Nioh (PS4): Why do I do this to myself?

I find myself getting annoyed by term "Souls Clone". I get that Dark Souls is amazing. Hell I've been advocating that series since Demon's Souls before people even gave a shit about that series. But not every game that is hard and has old video game aesthetics with a new shine is a souls game. But that doesn't stop every reviewer and developer from dubbing every game that loseable XP and a murderous difficulty a "souls game".

Now I had heard that Team Ninja were dabbling with the concept of a "souls clone" set in mythological japan. OK, that's a cool setting and I do generally like these games. So I got into the alpha and played for a few hours. I didn't like it. Then I got into the beta, and I didn't care of it either. So I felt I wasn't going to get it since the early tests didn't sell me. Then I started seeing reviews from almost every source that this game is very good. Not only that but it completely sold out of its first printing of the game. I had to be missing something, so I decided to take one more try and try to force myself though....

NIOH(PS4)

The story of Nioh starts from the voice of a man named William. William was a commissioned pirate once under the service of queen Elizabeth I. She sought after a resource of power known as Amrita to help win her conflict with Spain, but after using their services the pirates were imprisoned in order to keep Amrita a secret. 

William is imprisoned in the Tower of London for his role in the raids, but with the help of a fish like guardian spirit that watches over him called Saoirse, William makes an attempt to jailbreak and fight his way to freedom. During his escape he is confronted by an occult looking man called Edward Kelley, who is using amrita to corrupt and turn people and things into monsters. After corrupting an executioner in an attempt to kill William, Kelley realizes that William's guardian spirit would be useful to find more amrita, and imprisons Saoirse in a crystal and makes his escape to Japan where amrita can be found in abundance.

Saoirse has protected William since he was a child and has been with him ever since, so William will not stand for her abduction and gives chase. Unfortunately he lands in Japan in 1600, a time where the entire country is embroiled in war and ravaged by the demonic Yokai and Oni that overrun it. With no option but to press forward, William studies the way of the samuari, picks up the first discarded weapon he can find, and heads in search of Kelley.

The story of Nioh is actually a great deal more complex than that since this actually does parody the story of the Sengoku/Edo period of Japan when the country was at war to unify the nation under a single banner. William is more or less an homage to William Adams, who is considered by history to be the first Englishman to step foot in Japan, and was the first Caucasian samurai (so this isn't a case of whitewashing).

In fact, a large majority of the characters are based and off of real life counterparts who had prominent roles during this period. Even the cartoonishly gothy Edward Kelley was actually an occultist and alchemist who claimed he could use a mirror to talk to spirits. So while this game does take many wild liberties in the name of dark fantasy, there was a significant amount of homework done in setting up the backdrop for this game. 

There is an abundance of cutscenes of William looking lost at political meetings.
It's actually pretty fitting, since you won't have a clue about the conversation either.

Now, as I have mentioned before this game is very often billed as a Japanese Dark Souls, (which is ridiculous since the Souls games are Japanese to begin with). But while there are certainly there are some main mechanics that generally defined what the Souls series is, I would say that Nioh has a much more arcadey feel to the action the slow paced slog that is a Souls game. If I had to give it better comparison, I would say that it mixes the Bloodborne with, unsurprisingly, Team Ninja's other claim to fame Ninja Gaiden.

Instead of using the shoulder button based combat one might be used to at this point, Nioh keeps the a more traditional face button system for light & heavy attacks, dodge, and interactions. The shoulders are used for blocking, drawing your ranged weapons and firing them. The last shoulder button changes your attack stance from low, medium, and high. Your stance determines what kind of combat style you wish to engage with be it light fast swinging but lower damaging attacks, a balanced set, or a slow clubbing high damage range of attacks.

But then you also have a number of tricks to use as well such as the living weapon. In your pursuit of your guardian spirit, you get the help of others, and when fully charged you can essentially use their power to go super saiyan and deal massive amounts of damage as well as a brief spell of invulnerability. Each spirit has different attributes as well as passive effects, so with the right tweaking of stats and gods, you can create a self feeding living weapon form so long as you are constantly putting enemies down to replenish it.

