintain strong, weak, and average heroes at the same time. Constant rotation is mandatory because you simply cannot rely exclusively on your strongest characters. Improving them is already difficult and time-consuming, but eventually a specific event occurs—one that completely caught me off guard—and it is impossible to skip without being severely punished.
Ignoring this event causes you to lose upgrades from your town.
That may sound like an interesting consequence, but it is not. A single upgrade can require dozens of missions to gather the necessary materials. Losing one means throwing away roughly five hours of progress, possibly even more.
Choosing to face the event can be even worse, because there is a very high chance that at least two of your heroes will die. Developing a single character can take around the same amount of time. I just lost three of my best heroes, and at that point I had only one level-six character. In other words, I was not even properly prepared for the mission, yet the game forced me to either attempt it or accept an enormous punishment.
The encounter also involves an absurd amount of RNG that heavily favors the enemies. They repeatedly land critical hits, use area-of-effect attacks, possess high resistances, and, of course, inflict massive amounts of stress.
When I saw the consequences of that event, I realized I would have to invest several more hours—possibly dozens—just to train replacement characters. That became completely unreasonable, especially after I discovered that the same event can happen more than once.
I do not recommend this game to anyone who values their time.
It is disappointing because Darkest Dungeon is fundamentally a very good game. However, its late game is filled with artificial difficulty designed to inflate the playtime and create the false impression of a naturally long and challenging experience.
