A truly fantastic game with a criminally low review rating. This stems from the game having changed a fair bit since early access, but all the changes have been positive. Making the game less exploitable is a good thing, people! The other complaints I hear are usually "The RNG is too severe! No skill!" Which is entirely untrue. All RNG in Darkest Dungeon can be avoided by careful planning and thought. On my second run through the ganme, I survived 100 weeks without a single death or a single quest failure and with only one resolve check encountered.

Pros!
- Highly addictive gameplay that keeps you coming back for more
- Tons of replayability as no run through the game is the same
- Very strategic combat; party compositions, trinket speccing, synergies... the list goes on
- Beautiful in every sense. Stunning art-style, effective animation, fantastic soundtrack
- Diverse and varied characters make for a lot of experimentation and fun
- Fair difficulty curve, challenging the whole way with difficult but achieveable boss fights at the end
- Lots of content for the price
- Unique regions to explore with thematic enemies and procedurally generated dungeons
- Perfectly managed stress and health systems with intriguing "Death's Door" and "Resolve Check" mechanics to keep you on your toes in and out of combat
- Wayne June's narration is golden. It sets the Lovecraftian atmosphere perfectly and oozes quality with such sophisticated, verbose vocabulary
- Town Events make things more varied in the Hamlet (For better and occasionally for worse!)
- Somewhat frequent updates with new heroes, new content, bug-fixes, and fine-tuned mechanics

Cons
- A little beginner unfriendly in some places like cluttered tooltips, lack of game-mechanic introduction, etc
- The fact it's not in your game library! Absolutely criminal!

There's plenty more praise I could sing this game but I should stop now. This game captivated me and I fell deeply in love with it. I hope other people do too after reading this review!

I liked this game a LOT at first, but after a while i realized for me the only challenge is the grind. Definitely solid mechanics for combat . It reminds me of Total War: Warhammer in the sense that its extremely boring outside of the combat. Every single map and level i went on bored me endlessly. It had very interesting mechanics such as fear and stress levels, the combat etc, but its just got SO dull. The movement through each map is reallllllllllly uninteresting and repetitive and i Hate that the most about this game.,

If you go on a mission with party members that are not stressed out and are the right level/composition, you can pretty much win every mission. If you don't have level 3 dudes and have to take a level 2 or level 1 with you then you just go on an easy level and cut your losses the second it seems inevitable you'll loose.

Thats pretty much the challenge of the game. I only started falling behind when i sent guys on missions they weren't properly leveled for, and the only reason i did it was because i was bored of leveling up minions.Bored of all the busywork between levels and ultimately bored of the combat after some time playing.

For me personally this game definitely has a plenty going for it, which explains the high reviews from many gaming sites. I do feel its similiar to MGSV in that it almost certainly deserves a high score for the quality of the game however for some people they just CANT get into it, or understand why others enjoy it. I was and still am on the fence about whether i like MGSV, but hands down its a quality game.. Im definitely more of an outcast by disliking this game and not recommending it, but im SURE theres people who feel similiar to me.

Based on the current state of the game I can't recommend it.

1. There's nothing beyond the midgame. It's pretty much more of the same past the midgame point.

2. It has corrupt my saved games multiple times with no apparently solution. This is completely unacceptable for a rogue like game. Total deal breaker.

Game looks beautiful and has excellent audio, but is absolutely crippled by randomness of the game. I mean jesus, it's like playing a slot machine. In most of the runs, despite trying my absolute hardest with help of some guides, I felt that I had almost no control over any battle. Furthermore, game kept crashing once every hour or so.

Good game but its extremly annoying because it constantly holds you back I assume due to lack of overall content to make the game last longer. You will definatly rage over and over but maybe continue to play for no other reason then your stuborn as all hell. Your money will be constantly spent on the biggest peril to all characters "Resolve!!" because once they lose it they will become unreponsive, predictable or worse, Then when your guys who dont die get a bit better they wont allow you to farm the lower levels but force them to take on dungeons that are bound to kill them, oh and they dont revive.. So ya only buy if your a stubborn gamer and you might enjoy raging allot.

