Descent: Legends of the Dark Review - Enter the Digi-Dungeon

[Music] well met traveller join me by yonder fire and rest ye weary games welcome to shut up and sit down's review of descent legends in the dark sent to us by board game publishers asmo day a box so gorgeous as to make you realize that packaging design is not usually the industry's strong suit and actually it might be nice if our collections didn't look like a clutch of destitute logos organized a flash mob but what is in this box hark allow me to excrete but a simple can trip [Music] [Music] how marvelous actually i have one more magic spell for you hi i'm quince and i'm actually not a wizard at all i'm sorry i would have loved to kept that going but i don't know if you've ever worn a fake beard it's kind of like wearing the pubics of another dirtier man so descent is back and shut up and sit down has something of a history of this game the first ever edition of descent was one of the things that got me into board games that game came in what was lovingly referred to back then as a coffin box and reimagined the humble dungeon crawl as something with the hustle and energy of american gladiators then came dissent second edition a hunky upgrade which led a team of heroes taken on an overlord player in a dramatic campaign that started strong but inevitably became unbalanced as players gorged themselves on an entire catalogue of game-breaking powers and items but this lovely new box is not calling itself a third edition which is perhaps your first hint that it's trying something different and ambitious you see gone is descent's traditional all versus one structure that sees a team of hero players taking on an overlord player who is trying their absolute hardest to inflict an unhappy ending on the fantasy realm of terenoth like a sociopathic dungeon master legends in the dark is now an entirely cooperative experience where one to four players take on man's natural enemy phones so as you play legends in the darks campaign which is the only way you can play it your team of players will be tackling missions where the game's companion app only reveals each new room as you enter it the scenario being dolloped onto the table like thick anticipatory honey dripping off a digital spoon the app will also tell you how to imagine each room using a technology known as words it tells you what all of the monsters do on their turn it tells you what happens when you hit them it tracks their health it shows your characters talking to one another then when the mission's over it shows your characters traveling back to town it tells you what random encounters they have then when you're in town the app will track your group's loot add recipes and you can use your loot to craft stuff and it tracks your gold so you can buy things and then you can tell it you've equipped those things so later when you tell it that you've walloped a monster in its gross little mouth it can be like hey that thing you equipped just did a thing also as well so how do you play well oh um excuse me everybody it sounds like we're getting a public service announcement through from fantasy game reviewer headquarters oh yeah okay of course don't play this game on a phone listen when you start the campaign you're gonna have to download the app on something whether that's your phone or a laptop or tablet or pc and that's gonna feel like an inconsequential decision it is not there is no transferring of your saved game so the only way that you can play on a different device is by sitting there with a different device ideally fingering your way through the early missions kind of faking your progress until you arrive at a game state that's kind of sort of what you had before maybe and listen playing legends in the dark on a phone is as obnoxious as the rest of the box is charming you're gonna have to drag tiny icons to other tiny icons every time someone hits a monster only one person can see the instructions of how to set up each new room and they're gonna seem like they're performing obsessive feng shui for a doll's house there are really long cut scenes multiple times per mission that one person is gonna have to read out as if they were performing the world's most underfunded play we've nearly made it hindrus tomorrow will be in frostgate and then we can send our letter to is this guy talking then we can send our letter to the baroness can you tell i played this game on a phone listen if you do not have a laptop or tablet there is no way this game is worth your money and with that caveat cabbie added back to you in the studio thanks quinn's so how do you play well let's imagine you've got the game set up you've got your friends over you've had a weirdly chill and mindful time assembling all of this 3d terrain and you bear your party's magic item the screen of attention deficit disorder plus one the campaign starts with a camp of handsome travelers who spoilers will soon become fast friends resting for the evening next to a watchtower but oh no in your first scenario the watchtower comes under attack by evil bad guys and you jump to their rescue and so begins a grand adventure that will take you into bogs towers mines anywhere where there are evil guys to slay you can expect to go there and slay the pants off them more mechanically when you're actually in scenarios and you know playing the game on your turn your hero will get a small handful of movement points that they can use to run around and they get exactly two actions and you can use these results to get more movement points but generally you'll be using the actions on your turn to either attack a monster at which point you roll a dice and punch the results you got into the app or you'll interact with a piece of scenery and this interacting you're gonna be doing with all this lovely 3d scenery is unquestionably one of the most innovative and entertaining parts of legends in the dark although it does turn your party of heroes into like a group of prospective homeowners walking through every scenario looking and rubbing and smelling and touching every single piece of furniture that they come across is there a table in the room go and have a rummage is there a chest you better believe that's getting rummaged we found a tree can you rummage a tree cause we're gonna find out oh my god there are three options when rummaging a tree i'm gonna leave my character here for as many turns as it takes to try all of them a lot of these interactions with scenery will advance the story in the scenario you're playing some will see you finding physical cards for your characters but tons of your interactions with