Darkest Dungeon Review and Critique

the following video is about the review and a critique of darkest dungeon a dungeon crawler that was released by Red Hook studios in January of this year the first five minutes will only have minor spoilers I show two bosses and explain some of the game's fundamentals I'll include another spoiler warning further into the video when I go into more detail and you can side them if you want to stop and play the game yourself as always if you prefer to play games completely blind then you shouldn't watch any of this at all there are multiple ways to judge a game and determine what it does well when it comes to reviews objectivity is vital and it's the job of the reviewer to do their best to separate their own bias in order to give the game a fair valuation this is of course impossible to do completely you can't switch off personal tastes or preferences but it's still important for them to be acknowledged an example at sutter games being that I hate sushi that doesn't mean sushi is bad I'm the problem not the food however games are made of so many different parts that objectively measuring at least some of them is usually possible the list shown right now has some of the usual suspects that can be appraised quite easily does a game look good whether we're talking about graphics or aesthetic it's often easy to view a game and see how much of its visuals are impressive same goes for technical performance either the game runs well or it doesn't it's a buggy mess or it isn't for darkest dungeon some of these are quite easy to judge the game's graphic novel style is fantastic everything looks great and fits with the game's gothic theme from the characters to the monsters to the horrific hallways in the background of every dungeon the music is Moody and suitably understated the ambient noise in each dungeon fits the theme of each area the warns especially does this well with the squealing of the monstrous pigs getting louder as light on your torch goes down it all feeds into the game's atmosphere the story is light on details and that's perfectly fine it's a game about the psychological stress that dungeon crawling could inflict on a group of heroes and everything from the way every dungeon is filled with corpses and decay to the dreary state of your home base which is meant to be your safe haven that is barely more welcoming than anything else in the game reinforces this idea when it comes time to look at the rest objectivity becomes more difficult my last video is on Tomb Raider I made a comment about how the first games in this series had awkward controls when it came to really basic things like running and jumping it's pretty much a fact that Lara Croft controls better in the new series but that doesn't mean the gameplay is better just different since the older games built or challenged around those controls so even something as seemingly obvious as that is difficult to judge but we can wipe all of this away for an even broader distinction on how to evaluate a game on one side you have the game the developer set out to make meaning how well done or close is the final product when compared to the goal stated at the beginning of the project and on the other side how good is the game aside from that meaning if you don't know or simply don't care about the developer's intentions how much did you enjoy the game the reason I'm taking the time to separate these on the screen like this is because my thoughts on each side couldn't be more different on the left here I think that Red Hook Studios absolutely nailed the idea that they had when they set out to make this game it's not perfect but the end result is on the money but on the other side if I'm judging the game with my own preferences intact and removing any authorial intent on the part of the developers then darkest dungeon is one of the worst gaming experiences I have ever had if you don't know what a dungeon crawler is then allow me to explain it briefly or at least how it works in darkest dungeon the footage that has been playing so far may have given you the impression that you play as a team of Heroes that go down hallways and slay monsters this technically isn't true the game's opening movie sets the stage for the story you come from a long wealthy noble line you've left home for some reason and in your absence your rich ancestor has squandered the family fortune on investigating a mysterious power that is meant to be hidden under the family estate he was eventually successful in finding said power and he has promptly driven to madness by the horrors that it unleashed he writes you a letter saying that you need to return home to fix his mistakes and then shoots himself in the head this ancestor is the game's narrator and his ghost constantly talks at you while you play it's one of the game's best features even though the writing sounds like he eats an entire thesaurus for breakfast every morning monstrous size has no intrinsic merit unless inordinate exsanguination be considered a virtue so while you have some level of control over a group of heroes you're actually playing as the town nothing confirms this more than moments during gameplay when heroes can refuse orders or decide that they have a better idea on what they should do from here the game is split into two halves you choose the region that you want to run and assemble a team of four from your pool of heroes then you go through the dungeon with those heroes and give them commands while killing monsters and collecting