Darkest Dungeon

Darkest Dungeon

Impressive for a free browser game, boring for a paid Steam game.

Overview

Darkest Dungeon is an evolution of the old-style "tactics" genre. The kind of game where you have a party of three or four facing a small group of enemies. Each character makes a quick combat decision, usually "attack" or "defend". You might have items to buff or heal. Generally those games are extremely simple and only interesting as a tense mini-game telling a larger story. The Final Fantasy line is a good example.

While Darkest Dungeon has made this simple combat more interesting, at it's core the game is still very basic. Most of the time you will take the obvious action. 

The RPG elements of Darkest Dungeon are strong. There is a lot of character differentiation. Levels matter but aren't overwhelming. You don't find much exciting loot, like Diablo, but that's fine -- finding a big gem worth a lot of gold is plenty satisfying. 

Why Are All the Reviews So Positive?

If you like the "simple tactics" genre with a lot of grinding, this is a great game. Here is my take on features that other people enjoy about Darkest Dungeon:

The Ambience is Great (true)

This is true. The music, visuals, and narration expertly convey a desperate grim/dark world. That isn't one of my favorite genres, and I still enjoyed it. It approaches over-the-top without being campy. 

The Game is Difficult (false)

This isn't true. You can't actually lose the game unless playing on the highest difficulty setting. People say it's difficult because you lose a lot of missions and some of your characters will die. That doesn't make the game difficult, it just requires a shift of perspective. We are trained to expect missions to be easy and characters to be permanent. Characters are a resource. You can think of a high level character as a powerful potion of healing. You get free low level characters, or wimpy potions of healing. If you run out of powerful potions, you have to do easy missions with wimpy potions until you can gather enough big potions to fight the boss.

It's a Roguelike (false)

No. Only in the broadest sense of the word. From your roster of 20 people, one might die from time to time. Rarely, where you are really unlucky, four will die at once. If you keep your entire roster at the same level, even the most devastating party wipe doesn't reset your game. You can't lose your town upgrades no matter what you do. Even if you wipe your entire roster and start with newbies, you have a big advantage over starting a fresh game. I suppose roguelike has started to take on the meaning of starting over with global buffs. Darkest Dungeon doesn't even really do that.

Tactical Depth (false)

I didn't get far into the game, but after reading forums, I doubt there is much depth. For the ten hours I played, most "decisions" were obvious non-decisions. There is a lot of complexity, but that is different from depth. For example, a single character can have 5 positive and 5 negative traits. A trait might be like +15% damage to beasts. If you have 25 people on your roster, that's 250 traits to keep track of. In theory you could put together a Beast Slaying Team, but in practice that's a lot of work for something that only rarely comes up.

The RNG is punishing (true)

It's pretty easy for bad luck to really mess up your mission and get some people dead. I think Darkest Dungeon has just the right amount of luck but if you hate having people die from bad luck, stay away.

What do the Other Review Not Tell You?

Lots of Grinding

When reviews say, "this game is hard" they really mean, "you have to grind a lot". There is no way to lose the game. You just have to grind out levels.

Unholy Trinity

The game uses the tired combination of tank-healer-dps. I realize that's just my pet peeve, but it leads to the same types of gameplay we have seen for decades. It would be forgivable, except for my next point.

No Healing Outside Combat

Talk about pet peeves! I hate when your healer can spam as much healing as they want during combat, but once it's over they can't heal anymore. Darkest Dungeon doesn't just trigger this pet peeve, it has forced the dominant strategy to be built around it. Every encounter consists of burning down all but one enemies as fast as possible, then leaving the last one alive while the healer tops everyone off. The developers have tried to dissuade this strategy with a few systems, but that just highlights how odious this situation is. For example, skipping your turn causes stress. So a fighter who doesn't want to land the final blow has to pay a penalty. Forcing me to do all my healing while the enemies are alive already seriously breaks the fiction. Throwing systems on top of that to dissuade me just breaks the fiction even more. All in all, this makes the combat design feel very amateurish.

Who Should Buy This Game?

Fans of the Final Fantasy combat system who don't mind grinding and like a punishing rng. 

What are Some Similar Games That Are Better?

Mordheim (my review) offers turn-based squad combat with permadeath in a grim world with rpg elements. The story is far better and it's overall a much meatier game. Darkest Dungeon could almost be a super-light version of Mordheim.

Any Roguelike (my review of Dungeon Crawl) offers turn-based rpg with permadeath. They are free and you can find light ones or heavy ones.

X-Com (my review of X-COM 2) is still the best squad based permadeath tactical combat with strong story. It's not medieval grim/dark, but future alien/dark isn't far off. Like Mordheim, XCom is far meatier than Darkest Dungeon.

For the King (my review) is lighter than my other suggestions but still perhaps heavier than Darkest Dungeon. Ultimately, I didn't enjoy For the King very much, but I would recommend it before Darkest Dungeon.

Deep Sky Derelicts (my review) is very similar but does not suffer from the specific complaints I have of Darkest Dungeon.