L.G.C. |Reviews| — Darkest Dungeon

Your intrepid heroes encounter a bug, roll the dice, and get murderated. Darkest Dungeon faces the CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: Darkest Dungeon
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/262060/
Devel: Red Hook Studios – Ported by Knockout Games (aka Aaron Melcher)
Engine: “Homebrewed and lightweight, developed by Kelvin McDowell”
Price: €22.99 / US$24.99 / CDN$27.99
Wazzat: Darkest Dungeon is a challenging gothic roguelike turn-based RPG about the psychological stresses of adventuring. Recruit, train, and lead a team of flawed heroes against unimaginable horrors, stress, famine, disease, and the ever-encroaching dark.

Mandated Disclosure: The devs sent us keys

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

V-

Map bug.
Multithreaded like a mofo.

J-

P-

They still haven’t fixed the map bug.

Total-

Shiny and Sounds

V-

If you don’t dig the hand-drawn art style then you madam (or sir) have a malfunction.
It’s gorgeous and delightfully quirky.
Soundtrack is spot on and the voicework is passable, albeit a touch repetitive.

J-

I like the art style. It does a good job of remaining cartoony while still capturing the medieval horror setting
The sound design is your standard ominous waterbell stuff. It’s appropriate
What little voice acting there is is competently done.

P-

The heavily stylized graphics make characters look like cardboard cutouts but, and this is a nice round butt, the animation and the rest of the visual aesthetic fit this design choice perfectly.
Coherence is often overlooked in indie games nowadays but Darkest Dungeon’s graphics deliver, in spades!
The audio is really well done, too.
The ambient audio and subtle background music will smack you on the earhole with an amazing dose of atmosphere.
And the narrator, wow! There should be a rule that if you’re going to have a narrator in your game, it should at least be as competent as Bastion’s.
The narrator in Darkest Dungeon takes Bastion’s influence and replaces the humor with morbidity and cryptic compliments.
Congratulations to Red Hook Studios.

Total-

Controls

V-

J-

If I had one gripe about the UI, it’s that the inventory and Map are in the same location. Sometimes I want to assess the next room while farting around in there

P-

You click on things and things react like they were clicked on.
The UI seems to have been designed for tablets in the way everything is large and accommodating for fat fingers smacking on a screen.
Still, even if it’s a little too cramped, it works for what it is.
Also fun to mention that the devs actually have an official Steam Controller layout for this game.
- On my end I just had to remap the mouse movement to the left areola.

Total-

FUN

V-

Is getting skull fkd by the game part of the fun?
- Yes. Welcome to playing AD&D/CoC
Hell, I grew up in the days of Nintendhard
But Darkest Dungeon is not hard, nay, it’s random.
- Random In a smitey dick sort of way.
Basically Darkest Dungeon tells you to pay attention, learn new strategies, and mix and match your team for each dungeon…
Then it spite nopes you and expects you to thank it for the challenge.
Again, not hard, just random.
And random does not reward skill.
And Venn Stone does not reward such bullshittery.

J-

This game scratches a lot of itches for me.
Dungeon Crawling? Check. Lovecraftian Horror? Check. Gygaxian Difficulty? Check
You gotta love the type of emergent narrative that arises from games like these. Name all your after your friends and have fun going on adventures. Just like FTL and Xcom
The system is fairly simple yet deep. They don’t do a fantastic job describing all the rules, but it’s all there. You just have to look for it.
The game rewards trying multiple combinations of your party members
I’d love to have something like this on my android tablet, but I don’t think I’d ever leave the bathroom if that were to come to pass
And remember: Always bring a healer
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go roll a bunch of DCC characters

P-

As is tradition, here’s my schpiel about mechanics:
- Darkest Dungeon feels to me like the natural evolution of the roguelike.
- It’s turn based, has randomly generated dungeons, has randomly generated characters with randomly assigned combat skills.
- But then it also takes elements from XCOM.
- Party of characters, character and skill progression, unlockables and a limited equipment distribution.
Darkest Dungeon is heavily reliant on its mechanics and both the aesthetics and narrative accommodate those mechanics perfectly.
This should, by any stretch of the imagination be a four chair game for me.
But it isn’t.
This is the kind of game that tries very hard to give you the all important sense of immersion.
- From the dark theme and aesthetics, to the healthy and heavy dose of atmosphere those convey.
- Bonus points for the Lovecraftian themes, as well.
And it succeeds. Until that nasty map bug that literally stops you from progressing happens.
The only way to work around it is to stop playing and return to the main menu or, sometimes, having to actually quit the game and come back in.
That kills any and all immersion you may have had at that point.
Whenever that bug hit me, I didn’t feel like going back in the game at all.
Why would I bother? Just to have to do it again when I started the next dungeon? Nop!