treasure if you're successful you can use this treasure to fund upgrades in town that can be used to make your hero stronger the stronger your heroes the more difficult dungeons you can run the more difficult dungeons have more treasure that you can spend on more upgrades this is the gameplay loop of darkest dungeon it's what you're going to be doing over and over and over again you spend a lot of time in your town tinkering with heroes and upgrades this is all very simple you're ticking off boxes if you have the right heirlooms in order to fix up buildings there are similar boxes for upgrading your heroes that require gold it's the dungeons that are the real meat of the game combat is turn-based like traditional RPGs there are rounds in every character enemy and hero usually only has one move they can make for each one there are quite a few twists that Redhook studios have put in to try to make turn-based combat interesting the most important is that health isn't the only thing you have to worry about stress is another meter that fills up when you take damage instead of depleting like life at 100 stress a hero will break and become afflicted with things like abusive or paranoid they'll begin to question your orders and inflict stress damage on the rest of your party as 200 stress they'll have a heart attack and likely die there are four different regions on a dungeon map the ruins the Warrens the cove and the Weald after completing enough dungeons in one region equesticle boss will unlock there are two of these in each region plus the titular darkest dungeon that sits at the peak of the map as your end goal I'm getting far enough into explaining the game now that is becoming awkward to avoid spoilers so I think here is the best place to split the video if you think what I've said so far sounds great then maybe you'll enjoy darkest dungeon I am certainly in the minority when it comes to disliking it I can't really explain my reasoning without getting stuck into detail about this game the spoiler warning is mostly for those who want to figure out mechanics themselves and work out their own strategies to beating the game there's also story moment near the end that's development of darkest dungeon was funded through Kickstarter and then with sales while it was available on Steam in their early access program many have said that the game is a shining example of early access done right that the game was made available with a decent amount of features that frequent updates were made and that the developers listen to feedback from players I didn't play the game while it was in early access it looked interesting enough that I decided to make a video on it specifically when it was fully launched I purchased it at Christmas and only played it for about an hour before it's official release for making this video I played the game for over 80 hours that's how long it took me to finish it I completed it without turning off any of the difficulty options that can make the game easier I went through the entire game as the developers seemed to have intended players to do i leveled one of every hero to the cap and killed every boss I saw the game's ending I say all this because the vast majority of the reviews I've seen on the game are from people who haven't finished it even reviewers on big-name sites which I won't name out of courtesy didn't finish the game before reviewing it which would be really strange but if you play the game for long enough I think you can start to understand why there are quite a few reasons why I hated my time with darkest dungeon and I'm afraid that word there hate it's very much genuine this isn't some hook I'm using like I hate the game because it was so good I was addicted or I hate the game because it's so hard but so rewarding I meant it seriously when I said earlier that darkest dungeon is one of the worst times I've ever had with the game the four main reasons are turn-based combat is boring and over-reliance on randomness to provide the illusion of gameplay depth a massive grind and a lack of variety and gameplay now I'll explain all these and probably too much detail in just a moment but I quickly want to address what I think most people will dislike about this list that turn-based combat is boring I will freely admit right now that this might be another case of I don't like sushi if you think turn-based combat is fun then I'm not saying you're wrong I'll give my reasons for disliking it soon enough but in general terms I think it's a very difficult type of gameplay to get right and darkest dungeon does not succeed in doing so let's look at older games that use a similar system the early Final Fantasy titles Chrono Trigger these are some of my favorite games and even back then they recognized that the basic version of turn-based combat isn't engaging they tried to mix things up with having it based on time as well to reward players you can make decisions quickly there was also a sharp focus on progress between combat in Final Fantasy seven it was leveling up materia in Final Fantasy 6 it was about permanently imbuing magic on to your characters to magicite and other Final Fantasy titles you had jobs that filled a similar role the stories here were also major draws for players to get the game in Chrono Trigger you had the beginnings of contact space skills an enemy would do something and a certain ability that you had usually belonging to chrono since he's the only character guaranteed to be in your party for almost all of the game