scenery will see your party finding crafting components in a compulsive mechanic that has been present in video games for ages but has now found board games and slipped right in like a fox into a handhouse that even by henhouse standards really thought it was safe from the fox touch a tree 14 herbs and two discreet units of life magic will slow off it like skin from a boiled tomato look at a shelf in the middle of a fight just as well it's dangerous to go alone take these seven curios and eight rolls of cloth did you just kill a man if you're lucky he might leave behind as many as 10 bones for you to pick up off the ground as if you were the world's least efficient mugger in this version of descent enemies are way more dangerous and the game resides less in the grid in the middle and more in the indulgent array of skills and items and abilities that you're gonna steadily amass as the campaign goes on inscrutable machinery that each player is going to be hyper fixating on and flipping and tweaking and using like a dungeon based dj in legends in the dark when you're attacking or defending or doing a skill check these symbols on the dice are successes and these symbols count as successes only if you're willing to collect fatigue tokens and for as long as i've played descent i've always thought over these little teardrop fatigue tokens as sweat and all the heroes and descent are just incredibly sweaty and now i want you to think of it that way as well and now your character weapons and skills all have individual limits of how much sweat they can hold as well as sweaty abilities that you can trigger if the card isn't yet totally damp also new to this version if your hero collects statuses like they're scared or poisoned or prepared those tokens go on individual cards and any player can spend one of their two actions on their turn flipping any card which gets rid of all the tokens on it and reveals a new skill or weapon on the other side so you might charge into a swamp which poisons you kill an enemy with your mirror blades and then utilize the repair token you had to flip that card for free get rid of the fatigue and the poison before firing your bow at the next enemy does that sound cool because i mean i think it is and once you've found the right difficulty setting for your group which thankfully can be changed mid-campaign you can also look forward to a game that is excellently tense because healing is scarce and if any one player loses all of their health everybody loses and then you get to watch my favorite thing in this whole game a cut scene where all of the characters discuss what went wrong like sulking teammates in a sports anime consoling one another in the locker room after losing a match and on that note listen fantasy flight has made countless games set in their proprietary fantasy tearing off universal this is the lore guide and i have played more of these games than anyone should have to if you held a geiger counter next to me i think it would pick up dangerously unsafe levels of uthooks and infernals now terenoth has never been interesting but in this game while it's still kinda generic the creators have at least rolled up their sleeves and applied some of the desperately needed modern thinking you might associate from an episode of queer eye the heroes you play have actual personalities the random encounters are entertaining terenoth has never felt more like an intellectual property that maybe might possibly be worth forcing us all to revisit in more than one game descent has never felt more colorful it's never felt more young one of the characters who joins your party is a literal cat boy which initially bothered me in a world of classic fantasy but then i simply removed the two foot long stick from my rectum and i realized that actually this catboy was my favorite character to play well tied for my favorite character along with the elf who's both deaf and just really rude all the time and at the same time that you're realizing these characters are actually pretty fun i mean that is unless you're playing on a phone i'm hoping that baroness anderlin will let me study her alerions you'll be having similar realizations about how much this app can bring to an adventure as you get back to town you'll be able to craft new components for your weapons that you can slot in before a scenario so that when you enter your attacks into the app 10 of the time you might do double damage as if you were playing a gory dweeby scratch card each hero even has these little achievement bars known as feats that you can fill up as you play as if you are playing a mobile game which i guess you kind of are this feat system actually led to the funniest moment in my entire campaign which was i just completed a feat i was excited to see my next one and the app said new feet interact with a well which is both gloriously absurd and like a shakespearean insult um but listen can i be candid with you for a second do you want a tea how do you take yours five sugars that's obviously i mean i'm not gonna i'm not gonna do that so listen i had a genuine crisis of confidence while reviewing this i played it for an entire day and then for an entire other evening and i had the strangest feeling i just didn't know how i felt i had this growing sense of ownership over the characters that i'd play multiple times i'd feel this flutter of possibility in my chest when i got a new weapon or a new skill but if the act of writing a review for shut up and sit down is normally like tipping a jug and all of these like opinions and criticisms fall out in this case that jug was empty except for a few observational nuggets like the miniatures are nice and the app does some cool stuff and then it was on my fourth evening with dissent the me and my friends were in a scenario and we kicked open the next door and the app said put out title 16b put this furniture here this furniture here this monster here and i just felt this wave of relief coming over me because that was when i realized that the reason i didn't have thoughts on this game is because there's almost no game to have thoughts on now i know i know that's going to sound absurd to those of you who've already bought this game and are already enjoying the campaign but just hear me out from my perspective legends of the dark is a collection of elements familiar to the dungeon crawl genre that come together in this expensive euphony that distracts you from the hard fact that the mechanical side of this game you know positioning on the grid managing your character learning about monster ai in the app what you're doing is less of a game and more