And THEN you also have three different sets of skill points to go over multiple skill trees such as one of each of the various weapons you get in the game, your ninjutsu abilities, and your onmyo magics. Some of these abilities have passive that affect your character regardless of what skills you choose to purchase. Some of them have very specific uses so you really want to comb through the skill trees to kind of get an idea of what it is you want to go after. Setting on a few weapons types, and what magics you want to shoot for. 

Everyone one of those options at the top are for a different skill tree.

The stamina system is slightly different because you have a pulse move you can do that if timed at te end of the combo, can cause your stamina to regenerate faster. Yokai also leave waves darkness on the ground that slow your stamina regeneration so you have to pulse in those spots to dissipate them. I never remembered to do this. It felt like it was adding a stem to an already complex battle system.

I actually akin the combat more to Bloodborne than I would Dark Souls because of the high speed nature of the game. While you can be severely bogged down with heavy armors and equipment, you can still run at a generally fast pace, and combat still moves incredibly quickly. Breakneck base would certainly be a fitting term because it was this nature that had me struggle so much when I played through alpha and beta.

Nioh does not use a single large open world since for the course of the story your are traveling over nearly the entirety of Japan, so instead you go to major territories of the country an it is broken up into unlocking stages. Most of the story missions will be a long sprawling map with shrines (bonfires) to level up and checkpoint at before working your way to a spectacular boss fight, some of them will have only the one and a relatively simple objective for you to complete be it find something specific, reach a certain point, or fight a series of enemies or boss.

After completing the level, you are taken back to your map screen which also functions as a shrine so you can spend your accumulated amrita (souls) to level up, buy equipment, upgrade, set your abilities and so forth. So on one hand you might find that the world loses a sense of massiveness because its not just one big interconnected map, but on the other you might find it to be less harrowing because eventually the map will come to an end and you will have a chance to catch a breather and recover. In addition to that, by switching to the stage system replaying old locations to grind, level up, and explore seems less tedious since things move faster and areas are shorter.

And you are going to need that break to sort out the amount of items the game is going to barf all over you like an all night saki bender at a hostess club. In games like these you typically find new interesting weapons or armor in areas of the game that relate to the area you are actually exploring it or sometimes get specific drops from enemies that mirror their own equipment. In Nioh there are five major weapon types (before dlc) and two variants of ranged weapons. As you play through the levels, loot corpses, and find treasures you will be washed with a wave of equipment constantly loading up your inventory.

But then the loot also has rarity levels between common to legendary. Marked in very MMO colors to signify how rare it is. The more rare the item the better familiarity you can get by using the weapon more frequently and thus increase it strength, (or you can just use a whetstone and just boost it to full strength). Once you do if you opt to use this for crafting you might be able to carry over some of the abilities to a new weapon. While armor generally gives your character a new look, you are going to find yourself mix-matching almost every 20 steps because loot is mad irrelevant almost immediately.

The defensive gear does this as well. Just getting constantly flooded with a nonstop wave of equipment. Almost every piece of equipment has a myriad of next to negligible statistic changes of minor point values and fractional percentages. Some abilities highlighted so they have increased ability if you wear the entirety of that armor set for a bonus. The numbers are excessive or confusing. I finished the game without ever knowing what number exactly determined how much defense I actually had and what modifiers were actually contributed to what it was doing. The inventory mechanic in this game is as big of a fucking mess as is was in the original Mass Effect.

I find using the blacksmith to also be equally confusing. There is nearly no purpose for using it from what I can tell. I never seemed to enough of or the right materials to make anything respectively new, you can only Soul Match and item if its of a lower lever to something you are trying to merge it with to bring it up to speed, sell values are pretty weak from what I can tell to begin with. It just doesn't make sense to waste your time using the blacksmith when you are literally going to find better weapons the moment you kill something new, and you can use your old equipment as free XP dumps if you offer them up to shrines, so unless you are strapped for cash for some reason there is little reason to be here.

Now admittedly, I am a sucker for Shinto lore and Japanese architecture and iconography so the setting of this game is right up my alley, even if its a little samey after a while.  Many of the game levels will take you through Japanese fishing villages with small shacks and homes, Shrines, large wooden ninja manors and palaces with hidden doors and trap floors, and caves. Lots of caves. There actually seems like there are a significant number of levels that take you inside of caves an mountains for some reason. Admittedly those levels aren't exactly works of art. You've seen one cave you've seen them all.

