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.....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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. |
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.
Asshole appearing in the room right before a boss.
Fuck you.
