Darkest Dungeon · 2:41am Oct 18th, 2016
Just finished the game on PS4, though I played it a bit on the PC in a shop.
Love this game. Scratched my Dark Souls itch in time to get the DLC. It's brutal, it's dark, and requires a lot of planning and tough decisions. I love the aesthetics from the stages, to the monsters, to the different character designs. There's a bleakness around it that's wonderful and the narration...damn good narration. I love the perma-death, frustrating as it could be at times. It tugs at your heartstrings, then creates a callousness in you that you didn't think possible. At some point, you'll feel like a ruthless overlord pushing your loyal troops to their cruel deaths, all the while mourning each loss.
I have to admit that its reliance on a lot of random factors makes the difficulty seem artificial at times. In Dark Souls, every time you died, it was almost always your fault. In Darkest Dungeon, you can do everything perfectly, using tried and true methods, but the RNG might still decree that this run is the run when your party eats two dozen critical hits and deal none.
Still, there's something oddly...cathartic in throwing one's caution and control to the winds of fortune. You can send out your strongest warriors, arm them with the best gear and send them out with all the supplies money can buy, but there's still that nagging feeling in the back of your mind that things will still turn to shit and you'll have to stand there, controller in hand, and watch them die permanently.
Lowest point: Party wipe on a fucking short mission at champion level resulting in the deaths of a legendary plague doctor, antiquarian, vestal and leper. They got severely stressed out and had a chain reaction of heart attacks during the last battle to complete the quest. Lost a bunch of powerful trinkets in the process.
Highest point: Killed a shambler, a collector and the champion level prophet in a single run. Thanks to stacking bolster buffs, my team dodged the falling rubble five times in a row before the arbalest introduced the prophet to a 70 point sniper shot critical.
Most Valorous Moment: My bounty hunter, Bossard, deals a much needed critical hit to kill Vvulf, thus preventing the asshole from razing my upgraded village. In the next round, he takes a bleed attack from the surviving minions and dies of bleeding.
Most humiliating moment: My party kills our second shambler of the game, but at the cost of a man-at-arms and a bounty hunter. The survivors were so badly damaged that I had to retreat from surviving minor tentacles or risk losing my trinkets.
Perma death occasionally sounds like it might make a game interesting but what it actually does is make me stop playing after I lose someone I actually care about.
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This game can make you lose someone who's growth you've overseen from the very beginning, whose skills you've trained from beginner to expert, whose gear you've invested in from salvaged crap to shining artifacts, whose battles have laid low the strongest monsters. Over and over.
And I love and hate it all at once.
Have to grab it on Steam sometime.
At some point in the game I simply stopped doing Short missions. My heroes often ended up with more stress than during medium or even long missions while also gaining worse loot. The camp skills made missions feel a little trivial as I approached the end.
And to be fair, those minor tentacles are by far the scariest part of the Shambler. The stacking buff they get is no joke.
Lowest point: Losing a DPS race against the Collector and losing 4 rank 5-6s, probably.
Highest point: Killing the mammoth cyst before the stalk could teleport me away. :D
Been working my way through this game as well. My biggest mistake was summoning a shambler. After losing my strongest Crusader I fled the battle in shame. But I accidentally entered the encounter again because I didn't think the monster would stay summoned. A party wipe was my just reward X(
Personally enjoying the randomness present, its often very entertaining. Like watching one of your team members go missing for a week after drinking. Or when your Plague Doc gets a clutch critical heal.
My current strategy is just spamming the shit out of stuns, and disregard the negative effects of trinkets. Just stop being a bitch and equip that shit, no matter the cost. XD