could prevent a big attack or make an enemy vulnerable to taking damage you had some light decisions to make plus the tech system in that game fostered party teamwork and it was really interesting to see how different Tex mix together because without these twists turn-based combat can be summed up by one sentence make sure you spend some turns healing damage or else you die that's the whole game so it's understandable that recent games try to add so much to the turn-based foundation on top of the job system 2012 s bravely default allows you to bank turns and use them all in one go so you can save actions on your healer too and do a big damage spike or save up moves on a damage dealer for a huge combo when an enemy is vulnerable but even that game seems embarrassed about its combat system since it allows you to fast-forward through it after you're tired of seeing the same animations over and over many of the features that darkest dungeon implements are in a similar line of thought there's the massive amount of progress you can do outside of combat upgrading all the buildings in your town and then investing resources in your characters along with stress your heroes can receive quirks some of these are positive most are negative these are assigned randomly and have absolutely no connection that I noticed with what happened during a dungeon run one of many examples being a guy that received a quirk related to the Cove after completing a dungeon in another area entirely you can spend resources to remove these negative quirks or massive amounts of money locking some of the positive ones in there are trinkets defined in skills to purchase an upgrade heroes gain levels it's all about filling up check boxes and progress bars initially it's interesting and addicting in that way that leveling systems always are you're getting this steady increase in power but eventually those bars and check boxes are just those linear progression paths disguised as frivolous choices quirks don't really matter that much and since you can change what abilities your hero can use in the middle of a dungeon run it doesn't really matter which ones you invest in when you're in town more effort went into making the combat side of things fun instead and this is where there's some spillover on the list with the over-reliance of randomness and the amount of grinding required in the game the intention here is to make combat stressful and to keep you in suspense and I think that Red Hook was successful here but for all the wrong reasons death and darkest dungeon is permanent when a character has a heart attack or gets taken down to zero HP they are put on death's door once there any damage received has a chance to kill them so they could take multiple hits and luckily survive or they can die on the first hit they take after being put on death store any heal picks them back up to safety but with a debuff that lingers for the rest of the dungeon and that lowers their effectiveness numbers in the game are kept low levels only go from 0 to 6 the highest HP I ever saw on an enemy was around 250 or so the highest crit I saw while playing was I think about 60 the numbers are meant to be manageable and understandable so that when they do start getting high into the double digits you begin to get really worried and stressed out over the fear of losing one of your heroes who is once dead dead forever I'll come back to this in a minute for the rest of combat well most games usually provide challenge to the players in one of two ways they test your reflexes or knowledge puzzle games as an example are usually always about knowledge and implementing solutions learn from past lessons some puzzle games like portal have a mixture of both when they require precise timing on the player's part then there are games like Dark Souls that you think are all about player skill you learn how the mechanics work and get better at learning when to attack dodge block etc but one of the interesting things about that game is how you can also play it by gathering knowledge learning boss weaknesses and exploiting them recognizing how some of the items the game gives you can trivialize encounters to the point that I sometimes wish the series had a hard mode where this was impossible darkest dungeon is firmly in the knowledge camp while playing you have to learn what skills are available to every hero you have to learn what heroes do better than others in each region there's a set of three main resistances that enemies can have prot which lowers physical damage and then blight and bleed damage enemies in the ruins are highly resistant to bleed but vulnerable to blight enemies in the Warrens are resistant to blight but vulnerable to bleed some enemies have low prot and die fastest to direct damage one of the most important things you can learn while playing the game is which set of heroes do well or badly in each region and to select your party composition accordingly to deal blight or bleed damage this knowledge continues in combat you select and use the appropriate skills party formation matters a lot in this game since heroes can only use certain skills if they're standing in a specific place in your party line the Crusader can only use holy Lance if he's in the back two positions you can only use his main melee strike if he's standing in the front - every class has similar restrictions and your knowledge is tested again in knowing the best place for each here to stand relative to the rest of the party and their skills the