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.