Darkest Dungeon Review - Best Of Foul Inventions

[MerlinCross]

It's really fun at first, but after awhile, it just becomes too demanding. The stress management and dungeon advancement is really bad, since dungeons get harder and harder, while you have to keep switching to new parties. The game will also just straight up steal

Plus, if you overspend your gold, and don't save enough for stocking up on supplies, you might as well delete your save, as you really won't get through the dungeon without those supplies, and you won't get money without successfully clearing the dungeon. I do sympathize with the difficult mixing of rpg and rougelike, which kinda have opposite appeals, as RPGs reward playing long sessions of the same game, and rougelikes reward experimentation and shorter sessions, so i get that those elements are going to be in conflict regardless, and that makes things hard, but the game seriously needs refinement in preventing you from just straight up loosing and not being able to come back from it, or if not, at least giving your new games advantages or options for things you did in previous games.

And this is sad, since underneath all those problems, there's a great game! I love the mental quirk buffs and dubuffs, it's a really cool mechanic, as is the sanity and disease and provisions mechanics, there's a lot of positive things to say about the game! and it's a shame to see the developers pulling all this BS that jim always warns against, rather than just spend that effort making fixes that really wouldn't be that hard to make. Give the option to set some gold aside for adventuring supplies to not overspend, maybe make the recruitable heroes level 2 by default once you hit a certain point, or have a dungeon that's permanently on lvl 1 that doesn't reward much, just to get more heroes leveled up a bit so you have a proper A and B team.

And again, these are not impossible hurdles, the game still has some refinement to be done, but with a bit more refinement it could be stellar! Maybe a bit more time in early access would have done it some good, but the developers are going to need to spend more time working on refining the game and less time deleting negative reviews.

Pardon?

You can salvage your save if you just use cannon fodder. If your stagecoach is upgraded to the point where you get 4 people a week/adventure, you can send them out to get loot. Unless a patch changed it, you keep everything in your bag when you retreat from the dungeon.

There's no real failure state, just how much more of a hole you have to dig yourself out of.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

What does holy water do? Not a clue, according to some reading on the internet it can somehow interact with some things you can find somewhere, but I still don't know what, where or how.

You know when you find things in rooms and corridors, like urns, bookshelves, chests etc? That's where you can use your holy water, keys and a bunch of other things. Doing so increases the reward for using the item (a chest opened with a key yields more loot, using holy water on an urn can remove stress and quirks etc.). There is a comprehensive guide on Steam for what item goes with what curio/object, or you can start trying it out on your own.

 

[sXeth]

What does holy water do? Not a clue, according to some reading on the internet it can somehow interact with some things you can find somewhere, but I still don't know what, where or how.

You know when you find things in rooms and corridors, like urns, bookshelves, chests etc? That's where you can use your holy water, keys and a bunch of other things. Doing so increases the reward for using the item (a chest opened with a key yields more loot, using holy water on an urn can remove stress and quirks etc.). There is a comprehensive guide on Steam for what item goes with what curio/object, or you can start trying it out on your own.

One of the more recent updates added a Resistance buff if you use holy water/herbs on a character too. I forget which does which effect, but its probably also on a wiki (or mentioned in the game, which has gotten better with info in the release version).

 

[RedRockRun]

I love Darkest Dungeon. Talk about Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Undertale, MGS V, and whatever else all you want; this is my favorite game to come out this year.

 

[Kahani]

You know when you find things in rooms and corridors, like urns, bookshelves, chests etc? That's where you can use your holy water, keys and a bunch of other things. Doing so increases the reward for using the item (a chest opened with a key yields more loot, using holy water on an urn can remove stress and quirks etc.). There is a comprehensive guide on Steam for what item goes with what curio/object, or you can start trying it out on your own.

Sure, I know that now because I looked it up. But that's exactly my point - I shouldn't have to go hunting around Google in order to figure out how to play the game. Figuring out which items to use with what is part of the fun, but knowing that it is possible to use items on some things and how to do so is just basic mechanics that need to be explained in order to play the game at all.

On a related note, I think this lack of explanation is probably behind a lot of the complaints about the RNG nature of the game. Using FTL as an example again, it's always made obvious when something is going to happen and what can be done to affect it. If you get shot at, there's a percentage chance to hit, and you can take certain actions to improve your chance to dodge or reduce the damage. If you travel to a new area, a random event will occur and you can pick a route that's more or less likely to have major things happen as well as pick modules, crew, and so on that can affect those events. In Darkest Dungeon, there's almost none of that. Stress, for example, gets handed out apparently at random. Sometimes you get it after being hit, other times you don't. Sometimes it will suddenly pop up as you're walking along, sometimes it won't. Is this time/movement based? Is it actually just random? Are there abilities or conditions that increase or decrease the likelihood or amount? The game simply doesn't mention it at all.

If you take a game like FTL, or even more obviously something like Blood Bowl, it's possible for the dice to screw you over at pretty much any moment, but you always know exactly when you're going to be throwing those dice, and you know exactly what outcomes are possible and what actions you can take to affect the outcome or tip things in your favour. In Darkest Dungeon, half the time you don't even know there are any dice being thrown, and you don't know what the results might be or what you can do about it. That's why the RNG can feel so unfair at times. It's not that you got an unlucky roll that tipped someone over the boundary of stress into madness and ended up cascading into a total wipe, but that you didn't even know the roll was going to happen in the first place.