Similarly, this game features some very impressive and interesting monster design and that's really what allows the setting to shine. Typically the majority of the enemies you fight are various dudes in armor or ninjas, buy scattered throughout the levels you will fight various Oni and Yokai demons and ghosts that ends with a spectacular boss fight, usually connected to the level in some way. The visual design of all of them are impressive and amazing. I would often find myself marveling at their design. The ice maiden, Yuki-Onna, and her boss fight is an excellent example of this.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention how good the cutscenes look, if not for their laughable content. While very clearly computer animated, all of the character models are well designed and attractive, every with their own distinct looks about them. So while the names can be confusing by following who is who, you won't confuse anyone by appearances in this one. The downfall is almost every one of them is William sitting with important political figures in Japan, clearly bewildered by the conversation before leaving to slash up more demons.

My biggest complaints about Nioh, however all stem from the overall difficulty of the game for various reasons. First and foremost, don't give me an recommended level for when I should try to do something, because it doesn't mean anything. As I said above the defensive item statistics are all confusing, and it seems regardless of what sets of numbers you have selected, even some of the easiest enemies in the game can still cut you to ribbons if you are careless or get ganged up on. This game has one setting, hard.

Two, Nioh doesn't seem to follow its own combat mechanics for enemies that you have to suffer, giving them a significant advantage. Chiefly its in regard to the stamina trait. When you swing your weapon, dodge, block, run, or take damage, it uses your stamina. Once it depletes you have to wait to recharge before you can attack. If you try to block with no stamina the gauge goes red and your guard is broken leaving you open to attack. Whatever, this is pretty standard in this kinda game.

The problem with it comes in on a series of these one on one character duels you do as sub missions throughout the course of the game. These missions can suck my fucking ass. First off, regardless of your level they are next to impossible to do. But what makes them more frustrating is that you can't build a strategy because things that drain your stamina don't affect enemies the same way. I've had duels where my opponent strings together this massive 6 attack combo that doesn't even so much as lower their gauge by 10%. I've unloaded even longer combos that get guarded that don't move their gauge by 10%. Yet if I'm on offense or defense, I can't keep my stamina up to save my life. One of these fights resulted with me losing my shit on stream and smashing my controller beyond repair.

Now, there is one specific saving grace in this whole game that saved my ass in the form of one of the Omnyo spells in the form of the Sloth talisman. I read this was the key to toning down the difficulty and it truly did help with a lot of the fights, because it slows the opponent down for a brief period which makes the combat a little less twitchy (but no less dangerous). The problem here is when I would research how to get it, I'd hear of a nerf. When I'd look to see if it did get nerfed I would be treated to pages upon pages of people screaming in forums about how it needs to be removed, and "fucking casuals" are ruining the game and should go back to go back to playing Animal Crossing if its too hard.

A very early starting boss fight is a real struggle, the moment you get sloth it becomes laughable.

Listen assholes. You don't nerf shit from single player games if you think it makes it to easy for you. You not use to increase you challenge. You fucking nerf something if it causes the game to be unbalanced. And shit can only be unbalanced if A.) It is a multiplayer game that causes an unfair advantage. B.) breaks the games intended experience. Sloth magic is not harming people who don't want to use it even by fighting the shadows of players that died because it just makes the challenge harder for you.

Gamers, please. I bitched about this shit when the Gamergate debacle was really at the forefront of the news but seriously get this shit through you head: We are not special. Everybody games now. Nobody gives a shit that we can play through the original Dark Souls one handed blind folded on a guitar hero controller. So this unnecessary divide of hardcore gamer or filthy casual is fucking retarded and needs to stop. All you are managing to do is create a divide of a culture where one doesn't need to exist. I play Smite, but is to turns out, I don't need to venomously hate people who like League of Legends or Dota 2. Fucking knock it off. People who like games are cool, so if someone needs help maybe offer tips or ideas instead of berating someone as a casual. Fuckin' morons.

Why does there always have to be effn spiders...

So ultimately, my big issue with Nioh is this: When I would play the game I would be asked by a friend if the game was fun. I would go on to say that how it looks great, it controls well, the characters are well designed, the combat is fluid and fast, and so on. To which he would respond by saying: "But is it fun???" and while I could come up with all the reasons in the world for how this is one of the more technically sound games of 2017 the bottom line of things is I wasn't getting that sense of satisfaction of getting past a difficult segment like when I would get past and area in Dark Souls.

