The game is tightly constructed. Recruit heroes onto your roster, lead heroes in turn-based combat through various levels of increasing complexity and difficulty, return to your hub to spend rewards on upgrades, repeat.
The game is far more complicated than that, and I’ll have a lot more to say on the micro-game of dungeon crawling and combat in the future, as I will with the macro-game of managing your heroes and hub outside of dungeons. But I can’t deny the game’s quality even at face value.
Even before downloading the game, I had heard great things and trusted the sources: Excellent narration, strong writing, and immersive artwork that pair nicely with what’s essentially just a really fun game in Darkest Dungeon. Wayne June’s voice acting provides a lovely canvas for the rest of the game to paint itself on and, for all of that color, you’ll find a gameplay loop that’s able to capture even the most cynical of turn-based combat gamers.
The upgrade system for the player hub separates itself from the upgrade system for acquiring and improving heroes through different currencies. When treking through a dungeon, you’ll be tasked not just with defeating enemies and finding loot, but sorting your inventory to best manage your usable resources alongside the things you’ll actually want to take out of the dungeon. This creates an extremely simple yet effective resource management system to satisfy the more involved gaming community.
The punitive aspect of Darkest Dungeon is seen in the death system for party members. With only a limited roster of heroes to choose from (and an expensive method of upgrading and leveling said heroes), it’s important to play through dungeons carefully and to know when to hit the eject button. If heroes die in a dungeon, they die permanently. Rogue-like fans rejoice.
TLDR; Darkest Dungeon’s heyday has come and gone, but even as a late arrival, I find myself completely enamored with the game’s construction, both from the aesthetic aspect and in the gameplay itself. It can be difficult to theorize, on the surface, how the game might play or what it might be about, so it’s best for new players to jump right in with no prior knowledge and get used to the game naturally.
GLHF
-E
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