Darkest Dungeon is essentially about running an assembly line. The tactical dungeon-crawling may make it feel more like an RPG, but the purpose of leveling your characters isn’t to create a balanced squad that can take on any challenge, it’s to make their deaths as cost-efficient as possible. As characters level up, they refuse to go on lower-tier missions, meaning that they’re always moving to higher and higher challenges, which present the opportunity for the greatest rewards. While the increased challenge of these missions will often result in deaths, the resources they feed back into the system expedites the process of getting new recruits to that same level. Once characters reach the top tier, the only place left for them is the titular Darkest Dungeon itself, a multi-stage death trap which will likely wipe more than a few squads of fully-leveled characters, who each took many hours of care to get to that point. To fully ensure that the dungeon chews up your best soldiers, fleeing results in the death of one randomly-selected party member, and the rest will refuse to ever go back. So, the assembly line is a process of building up teams to the max level, feeding them into the dungeon, learning a little bit more each time, and hoping that one is eventually able to break through. However, a lot of players understandably felt frustrated that so much of their time was essentially going to waste, where a bad critical hit at the start could unravel twelve hours worth of effort. The complaints were so loud that a new difficulty mode was added which let higher-level characters join lower-level missions, along with allowing characters to go back into the Darkest Dungeon, and a few other features to expedite progress in general. It sounds like this would solve the problem, but in a way, it means there’s no definitive way to play the game anymore. In this easier Radiant mode, the assembly line has essentially been turned off, the loop of growing new recruits and feeding them to the insatiable maw has been replaced with just grinding the ultimate squad until you’re ready to go. While that’s much less demoralizing, the tactical gameplay isn’t deep enough to stand on its own. The decisions of killing stress or damage dealers, or what ranks of enemies to focus on, essentially remain the same from the first hour to the last, in order to accommodate a wide variety of parties across a hundred hours. If players are able to just stick to the easiest, safest, and most boring dungeons to grind up a perfect squad, that becomes the dominant strategy, and that’s what they’ll do. However, the normal mode has its own problems, since it seems to take joy in not giving players any sense of progress or catharsis at all. Players essentially have to take joy in the misery, which on one hand can be a powerful theme, but after the fifty hour mark it can understandably get extremely tiresome. More than almost any other game I’ve ever played, the difficulty modes feel like entirely different games, and while there are things I love about each one, I wish their strengths could have been balanced into a version that respected players’ time while also preserving the bleak mechanics. Until that ever happens though, I’m forced to give it half the score its aesthetics and ideas should probably merit.

Solid turn-based combat, but the rest of the game feels like an eternal procedurally-generated RnG grind. Characters come and go, there doesn't seem to be much of a story, so they have little in terms of personalities and you don't grow attached to them.

The atmosphere of dread is also not very compelling. Instead of writing good horror fiction, they just call things scary, which doesn't make them scary at all. The writing (as little of it as there is) in this game is pretty basic, and feels completely unnecessary.

It is addictive for a while, until you realize that you've basically been rolling dice the entire time.

i have tried to finish darkest dungeon many times. it usually goes like this: i reinstall the game, play for a few days, and then delete my save and uninstall. i've gotten pretty far some of these times, but it always ends the same way.

as a game using its mechanics to make a point, darkest dungeon is fantastic. as an actual game though, it's not as good, as you are subjected to constant unbalanced rng, such as the fact that getting hit by one critical hit can kill your entire 30min+ venture into a dungeon, but landing one critical hit yourself basically means nothing in the long term.

the worst part about this is that there are no real stakes. a critical party member being killed doesn't result in interesting decisions being made, it simply means that you'll need to do 5 more hours of grinding to get someone else to the level where they can replace the fallen character. the intended way of playing is to slog through the game, upgrading your more powerful characters when possible, and treating lower level characters as disposable workers.

the best aspect of the game is its economy, and how it essentially pushes you to become a heartless capitalist, exploiting the free labor you are afforded each cycle by the game. and while the combat is flashy, weighty and fun, it doesn't do enough to sustain itself for the length of the game, or to make me feel like it's worth finishing

Um rpg desafiador, com sistema de permadeath, peculiaridades que tornam cada personagem diferente uns dos outros e sanidade, os personagens aos poucos definham nas missões ficando aflitos e agindo por conta própria ou com uma pequena chance se tornam vigorosos e concedem benefícios para a equipe, mas ao final de uma missão é possivel recuperar pontos de estresse, ou como gosto de chamar; sanidade. O jogo te pune muito pelas escolhas erradas, e as vezes a ganância cobra um preço muito caro. Aos poucos você melhora o vilarejo a cerca da grande mansão e prepara melhor os heróis para as expedições, a economia também é importante, pois sem dinheiro se torna muito dificil de completar uma missão. A variedades de classes até que é nada mal, ainda mais tendo acesso a mods que prolongam a vida útil do game.