issue is that's about it there's nothing really left to learn I went into the game knowing nothing about it and after a few dungeons I grasped how this all worked for the next 10 hours or so I had some fun experimenting with different parties and taking different groups to each region I learned what worked and what I imagine will be the same way that most people will but that was just ten hours in it took me another seventy to beat the game there are a couple of other things you need to learn but these lessons happen organically while you're figuring out party composition that you need an array of heroes that are capable of striking down pretty much any and position at the start of a battle and that you need to prioritize certain enemy types in each region these are usually the monsters that inflict the highest amount of stress damage since restoring HP is a lot easier than fixing a hero sanity on the longer runs I can't really emphasize enough how easy this game becomes once you reach this point there are other bumps in difficulty I'll speak about soon but I want to say now that in another game I would have started playing with more wacky party types and try to challenge myself with more interesting dungeon runs but the game doesn't allow you to do that because of the aforementioned permadeath on your heroes there is so much grinding in this game a lot of it involves collecting heirlooms and treasure to upgrade the town but an equally time-consuming part is leveling up your heroes as it works now they sawed off at zero and then hit one if they survived losing their dungeon virginity dungeons can be short medium or long and reward higher experience with each one but the experience isn't that much higher between them and since the larger ones take longer to complete the extra experience isn't really all that faster when compared to short ones that you can just rush through it takes hours to level up a full party of four and you can't stick with one group either since stress damage persists between dungeons so you have to use the pub or the church in order to remove stress on heroes this makes them busy for a dungeon run so you have to take a different group of heroes out instead additionally it takes a hefty amount of goal to continually upgrade your weapons armor and skills of your characters so you're constantly grinding out more money and more levels never really able to commit to focusing on one side at a time this spreads resources thinly over many characters instead of just a handful that you can level in a short time this had the potential to be good since it puts stress on your decisions and practice however it means you play the game as cautiously and tediously as you possibly can because losing just one hero could mean you have to spend upwards of three hours grinding dungeons to get another hero of the same type back to that level here's an example of how quickly someone can die in this game I have a Hellion on the frontline she's randomly selected to take a hit which rolls a massive crit that deals more than 75% of her maximum HP she's knocked down to death's door and is then chosen for the next hit and dies that's at least three hours of grinding out done in that moment and there was nothing I could do about it this is a way that permits the game it encourages careful tedious play to minimize any moments like this this place tiles also reinforced by several other key features in the game most notable of them all is that high level heroes can't run low level dungeons dungeons have levels apprentice veteran and champion these are in addition to the short medium and long modifiers when a hero reaches level 3 he decides that anything below a veteran rank is beneath him and he refuses to run the dungeon when he reaches level 5 he won't do veteran ones either he won't get out of bed unless the champion dungeon so if you lose a level 6 Hellion like I did you can even level another one up from 0 with a team of bodyguards you either have to send a lowly newbie into the champion dungeons because bewildering Lee you can force low-level heroes into high level dungeons but not the other way around or you can form a whole new low level party in order to run apprentice dungeons for your new hero at this point you might think I'm exaggerating the issue and if I hadn't played the game to its conclusion that I would probably agree with you because if you play carefully and then losing a hero should be rare right for the most part it is when I was running the four main regions I think I only ever lost three level 6 heroes and one of them was during a boss encounter so this act of repeating the entire grind of the game should be rare enough but once you start venturing into the darkest dungeon at the top of the map screen the series of quests that end the game things romantically change there are 4 missions to get through here you need a full party of strong level 6 heroes to get through it as should be expected in the finale of any game these dungeons are fairly tough but mostly because there's a massive penalty for losing here if you decide to abandon the quest before the end wonder if your heroes will be randomly selected to die so you have to guess at what party formation will be best to send into these quests and then go through with it luckily I guess well in my first go and got through it with only minor difficulty and then this happens after you're successful the game is so unabashedly in love with its grind that you can't use any hero twice in the final