Its like 80% of the way to being a great game- fantastic aesthetic, cool gameplay, but there are two fundamental problems holding it back:
1. There's a lot of RNG stacked on top of more RNG- nearly everything that happens is random in some capacity which can lead to deaths that feel really unfair and arbitrary. That's not inherently a bad thing- unfair and arbitrary deaths should make a bleak game like this better, but...
2. The only actual punishment the game hits you with for characters dying is just.. grinding. You can't lose a run of darkest dungeon (to my knowledge anyway), you just might have to grind up some new characters. Once you get used to the systems and the grinding becomes comfortable and easy the aforementioned RNG arbitrarily just becomes a source of frustration, as there's no longer any tension since the game threatens, at worst, to inconvenience you a bit.
It feels like Darkest Dungeon worked itself into a weird corner where if it were possible to lose an overall campaign in the same way you can in XCOM it might be a bit too unfair to appeal to most (I'd like it that way, though) and it results in an experience that feels simultaneously frustrating and toothless. That's not to say it's bad, it just really loses steam by the end once you've gained familiarity with the systems but now have to deal with the absolute slog of the final levels which constantly threaten to bad-luck you into a having to grind more.
1. There's a lot of RNG stacked on top of more RNG- nearly everything that happens is random in some capacity which can lead to deaths that feel really unfair and arbitrary. That's not inherently a bad thing- unfair and arbitrary deaths should make a bleak game like this better, but...
2. The only actual punishment the game hits you with for characters dying is just.. grinding. You can't lose a run of darkest dungeon (to my knowledge anyway), you just might have to grind up some new characters. Once you get used to the systems and the grinding becomes comfortable and easy the aforementioned RNG arbitrarily just becomes a source of frustration, as there's no longer any tension since the game threatens, at worst, to inconvenience you a bit.
It feels like Darkest Dungeon worked itself into a weird corner where if it were possible to lose an overall campaign in the same way you can in XCOM it might be a bit too unfair to appeal to most (I'd like it that way, though) and it results in an experience that feels simultaneously frustrating and toothless. That's not to say it's bad, it just really loses steam by the end once you've gained familiarity with the systems but now have to deal with the absolute slog of the final levels which constantly threaten to bad-luck you into a having to grind more.