Darkest Dungeon
An older relative has left you a property in the countryside, and you need to take care of it… Stardew Valley? No… Ha, ha, ha… No. No, no, no no… noooo. NOOOO AAAAhghgghhh!!!…
Did I mention that the estate is overrun by hordes of demons and degenerate, cursed, Lovecraftian monsters? Ah, and that relative from the will is not the beloved grandpa who wants you to take care of the family estate, but a suspicious malevolent figure, who as a narrator will comment on all your failures. And there will be a lot to comment on, because Darkest Dungeon is a game that will drag you through the bottom of its darkest dungeons and despite its very high difficulty level – will chain you with dopamine and an addictive game loop… Until you finally get discouraged and abandon the game never having finished it. It’s a game I advise against for newbies and only reluctantly recommend to casuals with a particular weakness for Lovecraftian atmospheres. And they probably have a better chance of fulfilling their tentacled dreams in Dredge – after all, an easier and much less malicious game.
Darkest Dungeon is a difficult, frustrating game, but it also doesn’t require dexterity, it is divided into very casual-friendly turns, and is quite enjoyable to play on a controller, not just with mouse and keyboard (which casual doesn’t prefer to play lying on the couch, let him throw the controller first).
But it’s a dungeon crawler and crawling you will…
Above all, you can never feel too confident. Even if you know all the dependencies of all the character parameters and all the modifiers of these traits (and you won’t, because there are too many and the game is not designed to be played this way), the random factor still plays a big role. You will never have all the characters in your team fully healthy, cared for, and safe from death. Leveling up doesn’t help much either: if the heroes are at a high enough level, they no longer want to embark on too easy dungeon expeditions, so you’re always balancing on the edge. Equipment is expensive, healing is expensive, upgrading the base/town is expensive. The gameplay is very much like a roguelike – we set out on an expedition, collect experience, money, valuable items, and equipment, and return. Except that, while for example, Hades rewards each of our defeats with retained loot and progress in the story, Darkest Dungeon punishes defeats. Success, too, sometimes. Because f*** you – that’s why! Because we are cursed, everyone is. The whole land is cursed and… Will. Bear. The. Consequences.
The fights are turn-based, so they don’t require reflexes or dexterity, but still feel like a rollercoaster, best illustrated by this recording. And together with the overall gameplay, they give the effect of a slot machine: numerous hits interspersed purposefully with small victories. The balance may not come out particularly positive, but it stimulates our dopamine receptors and becomes addictive! All the more so because you can’t really definitively lose in Darkest Dungeon. Even if the whole team dies, you can always take other desperadoes and create another team.
And sooner or later, we will inevitably lose our pampered, leveled-up heroes, or at least one of them, because, for example, we don’t take enough torches on the expedition, the light will go out… Shadows will emerge from the darkness, and our hero just happens to have a random nervous breakdown and gets a heart attack… In that moment we’ll painfully feel another curse the game creators have placed on us: the lack of saves. Or rather the fact that the game is constantly saved, on one slot. So there is nothing to go back to: every mistake, every defeat, and loss of characters are immediately saved and final.
However, in defense of Darkest Dungeon, it must be said that it teaches how to play itself rather well. In the beginning, everything is very chaotic: is it better to have +5 to speed, or +2 to dodge? What is “Affliction”? How is dodge different from protection? But most mechanics become understandable fairly quickly and intuitively, and only rarely do we need to look up instructions online. And even if we don’t understand all the interactions between character traits, it doesn’t prevent playing the game – as I mentioned, a lot depends on luck, and over time we’ll develop certain habits – a well-functioning way of conducting an attack. We’ll know who in the team is best at shooting, and who can heal well. Sometimes we even manage to take someone on a taxi – bring a weak character on an expedition just so that they can gain experience protected by stronger characters.
Yet even the strongest team can come across an opponent that will finish them. Just because, for example, they don’t have the right resistances or luck favored the opponent. To avoid such a fate before completing the game, I give one hint that the game does not provide, which will be useful to players whom I haven’t managed to deter: the last boss is of course very difficult, but not as powerful as it seems, and it’s better not to delay the confrontation indefinitely. During the expeditions that are meant to toughen up the team just-a-little-more, we may lose its members and never reach the dream team of undefeated heroes, but meanwhile, it’s better to just try your luck… And don’t blame me if it doesn’t favor you. I warned you – it’s a Hard game.
Final Izzy Mode Score for Darkest Dungeon
Casual score: how suitable the game is for casual players – casual players who like a challenge from time to time, but generally just wanna’ have fu-u-n🎵 a few hours a week without stress and just for the fun of playing. The higher the score the more casual-friendly the game.
n00b-o-meter: how suitable the game is for n00b players – new players whose gaming career started and ended with Candy Crush, Tetris or browser games or even never played a game and would like to start. The higher the score the more n00b-friendly the game.
General Izzyness Level: between Izzy Mode, Normal, Hard and Nightmare – how would the title score in the difficulty scale known from games?
