Darkest Dungeon

Darkest Dungeon is a turn-based combat game with some exploration, expedition planning, base upgrading, and roster management thrown in for good measure.

One part of the game is spent at the Hamlet, where you manage your roster of heroes (accepting new heroes and paying for training, equipment, and healing) and upgrade the town.

The rest of your time is spent delving into dangerous dungeons. You need to plan out each expedition by choosing the right heroes and giving them the right skills and equipment. You then control the team as they move left-to-right along corridors and into rooms. They encounter points of interest (such as treasure chests, mysterious shrines, or battles) along the way. The delve goal is usually to explore 90% of rooms or defeat all room combat encounters.

The point of the game is basically to learn how its various systems work, level up the Hamlet and your heroes, and then kick the ass of the final dungeon (the Darkest Dungeon, obviously).

I played 87 hours to complete the game on the easiest (Radiant) difficulty. I had fun most of the time, but had no interest in starting over to play harder or longer difficulty levels.

THE GOOD:

• Perfect hand-drawn graphics, music, sound effects, and narration really suck you into the game's disturbing world. I adore the main game menu's song, it's equal parts majestic and disturbing.
• Overall, the game is quite gripping, with meaningful strategic and tactical choices to make throughout. There is lots to learn, discover, and adapt to. It's a genuine challenge.
• Darkest Dungeon is an emotional rollercoaster, with dizzying highs when you succeed against all odds and terrifying lows when you fail miserably despite your best efforts.
• One of the unique elements of this game is the importance of the party's marching order. Your 4 characters are arranged in a specific order, as are the enemy team. Which enemies your characters can attack is heavily dependent on where your character is located as well as where the enemy is located. This adds some interesting strategy that can take a while to master.
• When your heroes become over-stressed they can either handle it poorly (becoming afflicted) or well (becoming virtuous). It's an interesting mechanic because while your heroes will almost always become afflicted, those rare moments when they become virtuous (it only happened to me 3 times in 87 hours) can be crazy cool.

THE BAD:

• There are different mission types, but I spent 95% of my time in the same mission type ("explore 90% of rooms"). This did get old eventually. I feel like the developer could have done more to improve the variety of the delves.
• I spent a surprising amount of time planning out expeditions. The preparatory steps got to feel quite repetitive once I figured out the optimal choices. The game could have made this a bit less onerous, perhaps by remembering my settings from last time.
• The handling of hunger during delves is really frustrating and stupid. Hunger should run according to a timer, like with torchlight, but instead seems to be totally random. I sometimes ran out of food early during a mission because the heroes kept being hungry over and over for no reason. It also doesn't seem to take into account if you recently camped and ate. Starvation should be the result of bad player decisions rather than unlucky randomness.
• In the Hamlet mode of the game, certain NPCs will occupy resource slots that you need for de-stressing your heroes (to clarify with a spoiler: I mean how the custodian and, later on, the town crier will occupy slots at the Tavern or Abbey). It's not very impactful to the game (as in, the NPCs rarely took a slot I really needed), however, it feels like a real slap in the face from the game designer. I paid for those extra slots through sweat, blood, and tears. Having the designer invalidate my choices and hard work is bullshit.
• Once you've finished upgrading the Hamlet, there is nothing to spend the upgrade resources on... it would be nice to at least be able to trade them in for a bit of cash.
• After delving into the Darkest Dungeon, any surviving heroes will have a torch appear on their roster entry. This mechanic is not explained at all in-game, requiring you to search online and be potentially exposed to spoilers. The game should explain that in Radiant mode it means that (1) the hero will have a huge penalty to stress and virtue if they attempt to re-enter the Darkest Dungeon, (2) you gain a new Hamlet roster slot, and (3) the torched hero gives an XP bonus to their companions, making it faster to train new recruits they accompany.
• This special Darkest Dungeon mechanic also makes the game take unnecessarily longer. It turned the last 10 hours or so of the game into a grind.
• If you want the heroes to turn back along a corridor and return to the room from which they came, the heroes will walk backwards. This is frankly bizarre.

THE UGLY:

• During a dungeon delve, the way the heroes' movement is always left-to-right can be quite confusing at times. It's completely divorced from the map, where you might actually be moving right-to-left.
• When using a console controller during combat, the game will sometimes (seemingly randomly) pre-select your combat option from last round. This inconsistency can cause you to make muscle-memory input errors at crucial moments.