So the question then becomes, does "fun factor" count as a tangible merit if the game is good or not? I certainly put in enough time to say it was a worthwhile purchase. I was able to see the game through to the end. There are few mechanical flaws that I can come up but nothing that was a deal breaker. It's setting and character design was well done and nice to look at. And all of these things are certainly marks in it favor. But if honestly sit and ask myself if I enjoyed my time with Nioh, gun to my head, yes or no answer, it's going to have to be no.

The bottom line is outside of that first push through the opening area of the game, I never had that sense of relief of accomplishment I would have when I proceed through Dark Souls.  Just a continued persistent annoyance knowing something harder was waiting. That I would die to some simple enemy because of a cheap death. Have to grind and sort out about 2 billion items to power up marginally to fumble through the next boss fight. It was tedious. I didn't even have that break through like with Darkest Dungeon where I suddenly understood how things work and was able to take it for what it is.

Nioh is a well designed, very beautiful looking game. It is certain going to have its niche audience, and looking at it objectively I can see why would think that this game is very good. But the fact of the matter is that I played through it out of annoyance and stubbornness, not enjoyment. And last I checked that was the whole fuckin' point of buying video games. It's getting a release on PC so its user base will grow. But I can't in good conscious give the game a proper recommendation, because when asked if its fun I could never just say yes. There was always some qualifier.  Purchase and play at own risk.

Maybe GamePro was onto something with their Fun-Factor score.

The Darkest Dungeon (PC): Taking me to a very dark place.

Grrrr... This fucking game... So ok, when you hear about games that are funded through kickstarter, you usually think one of two things: A.) it is grossly over funded and either never comes out or is poorly released. Or B.) ends up being a clever little indie darling with some seriously passionate fanbases. This one tends to fall more into category B.

Much like my now beloved Undertale, I had started to hear some rumblings from my friends about this title and the challenge it presented. During the most recent steam summer sale, I saw that it came down in price. As someone who is always looking for something to play and willing to test games that inherently "hard", I cracked my knuckles, clicked purchase, downloaded, and sat down with.....

THE DARKEST DUNGEON (PC)

Darkest Dungeon opens with a monologue from one of your relatives lamenting the ruined state of your family. Basically recanting the lavish manor they used to dwell in. Enjoying wealth and decadence ad nauseam, he began to tire of traditional luxuries and started to seek out the depths of the rumor plagued estate. Digging underneath he began to find dark tombs, tunnels, and eventually what appears to be a gateway to something otherwordly and unholy.

He writes his letter, imploring you to return to your home. That the madness from his work has spun out of control, and the manor is ransacked with corruption and it continues to spread to the surrounding area. You are begged to reclaim your birthright, take back the manor, descent the darkest dungeon and put an end to all of this. And as he finishes the letter, he takes the cowards way out and eats a bullet for lunch.

Whew. Well, there is a chipper start to this game and honestly it doesn't even stop there. The moment the cut-scene ends before you get to the title screen. the game gives you a small paragraph about the difficulty.  It's not even a gentle "hey this game is a little challenging" kinda thing. It comes right out and tells you "Darkest Dungeon is not for the weak. It's going to grab you, it's going to fuck you, hurt you, kill you, and then do it again. Don't like it, sissy? Piss off." (I'm paraphrasing.)

Allllll right then, good to know. So the game begins after your name your estate, with you on a small tutorial map to travel to the hamlet where your manor resides. This little map basically runs you through the basic mechanics of the game. From a technical standpoint, the control is very simple. The entirety of the game is played through mouse controls and for the most part they are pretty intuitive. This is good because on a number of occasions, I would have really appreciated the game to explain some of its rules to me.

Basically you are presented your characters on a screen in a location in party order, you are presented with the stats and abilities of your selected character directly below them, and to the right of that you have the carried supplies with you, and a map of all the locations to visit. On this beginning map, its a straight line. You are basically directed to select an adjacent square on the map to indicate which direction you would like to go, Indicated by 4 squares connecting the two large ones.