series of 4 quests so if you have a party comp that you really like you're going to have to level up a fresh set of them and go through it all again not to mention the characters you lose in your attempts anyone who has gotten to this point will have already learned the game systems and how to run every region there isn't really anything left for them to learn and nothing to challenge them there it's just a tedious slog through the same content over and over and it's here that the game's lack of variety really hurts at the gameplay whether a dungeon is short medium or long they each have a given objective there are only four different types you either need to explore 90% of the rooms in a dungeon win every battle in those rooms find three objects scattered throughout the place or find a boss and kill it these are all functionally identical and have you moving through the same rooms and killing the same monsters they all end up requiring roughly the same amount of exploration through a dungeon before completing it boss encounters are the exception to the rule but you can only kill them once on each difficulty rank before they're dead forever nothing proves how lacking the game is in quest variety than the game itself when it sends you through the darkest dungeon set specifically the 3rd quest this is the best part of the entire game it's the only time that it changes things up and has you doing something unique your goal is to find a beacon somewhere in an absolutely gigantic maze of rooms and hallways there are monsters you encounter that can teleport you to a random location across the map and force you to get back to your goal this was stressful and a great challenge of endurance and problem-solving to estimate the quickest route back to where you are and it's the only time in the entire game that a dungeon breaks out of its formula if there had been more random events like this in other regions and I need a lot more then suddenly that grind could be fun the other solution would be to dramatically reduce it the further you get into the game those bosses I mentioned in each region are recycled in the same way as everything else in the game there are eight in total two each in the ruins Orange Cove and the Weald you fight them all on an apprentice veteran and then champion for a total of 24 times you're never given any substantial reward or incentive for doing so on the champion levels they drop trophies that are mostly really bad trinkets this is a missed opportunity that feels curiously like an unfinished feature when you clear some of these areas and narrate or pipes up and speaks like you're effecting some sort of change this is especially true in the Cove area after you kill the boss there he says seafaring trade one of any port then resume again now that the routes are saved so if the port is now open after all this time why doesn't anything change in the town you're not given any extra supplies no new tools since these bosses are currently optional and there's nothing stopping you from throwing yourself at the darkest dungeon without doing them this could have been a great way to reward players by alleviating the grind how about for every region that you completely clear out of champion bosses that new heroes get a plus-one to level if you clear out all four new heroes would come to you already prepared to risk ampion level dungeons and only require an hour or so of grinding instead of three to four or if you clear the bosses that unlocks the ability to send high-level heroes into low level dungeons for that region to make it easier to train up new recruits there's a similar problem with the heirlooms you find there are busts paintings deeds and the quests of your noble family they're needed to upgrade the buildings in your town once you've upgraded everything which is very likely to happen before you beat the game you have nothing to do with the extra hundreds of the things that you'll find after that there isn't even a way to trade them in for extra gold to lessen the grind these could have been given a new use at this point or an option to invest them in smaller upgrades ways that you can use heirlooms forever for incremental cost reductions on skill ups or the blacksmith quest rewards also suffer you can't find weapons or armor in this game only trinkets each hero has two slots and these items are downright awful most of them suck and come with heavy drawbacks again this comes back to the developers intentions versus the end result of the game these drawbacks are meant to reinforce the idea that this is a harsh stressful game that isn't going to cut you any slack but because of this trinket rewards are boring I was rarely excited about what I got especially since the vast majority of good trinkets also increased stress damage your heroes receive many more trinkets could have solved this then they could have been kept hidden on the quest screen and you could have been randomly assigned a choice between three at the end so you have a higher chance of getting something useful and also a mystery keeping you going through the dungeon you wondering what you're going to get at the end since the game embraces randomness so readily elsewhere I think it could have been good to make a whole line of trinkets that get randomly assigned stats that you can alter and lock in just like works on heroes this could have been another building in your town a tinker tent or something and another way to spend the heirlooms you collect randomness also severely hurts