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]