Played the game a fair amount during EA. Recently decided to play again..... Disappointing to say the least....
Can't get the game to start on Windows 10. I get the Darkest.exe stopped working error.
I don't even get to see the intro..... Can't recommend the game if it doesn't start. Sorry....

Bad RNG can make runs more frustrating than they should be. A game being hard can be enjoyed if there are things to learn from losses. You learn nothing when losing in this game, wether you miss a hit or get crit-ed by enemy, because it was all a dice roll.

I like the idea of the game and what it does, but I find it hard to justify to myself to keep on playing this after having one bad luck situation after another. I feel no acomplishment finishing dungeons most of the time, because every time I feel like I had an ungodly amount of bad luck, even though I tried mittigating as much as possible any losses I had from it.

I'd say this needs more work, but it's already out of Early Acces, so I doubt they'll do more balancing/mechanics patches.

Also, self buffs are a waste of time. Buffs in general are a waste of time, because dealing damage to an enemy and making it drop dead is better than getting ANY buff and losing an attack.

+ great artwork, music, narrator, atmosphere - this game oozes atmosphere from every byte, every 0 and 1... as long as you don't spot the design flaws and questionable mechanics.

- really f****d up design. Basiaclly, a game where you cannot lose. It works in some genres (adventure, some builders, etc) but in a game like this one (mix of rpg / roguelike / management / something else ?) this isn't simply a very bad design choice on a very basic level - it is imo unacceptable and kills the game for me.
- mechanics, some are questionable but i think it really comes from the big basic flaw mentioned in the point above. There is no losing, so in consequence the characters are unmemorable and 100% replacable... Similarly: because the game has so much repetition at its core design so dungeons must be extremely simplistic with little interesting features.


Good for the hours before you can spot the major flaws in its mechanics and basic gameplay concept and the game starts to get repetitive. Those early hours are great so you might want to enjoy it anyway.

Verdict: 5/10 = Not recommended

Beautiful art, effects, story and voice over, but horribly designed. The games sole purpose seems to punish the player with sheer randomness that is heavily weighed against the player. Once a single event goes wrong such as a failed save, 99% of the time it will turn into a domino effect that completely wipes a party of veterans in a round or two. The underlying strategy seems to be to throw as many bodies at a dungeon as possible, and never get attached to anything in the game no matter how much effort or time was put into it. If you like pure randomness that flies in the face of strategy and planning, then this is the game for you. If you like playing games to experience frustration instead of enjoyment after a hard day of work, then this is the game for you. If you like having characters you spent weeks building up to be flush down the toilet, then this is the game for you.It is a shame, everything about this game is top notch and amazing, except the combat design which is just plain amateurish and unbalanced.

Don't get me wrong I love hard games like Dark Souls, Don't Starve and Super Meat Boy where you can learn from failures and overcome them, but with this game there is no learning or overcoming randominess.

Imagine playing a slot machine. If you win enough on the slot machine you can then play the next level. But if you lose the slot machine you have to start back at the first one. That's essentially Darkest Dungeon. Instead of dying and trying a new strategy to beat an enemy you just have to keep throwing your characters at it until you get lucky enough to deal enough damage before you go mad and die.
I've been playing since the early access and it seems like they only made it worse. When I finally made top level characters they would just get wiped at the next boss and then I'd have to grind again. Finally completing all bosses and recreating new top tier team they get killed in the new patch of levels. Back to grinding the small guys again.
Now they didn't die because I failed to play a certain way, they died because the combat system is entirely random number generated. There is nothing to learn from a loss to help on the next run. Just repetition.
Not only that but many anything other than dealing damage is a waste of time. Every attack deals damage and sanity loss to your team so using the Jester seems like meaningless. Any buffs would rather be used trying to knock out the enemy as late levels make the buffs useless anyways.
I love the art direction and story of this game so much but am very disappointed in such a lack of actual gameplay.