the game and it's not just in combat the example I showed earlier with my Hellion dying may have been the most frustrating moment I had while playing the game I lost a crusader in a similar way what happened more often were dungeons where one hero was chosen by the game to be the runs punching bag they would end up on that store while every other hero is at full HP or stressed out - an affliction while everyone else is low on stress and just chillin everything is riddled with this extreme take on dice rolls to the point that I considered the game the closest thing that could ever be made to single-player hearthstone I had some dungeon runs that were crammed full of monsters in every hallway in room and then another with literally only two fights in the entire thing or the dungeon I had that completed after I finished one fight in just one room all because of random chance there are hunger checks that are completely random you can go through hallway after hallway never having to eat and then hit two checks back to back or use food on everyone to the point that they're full and won't eat anymore and immediately have a hunger check a few seconds later there were runs when quarks would trigger and make my heroes open every interactable object in the dungeon this usually has bad results since part of the game is learning what items you can use to cleanse these objects for extra loot even if you have these items in your bags the game never gives you the option to use them when a hero decides to open something there are only two real healing classes in the game the vestal and the occultist the latter has the strongest heal but also the most random it can do anywhere from 0 to 20 healing it can also crit and has a chance of putting a negative bleed on your hero maybe I'm one of the most unlucky players in the world for this sort of stuff but whenever I ran with an occultist in my group they healed for zero and one so often that I started to wonder if they were trying to communicate with me in binary the three worst cases of randomness are found in dungeon layouts the tavern and an ability of monster has toward the end of the game dungeon maps are randomized and because of this are never that interesting since every objective requires you to explore almost all of it when you're plopped down into the middle of two divergent paths you have no choice but to buckle up for a lot of downtime it boggles my mind that this is in the game and I'm hoping that maybe I missed some sort of teleport ability because you have to explore both paths to finish the run so when you make it all the way to the end of one you have all this unavoidable backtracking to go to the other path dungeon should have always been made with a quick test to work out a clever efficient way of navigating it all not pointless time wastes the tavern becomes a useless building when you learn that there's a chance heroes will lose trinkets when they go there for stress relief they can get drunk and misplace it or lose it while gambling this can be devastating if it's one of the rare trinkets that's actually useful so it's never worth the risk to use the tavern there's also always a chance during any stress relief that the hero will go missing for a week or decide to stay in the building for an extra dungeon meaning that you can never really rely on having them available for the next run for the monsters ability it's the intentionally named the finger that Red Hook is giving to its player base this has the potential to crit for incredibly high HP and stress damage and also puts a bleed on the target this is doubly scary since characters who are on that store have a chance to be killed by the bleed when their turn starts before you can use a bandage to heal them numbers in general also don't make much sense or at least they don't if you're looking for a consistency sometimes the game uses ratings other times it uses percentages examples being that dodge chances are rating just a flat number but bleed blight and sun resistances are percentage based so you think that 100% resist means immune but it actually means the percentage chance of the abilities AI stunned with a hundred and sixty-four percent chance to hit is compared to the hundred percent resist chance which means it's a rating after all and not a percentage but there are ratings in the game so why bother with it traps made me very angry before I realized this they aren't given any resistance numbers they're just drops on the floor so my character that had a 100 percent or 135 percent chance to disarm a trap would very often trigger it instead making me wonder why how and a similar thing happened on the second darkest dungeon level you're given trinkets that are meant to prevent any damage HP or stress taken from an ability called revelation you can read the tooltip right now if you'd like yet they still did some damage both HP and stress even when characters had them on same goes for quests that ask you to explore 90% of rooms what this actually translates to is that you can leave one room unexplored onshore dungeons to on medium and 3 on long no matter how many rooms there might be I wish they had just made this a number instead of 4 percentage so you can better make decisions your first time through while we're nitpicking here I also wish you could fast-forward through the dungeon recap at the end it ticks slowly through each piece of treasure and heirloom every single time you can skip it all but then you don't see your totals for the end very