A história é enigmatica, contada a cada boss que enfrenta, narrada por seu ancestral, e o visual é simplesmente incrivel!

Se gosta do gênero dungeon crowling esse jogo é pra você.

It's good but I can't say now that I've beaten it that I harbour much love for it or anything. It has a similar flaw to the XCOM games in that it really outstays its welcome by 8-10 hours. A lot of the midgame quests is grinding out the same missions you've been doing up until that point with maybe 1 or 2 new enemies to take into consideration (which became far too familiar far too quickly as well), until you finally unlock a new boss so you can get back to the fun part of the game, all the while hoping RNG doesn't decide to fuck you over on a random run. Furthermore these missions are even worse than XCOM's midgame because a ton of them feel like EXACT replica's of one another, with only slight variation in the layout. Also there's far too much walking through empty hallways and backtracking through dungeons for how monotonous and slow this can be at times. A fast walking option in the settings would've probably cut down my playthroughs length by an hour over the course of the game.

When it comes to game balance I generally think they did a good job class-wise, only the Grave Robber felt to me like it didn't serve that much of a purpose on many teams (it has a little bit of everything, but almost every comp I made i'd rather take someone else with me in their place). Vestal is a little too overcentralizing for my tastes; when the only other good (main) healer is the rng-centric Occultist you are setting up your strategy game to become vestal + 3 others as your comp on every (important) mission. Additionally, I think the bosses are mostly good as long as you know what you are getting into. Unfortunately a TON of them are matchup checks that become nearly impossible with the wrong comp, and a pushover with the right one. The wiki or a friend who knows what they are doing is a lifesaver in this regard. Going in blind can easily be the end of a run.
Enemy design is hard to talk about because generally they are well done but a lot of problems with them come from the structure of the rest of the game: There is too much RNG stacked on top of RNG meaning that any fight can be a complete push-over or spell the end of a run.

As a final note I want to say that capping your accuracy at 95% is one of the stupidest game mechanics I've seen in a while. Forcing RNG like that is fucking lame and it creates some really fucked situations where I set everything up perfectly but two of my guys decide to miss their 95% accuracy moves on their backline Madmen who promptly fears two of my guys and now the whole party is losing it right before I was about to camp etc. etc. It's just not fun, you are getting punished for the basic act of playing the game.

I understand if all of this comes of as supremely negative, but I swear I do think this is a good game over all. The core gameplay loop (in the early/mid game), the strategy, the art direction, the sound effects, the music, the atmosphere are all really great. It just falls apart bit by bit the longer this game goes on, and unfortunately this game goes on for a WHILE.

So, to conclude: This is a good game that I would not recommend to anybody. Or if you do play it, don't feel pressured to beat it. Play as long as its fun, and don't feel ashamed if you have to drop it because it is too hard or feels too unfair, because it really can be on many occasions. There is a reason that only 6.5% of players have even beaten the game on any difficulty.

Shoutout to Dismas and Reynauld the GOATS for being with me until the end and getting me that achievement o7

I like this a lot - or at least I like the thought of it a lot - but it exists in a strange limbo state between being too complex and not complex enough, and it's making me question how much I want to keep committing to it when the majority of gameplay is based on a fairly broad RNG spectrum. Getting into the groove for the first few hours is exciting, getting to see all the art is wonderful, and the punishment mechanics are interesting enough, but once I got to a certain point it started to feel a little tedious for how much variety it seemed to have at first, with so many classes and formations and randomized dungeons. It seems like it requires a lot of time to actually make any progress, and an equal amount to lose that progress. In other roguelikes, success and failure both lead to significant advancements over a few play sessions, but in Darkest Dungeon it feels like it could take a week or two of steady play just to make any leeway, and that feels like too much of a commitment for what it's doing.