The screen transitions to a different area and now you are on a path. The entirety of the game is essentially 2.5d so you can only click and hold ahead of you to move forward, or behind you to trudge back. As you press forward a small torch icon will indicate your movement along the map. The majority of the time, all of these spaces will remain darkened out until you investigate them. During this introductory stage you are taught the basic game mechanics and combat which we'll get to in a minute.

Eventually, You will get through this tutorial stage and be brought to the hamlet outside of your manor. This essentially will be your base of operations in preparing for the darkest dungeon. It starts off meager and small. Basically a stage coach to bring in new warriors, A graveyard to see who you lost and how, place to see unlocked cut scenes or hear monologues, and a church and tavern to relive stress. As you play through the game though, you will unlock a blacksmith for better gear, a guild and survivalist to get you new and upgrade skills, and caravan who sells trinkets for bonus effects.

Once you have done what you need to in town, you can embark on the surrounding areas to complete quests for loot and levels. There are really only 5 levels in the game: The Ruins of your manor, the Cove by the water, The Warrens surrounding the hamlet, the Weald beneath the hamlet, and the Darkest Dungeon. When selecting, you are prompted with a quest goal, the length of the dungeon, and what your reward will be for completion. At the start they should all be level one, but as you increase you will get level 3 and level 5 dungeons to explore. Warriors who reach these level marks will find the lower ones beneath them and won't explore. So don't over grind.

I apologize to all my friends who are going to die on this crusade.

When you assemble your team and pick your dungeon, you are taken to a small shop to outfit your group. This can make your break your mission right from the start. Here you can buy food, torches, and expendable items such as herbs, bandages, shovels, keys, and anti-venom. All of these can be critically important depending on where you go or who you fight, so you want to be able to stock up. The problem is you only get 16 item slots so you may not want to over do it, otherwise you will have no room to take any loot back with you. I tend to overload on food, grab a few torches, and handful of each supply and maybe a key.

There are some important aspects about dungeon crawling in this game you need to be aware of. This game isn't just difficult due to the fights in the game, there are a lot of little mechanics that play into how all the dungeon crawling works, and all of it effects you in different ways. First and foremost it isn't called DARKEST Dungeon just to be cute. As mentioned above torches are one of the things you can buy before entering the dungeon. These are very important to survivability. As you progress through the dungeon your light gradually decreases, as the light decreases the enemies hit harder and they are more likely to score a critical. So naturally you want to keep the light up, but on the flip side, when it is darker you tend to cash in on a lot more loot to pick up as you travel, so dark runs aren't bad depending on level.

As you might expect, these assholes can infinitely respawn if you don't put them down.

The major problem though, is your stress level. Stress can fuck right off. Seriously. This mechanic has me ripping my hair out. As light dwindles or certain enemies attack you, your character will be to become stressed. once the stress hits 100, your character has a chance to show virtue or more than likely freak out. Depending on how they reacted they become harder to control such as becoming fearful, masochistic, or paranoid. Sometimes they skip turns, sometimes they hurt themselves, or get negative debuffs. In addition to that, they will continue to spout negativity and stress out your party as well (something I can more than relate to.).

But that isn't even the worst of it. If the stress level becomes too high (as in filling your stress bar again), your character has a heart attack and will be immediately dropped down to "death's door". What this means is if you take lethal damage you basically get one shot to hang on, but you have severely reduced stats. If you ANY kind of damage at all, you basically have a chance to die and lose that character for good. So this has two sides. On one hand you always have a chance to survive a lethal shot, but on the other once you are in this position it becomes very dangerous to pull yourself out of. I've had situations where blight(poison) or bleed damage did just enough to off one of my best characters.

Stress can send a good run completely to the shitter. It can be more deadly than the monsters.

As you travel you will sometimes come across events called "Curios". These can range from chests to loot, effigies to inspect, graves to raid, statues to praise, and so on. Many of them have random effects, some are good and some are cripplingly bad. Many of these can altered to serve you better given you spend the correct supply with you to activate it. Some of these can have devastating to life saving effects to your party or loot, so this is a game where there really is no shame in having a wikia handy to have an idea of what it is they actually do.
A lot of the curios that you come across you will find as you travel between rooms, most of these you can encounter freely. However, for rooms that contain special curios or treasure, you can count on fighting some monsters. So let's talk combat. Fighting in this game is fairly one click combat as you can get, but that doesn't make it easy because there are lots of little things to know. Each character has about 8 abilities that they can learn, and only 4 that you can use in battle so you will want to choose wisely. Abilities vary from attacks, heals, and buffs/debuffs. So clearly you want decent blend depending on your party.