strange decision for a game that's all about repeating content so much nothing can sum up darkest dungeon more than the boss fight with the collector it shows all the good and the bad it looks awesome it uses with the same atmosphere that the rest of the game has how cool the concept is at the fight against something that has apparently killed so many adventurers like you that he has a collection of their severed heads to use against you yet on the other side this fight is randomly thrown at you in dungeons where you're meant to fight regular enemies so you can end up against it when you're in a bad spot it also takes forever and you have to grind through so many mobs if you're unprepared to hit something on the back row it's horribly imbalanced with its life steal ability and the way it can simply summon more severed heads whenever you kill enough the boss can spam this over and over almost all the bosses follow this pattern they look awesome they have some great backstories to them yet with only a few exceptions all of them follow the same rules ignore whatever special mechanic they have and instead burn them down as fast as possible because whatever makes them unique is also what they can relentlessly spam it's not worth dealing with the mechanics just use stuns and focus on the big cool-looking monster playing this game was one of the purest examples I've ever come across that proves tedium and difficulty are not the same thing it's a shame too because with some more variety and ways to circumvent the grind darkest dungeon could be a very enjoyable game the moments where it's best or when you start to get worried that you're not going to make it through everything it's throwing at you when you get to the end of a long series of battles or one the bosses in the final set with your heroes half dead and close to afflicted somehow you managed a victory and you feel like you've accomplished something but for me the realization would always quickly come that I wasn't relieved that the boss was dead I was relieved that I had avoided the extra hours of grinding that dying would have meant especially considering that most failed runs were the result of random critical hits from monsters rather than poor decision-making leading up to that point that same feeling of tension could have been kept by making her heroes be knocked out of rotation for a few weeks or any sort of punishment that's harsh enough to slow you down but not in a way that's measured in hours because in the end it's that grinding gameplay loop that I keep coming back to is the games primary flaw that cycle through the same dungeons with the same enemies at the end of the game the final boss is quite an easy fight the predictable but still decent twist here is at the ancestor who sent the letter has been consumed by the evil in the dungeon it was at this point that I was expecting the game to throw all the dead heroes at you maybe a long gauntlet of fights against those who fell in your service so that at least had some excuse to justify making your people stay dead but it never happened instead the fight is a victory lap it's visually impressive enough and it feels like there's a lot of tension behind it even though it's a lie then the story itself falls prey to that same cycle that same loop that collapses into the grind it's revealed that everything you did was for nothing that maybe it wasn't even a temporary victory and just a setback to the beginning with the letter being written again and your ancestor killing himself again there's another game that's just like this does the repetitive task you have to do there's a loop of gameplay of saving up resources in order to unlock the next tier of repetitive tasks the numbers get bigger as you go on you continually oscillate between that gather resources spend them and then move on to the next gather and spend there's even the same eldritch horrific undertone that's a teasing stress on the sanity of the player it's called cookie clicker you should give it a try as always thank you very much for watching if you like these videos then please subscribe to the channel and you'll be notified when the next one comes out if you really like it and would like to support future videos I have a patreon page set up that you can visit there should be a link on the screen or in the comments below if you'd like to see what I'm working on next you can follow me on Twitter or you can go to the patreon page and you can see the weekly posts that I've started making I usually make them on Friday or Saturday and explain what I've done that week and when the next video should be due out my next video is meant to be on Dragon's Dogma but darkest dungeon took me so long to finish that the thought of going through another 100 hour-long game like that doesn't seem good to me so I'm going to go through rise of the Tomb Raider first and then go to Dragon's Dogma after that apologies to anyone who is looking forward to the Dragon's Dogma video or voted on the Twitter poll that I did a couple weeks back but I played darkest dungeon so much this week that I can't even consider another big project like that while people are still here I'd like to ask for suggestions on what I could use as a banner on top of the youtube channel I honestly have no idea what I could put up there especially considering that my channel doesn't have a theme it's it's just my name so if anyone has any good suggestions I would love to hear them thanks again for watching hopefully I'll see you next time