I'm at the point where my party is hitting level 3, but I'm still taking early level parties on simple runs just to get money and artifacts and things, and the loop seems to be stuck a little bit where I'm defaulting to buying the same abilities for every class instead of experimenting with different tactics, because there definitely seems to be a best option when it comes to building your adventurers up. I'm not really progressing much at hour 10, because I can't take my level 3 party on level 1 boss fights, but the RNG doesn't like my level 1 parties and so I have to spend money filling in the gaps and taking exploration quests just for income. Looking at this quest list in the hub, there's so much I'm not even close to touching, and it kinda just feels like this is what the majority of the playtime is going to feel like - just trying to get enough money to scrape by and cycling out party members until something eventually breaks and I proceed to longer and more difficult quests with the same rewards in bigger quantities. Normally I'd be into that idea, but it feels less like resource management and more like grinding at a point in a JRPG where you're crazy underleveled and need the numbers to go up so you can progress. It also feels just randomized enough that failure doesn't always feel fair mechanically. I compare the system to Mork Borg, where failure is inevitable, but you're encouraged to play dirty to rebalance the odds. Darkest Dungeon pretends to be going for that same thing, but doesn't give you enough agency to make it feel true. Really good things can happen, sure, but they're sparse and generally don't make much of an impact long-term, which is imbalanced by the fact that the really bad things feel too random with a much bigger long-term impact, and make progress feel frustratingly hinged on luck. This would be more of an issue if you weren't allowed to return from quests early

The other problem is that your inventory is limited, so in later dungeons you'll have to throw out money to keep a potentially helpful utility item, so you're technically only bringing in as much loot as the game deems necessary. This is dissatisfying given that the dungeons are already limited, so you can only get so much loot in one run anyways, and I think it'd make more sense if there was an encumbrance system or just a separate inventory management system for utility items and artifacts, and money doesn't count towards those slots.
To further the balancing issue, not being able to take higher level adventurers on lower level quests means that buying new equipment and trinkets isn't necessarily an upgrade more than a necessity to stay at the same level as enemies, so I'm not getting much satisfaction out of spending money on better gear and items, especially when the loop stays pretty much the same through longer dungeons.

Bottom line: it's a great way to burn some time, but it really doesn't feel like it intends for you to get far unless you're the type of person who really gets into roguelikes, or else really clicks with this game specifically. Personally, I don't have enough time to justify getting too far into it because at a certain point I feel like the game's shown me everything it wants to and I'm ok with drawing that line and cheerily moving on to something else. Radiant mode might be the way to go here if you're like me and want to see what it has to offer without committing a ton of time.

¿Agobiante, opresivo, estresante? No especialmente. Lo que es, es entretenido y divertido. Entretenido al nivel de un pasatiempos: te mantiene ocupado. Leer sus menús no difiere mucho a completar una sopa de letras. Extraes palabras sueltas e inconexas entre todo el ruido de fondo e intentas darles sentido en tu cabeza. Luego se tiran dados. Muchos dados. Aunque no te los muestren (ese es el otro DD). Aquí es donde entra la parte divertida. De este componente de azar nacen las situaciones inesperadas, los fallos, los críticos, las reacciones al superar el límite de estrés… En resumen: lo imprevisible. Es aquí también donde cada uno establecerá su límite con el juego. Toda la estrategia y planificación son formas de aproximarse a lo aleatorio de la mazmorra. La idea no es superar un nivel con habilidad sino intentar sobrellevar los efectos inesperados que el juego nos lanza mientras rascamos lo máximo por el camino. ¿Hasta dónde quiere uno llegar? ¿Exploras un poco más arriesgándote a perder algún aventurero o vuelves sin obtener las recompensas extra de la misión? Sabes que el resultado no depende de ti sino de las tiradas de dados. Darkest Dungeon es riesgo/recompensa de la misma forma que apostar a la ruleta es riesgo/recompensa. En el momento en que entiendes que estás ante un juego de azar con estrategia y no lo contrario queda enteramente a ti si te apetece seguir apostando. Al menos no te vas a arruinar.

I really enjoyed the setting and tone of the game, and the art style fits in perfectly. Combined with permadeath mechanics, it really makes each dungeon crawl feel dangerous and exciting. The turn based combat is very satisfying, and I appreciated the twists on turn-based combat like party positioning (push/pull moves, lunges, and even the surprise mechanic). The classes are interesting and fairly balanced such that there are a wide variety of viable party compositions.

I couldn't make it through the endgame because it felt like it required a bit too much luck/grind, but I very much enjoyed my time with it.

This game has been with me for most of my adult life and even as I write these words I struggle to come to terms with the fact that I actually just beat it. I absolutely adore Darkest Dungeon. It's cruel, terrifying, and punishing, and it's absolutely incredible. The tone, theming, and gameplay design are in perfect harmony, and I can think of few games that better fulfill their purpose than this one. I struggle to recommend it because it will not be everyone but if you're looking for a challenge, I can think of few better games to test your mettle with. What a masterpiece.