However, one of the big factors of battle is yours and your enemy placement. Just because you took an ability doesn't mean you just get to use it. No, giving your crusader melee attacks and then sticking him in the back isn't going to let him swing at much. So while choosing your abilities you want to look at the lighted circles above your abilities to see where is the best placement for this member, and where they will most likely focus their attacks. Again, balance is going to be everything.

So aside from team placement, ability selection, light and dark, stress, and death mechanics, you'll remember as I said earlier there is blight and poison damage. Outside of debuffs, these are the only status effects of the game. Most of them start off non-threatening enough: 2 damage a round for 3 rounds for bleeding, or like 4 damage for 2  rounds for blight. The problem comes in if groups of enemies compound on you, the negative effects stack and it resets the round counter. So say you are on your last round of a blight and you are set to take 4 damage. A spider spits and gives you blight again. Now you are taking 8 each round for 2 more. That very same turn you get hit with another spit and are blighted again, now its 12 damage. If you don't have the HP to survive the start of your turn or have another member who can heal you, that character is as good as dead.

Make sure to actually read what your abilities do, Some status effects in battle can save your ass.

If by some grace of the random number generator you somehow manage to complete your mission, you are given your reward and tally how much loot you left the dungeon with. You are given experience for surviving, and have the possibility to gain a quirk... Oh jeez, I haven't even explained quirks yet. At bare bones they are basically positive or negative effects that affect that specific character, and if you don't save the good ones or remove the bad ones, you can lose the positives to new ones, or lock some of the more negatives to that character. You also run the risk of contracting illnesses which also function like negative quirks. As you can no doubt tell there is a shit ton of different mechanics in this game.

Some of the loot you gather are heirlooms, these are used as currency to upgrade the shops inside the hamlet so you can get better equipment cheaper, and get better selections. So the early portion of the game will be you trying to grind this up to full so you can then focus on your party. The only downfall is once you have completed the hamlet, there is no use for the heirlooms. Its a shame these can't be sold to help equip your team.

Levels are important, but not as much as your gear is. Load up.

The objective of the game is to manage to build up a party strong enough to enter the darkest dungeon and complete the quests there. There are other quests along the way to help you get money and rarer items. The boss levels will hear more story from your relative explaining how his hand in things made everything go so bad. He also sort of comments along as you play. Its a subtle touch and it varies just enough to not annoy me.

So I'm not going to lie, this game is fucking brutal. They aren't lying when they say this is a game of loss and you will lose characters. That shit will happen a lot. There is almost always the possibility of a fight going south on you quickly, be it someone stressing out to the point to fracture your party to taking a critical hit and scrambling your strategy to keep them alive. The first thing you need to learn is that you are going to lose characters. They are going to die and there is very little you can do about it. Until you accept that, you will never progress in the game.

Sometimes fortune can shine during a stress situation, but don't count on it happening often.

That was the mistake I made. Desperate to not let characters die, trying to keep their stress down, boosting their gear as I could. It ultimately kept me in this circle of not being prepared for dungeons and being forced to escape with high stress, having no money to prepare for the next mission. I too late learned you need to have a series of throw away teams to exhaust. Send em in, gather loot, get rid of them, bring in a new 4. You need to detach from the mindset that everyone has to survive, because they can't.

My biggest problem with the game is that while it plays under the guise of being a relatively simple to control game, I feel there is a bit of poor design because it throws so much at you without explanation. Just a multitude of numbers and statistics that aren't inherently explained.  Hell it took me like 2000 something words to barely cover most of the adventure mechanics. I had to go to a wiki to figure out just what everything meant. Without them, I was missing out on some pretty critical information that would have helped me survive such as hit percentages, dodge, and enemy protections.

Usually only takes one shot to put you on the ropes.