Channel: Joseph Anderson

Views: 740,895

Rating: 4.6925159 out of 5

Keywords: video game analysis, video games, darkest dungeon, video game reviews

Id: _Buwei6ZWqU

Length: 31min 42sec (1902 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/J3andit]

Oh boy, Darkest Dungeon reminds me so much of Sunless Sea. Both games have this insanely good horror asthetic and tenseful gameplay.

But both games are ruined for me by the unnecessary grind. For me it really feels like the devs of both titles made and finished their games, then saw they only last 20-30 hours. And thus later added the grind just to prolonge the game.

I really really wish to like both games, but I absolutly have no time to deal with this. What a shame

[u/amish_bodybuilder]

Great game but it does have some serious flaws that really start to compound the more you play.

• Food. Two rooms or two steps it doesn't matter when your guys ate last. Even bringing extra has left me struggling to cope sometimes.

• Darkest Dungeon. Once your guys go in there you can't use them ever again for that place. All those hours you put in grinding them up is eventually wasted with this system which really sucks because...

• Level system. You can't power level your guys up, they put in maximum (but not minimum) level restrictions on dungeons so you need to slowly regrind each guy if you lose one.

• Combat speed. Too slow. It's fun for the first dozen or so hours, but after that I just want to get on with the dungeon and not watch 3 minutes (hyperbole) of animations every round.

• Character balancing. There's really no reason to include someone like a Leper on your party when Crusaders and Men at Arms exist. Leveling them up only to find you can only run one endgame dungeon with each character is bullshit so why bother with unoptimal guys.

• Inventory. By design it's meant to be tight, which worked before the leveling nerf. This only causes more grinding to get enough money for upgrades, on top of the grind for heirlooms. That isn't fun.

It's a fun game but it has its problems that Red Hook has either failed to either fix, outright ignored, or made worse.

[u/madmalletmover]

As always, I'm amazed at the quality and execution of the analysis here. Having only played the early access version for about 4-5 hours, I was very surprised to hear about the shortcomings later on in the game, but it was explained in a very clear way that made a lot of sense. I love this guy's videos.

[u/Firesky7]

I like how Joseph Anderson makes 100% sure that he fully grasps a game before he reviews it. A lot of people seemed to like this game because it comes in strong for the first 5 or so hours, but quickly evaporates once you hit the last third. That's really too bad, and something that could be patched, but I didn't see anyone mention it except him.

[u/ChipmunkDJE]

I don't mind the INITIAL grind at all. But once I get a character to level 6, it would be nice to get an XP buff for raising any other characters of that class. Having your level 6 dude die and need to "grind up" an new one takes many in-game weeks. This part of the grind sucks.

Same w/ the "Can only be used once in the Darkest Dungeon." I wish they'd let you turn that off, like w/ corpses.

[u/paradise92]

I didn't mind anything at all while playing, but the moment that made me say "FUCK THIS GAME", is the first time I finished the darkest dungeon, the first part/mission and then getting the fucking notification that my 4 main characters didn't wanted to go in it again was complete and utter bullshit. Yes, I'm really pissed off at how stupid it is, I don't have the time to grind and make a good team from the fucking beginning...

[u/LukaCola]

I'm glad someone else said it for once... I often feel like I'm part of the minority when saying I just didn't have fun with this game, and it's largely for the reasons he describes.

He seemed to have a much easier time of it, I didn't.

I could just see the grind looming and I cannot convince myself to continue playing.

E: And seriously, the trinkets, what a fucking waste of effort. I don't get why the devs don't feel like they can let you have anything.

[u/DancingOgre]

This guy has some really solid reviews of the Dark Souls games as well, I highly recommend them if you're into the games. Especially the DLC.

[u/TheSupremeAdmiral]

Alright, I'm gonna say that as a staunch lover of Darkest Dungeon I'm already impressed with this review and I'm only about 4 minutes into it. He outright says that enjoyment is subjective and that the developers clearly created the game that they wanted to make and it's almost perfect in that regard but despite that he dislikes it because of his own preferences which might not be shared by everyone.

The rest of this video could be him shitting all over the Darkest Dungeon but it doesn't change the fact that I, personally, like the game; possibly for the very same reasons that he dislikes it.

What I don't get is the petty, passive-aggressive, war that divides the user base of /r/games over Darkest Dungeon. It crops up in every post made about DD, certainly in everyone I've made about it. Have you considered that the game isn't for you and that's okay? Or that someone is allowed to dislike something even though you like it?

Edit: Finished the review, it was fantastic and had lots of very good points that were very carefully explained and justified. Doesn't change my opinion in the slightest. If you're looking for reasons to back up your arguments for why you dislike the Darkest Dungeon to your annoying friends who keep bothering you about it then I would recommend that you study the points made in this video. Just don't try to stop other people from liking it because it won't work.

People complain about other people seeking out "echo-chambers" when it comes to reviewing media like video games but I seriously think they are missing the point. It's important to find a reviewer that shares your tastes so that when that person recommends something you know you will enjoy it as well. When a reviewer speaks negatively about something you like then all that means is that the reviewer is speaking to an audience that shares their own tastes and is warning them that they won't like it so they don't waste their time and money on it. People need to stop taking personal offense when someone criticizes something that they like.