Darkest Dungeon also grossly undersells the importance of certain upgrades, many of which are pretty expensive. Slowly I grinded my way up, beating levels and some bosses till I had what I thought was a solid team of level 6 characters (the cap). An event mission appeared that forced me to defend the hamlet. It was a level 6 dungeon and if I had to escape, someone was going to die. So I rallied up what I thought to be my best 4 characters to try to take this mission down. By the time I made it to the very first room, all 4 of my characters were near death, stress already pushing maximum levels.

Why? Because I hadn't maxed out my gear or abilities because the lv3 dungeons didn't need it. Because of this, my hit percentages were significantly lower and when I did hit my attacks were weaker. In the first fight, I could barely land a hit and since I didn't see the %'s I had no idea why. Their front ranks cut me to ribbons and their back continued to cause stress. There was nothing I could do. I lost my best fighter and was forced to escape, causing me to lose my best healer. I almost put the game down for good. Thankfully I discovered the Riposte ability and that sort of put me back on track.

The right arrangement of trinkets can make or break your team.

The game does do some things very right though. For example for a game that is billed as a trek through stress and darkness, the kind of gothic comic visual design feels right at home here. All of the characters and enemies have very awesome designs that look very comic, yet rugged and terrifying at the same time. Since there isn't a lot of environment to design outside of some parallax for movement the characters have to look good, and I really like what they did here.

They also nail setting the scene. There is only a handful of levels, but each one has their own unique tunes for traveling and battling. But what I specifically love about music is that it starts off slow and simple, almost droning at times. But as you travel through the dungeon and the amount of light starts to fade, the music becomes more menacing and intense. This happens in the battles as well and that's where the music really shines because it really layers on the feeling desperation while you fight. If the music sounds intense, you're gonna have a bad time. I've been listening to this OST for weeks now.

The occultist is a gamble on healing, but can be more
potent than the vestal and has decent attacks

Following the music cues, the narration can also sometimes throw out a line when you do something well that just adds to the intense music. For lack of a better word it can give you a bloodlust and really help you engross in the game, you know until the battle turns on you and you start cussing out your PC screen.

So here are my tips for the fresh faced player. Building up the Carriage in the hamlet is a priority, followed by the Abbey. You want to expand your roster quickly so you can have a series of throw away characters while grinding up a main four. The Abbey is safer for stress relief compared to the tavern. Always take a few torches, Even if you are doing darkness runs its better to keep you at near low light then darkness, because in total dark you run the risk of a random boss fight with the hardest baddie in the game.

Load up on Vestals and Occultists for healing, and Man-at-arms and Highway men for their use of the Riposte ability. You will be able to quickly dispatch enemies with multiple attacks with those. Lastly the trinkets you take are very important to the survival of the dungeon. The handy thing to know is the 4 main dungeons each have one major enemy focus, so its a good idea to horde up on common rings for man slaying, eldrich slaying, beast slaying, and unholy slaying. They give a 25% damage buff with no negative effects. with the the right combo you could be dealing up to 50% extra damage going into a dungeon.

Ok, I'm not going to lie here. I haven't beaten this game. I don't even know if I can. Every time I start to build up a stable of decent fighters I try to tackle a boss mission or an event mission, or a lv6 dungeon and get completely wiped out. Forcing me to regroup and grind again to try to find the right combinations of characters and items to take another swing at it. It's been a grueling slog. I think I've clocked something like 90 hours trying to get through it and I seem to be at a bit of a stalemate with the game.

Do I like the game? Yeah I would say for the most part I am really enjoying my time with it, although admittedly it took some time for me to get there. Am I having fun? That can sometimes be difficult to tell depending on how fast a mission goes to shit on me. Did I get my money's worth? I felt that 24$ full price was a little expensive for this game, but I've played 60$ games for way less time than I've sat down with The Darkest Dungeon.

Can I recommend it?..... Whew..  Look this game is not for everyone and the game itself will tell you that right off. It is going to test you early, often, and will do so till the very end. This is one of the most punishing RPGs I have played in a long time and it really is a battle of attrition. It finds a way to present itself in a unique fashion while at the same time not really doing much to break the mold.  If you enjoy a challenging slog The Darkest Dungeon will deliver on that front, but I wouldn't blame anyone for putting it down after they start it. We all have stress limits.

Oh yeah. And FUCK the Collector.
Asshole appearing in the room right before a boss.
Fuck you.