of a process listen on harder difficulty settings you cannot make a mistake in these scenarios but after about three or four evenings i could not make a mistake with my eyes closed and i was bored to tears look i promised myself i wasn't gonna bang on about older versions of descent in this video but there's a point to be made here the reason that descent had this big grid in the middle of the table was that it was the game it was full of monsters that kept coming back if you killed them and the heroes were asking themselves okay how do we cross this dungeon as quickly and as safely as possible and when i was reviewing this game i was so fixated on what the app adds that i didn't notice that now even though you want to be looking at all of this it feels like this gaudy irrelevance and it's simply not where the game resides for all of the terrific variety of this game's scenarios whether you're in a thieves forest or a dwarven gulch you're gonna enter a room you're gonna painstakingly assemble that room there will be some monsters and listen the monsters are dangerous you need to kill them immediately so you kill them and then you take as much time as you need before opening the next door and so you might draw the logical conclusion that okay they've removed this whole game where we have to run past monsters or war them off or watch our lines of sight but we have all this this new system this interactive 3d terrain so maybe in combat we'll hit monsters and then interact with terrain that will help us to hit the monsters better nope look there's probably some alternate universe where this game saw players doing attack and then dashing over to flip a cauldron of oil at enemies or fleeing an enemy and then pushing a bookshelf in front of the door or even deciding that rather than attacking you instead flip a card so that you can heal your friend but that's not what this game is interacting with scenery mostly gets you loot so you do that once all the monsters are dead and flipping a card will make your character better often but it's rarely better than just attacking which means that descent legends in the dark is a game finding a monster walking up to it and spending your turn hitting it twice until it dies and suddenly all of those colourful diverse characters in your party don't seem quite so colorful or diverse anymore i am galladin the elven huntsman with my hunter's bow and flashing swords i hit enemies twice a turn until they're dead i'm cyrus the mage don't mess with my magical bird or magical wand if you do i'll use either one twice a turn until you're dead [Music] the cat burglar do we need to do this bit again no stop there i reckon as the campaign goes on of course it does get more complicated introduces more equipment for your characters to divvy up and new skills but all this really meant for me and my group is that we would work out what the most efficient arrangement of our tableau was to do the most damage per second and then make sure all the cards were just right way up before we went through a door as if we were straightening our ties before entering a meeting in a day that was all meetings and once i realized how bored i was by this combat the whole well almost the whole experience unraveled i still really liked finding out more about these characters and i did like unlocking new stuff but i just felt like the game was sticking more candy and cherries into a dishwater flavored sundae and i think probably for the people online who are enjoying this game with all of its video gaming elements are enjoying it kind of like a humdrum video game where you can just kind of amiably drift through it with repetition becoming pleasant routine but for me no it wasn't that at all because if this is a video game it's one where i am both the player and the console i'm a human loading bar having to render every monster and get every bandit out of its plastic and then where does it go where does it go here okay loading complete have fun oh that's me again i guess i'll uh what should i do oh yeah walk up to it and attack twice you want a capsule review of descent legends in the dark it's that by my fourth evening with this game i was just hoping that whatever was on the other side of this door it wasn't going to be stairs because if there's stairs then you have to use pillars to create higher levels and none of this has an effect on the game anyway picture me literally putting off a quest on the world's map that was set in a wizard's tower because you know it's a wizard's tower it's gonna have loads of stairs i wasn't role playing an elven ranger i was role-playing a courier who did not want to deliver to a place with stairs and did i mention that this version of descent costs 120 elven coins i don't think that's actually a lot of money if you're going to enjoy the full 40-hour campaign but i do think it's a lot of money for a game that you're not sure you're gonna love and for me i certainly didn't love it i went on about four dates with it and decided i was done i mean if we're going to extend this analogy i decided that i really liked their friends but i didn't like how they kept making me go into a dungeon not because i've got anything against dungeons but rather what they did to me in the dungeon displayed a certain lack of expertise so no i don't want to play this game again especially not after i had to transport this game to my friend's house a couple times hey board game publishers stop making games that come in cubes not all of us have cars and if you don't have a car these games don't fit in bags and then you have to walk around town looking like a bloody video game protagonist who's midway through solving a block puzzle but on the subject of shame i do feel a deep shame to be sat in front of all of these stunning miniatures this thrillingly vertiginous scenery that my wife kept calling a playset and i didn't even mind because she was right and i feel this shame because like look at it look at it all this should be enough for me how is all of this not enough for me but i'll tell you why it's not enough for me because the actual design of this game sees me spending more time assembling each room and placing all the monsters than i ever do thinking about like how to fight the monsters this design and being so beautiful and so lacking in a in a game it's like a heaving banquet table covered in dishes to try and i know all of them have no salt and no sugar i can return to a character i haven't played in weeks and equip them with a new sword and be fighting a new enemy and i can be doing it next to a cliff edge in the dream of someone else in the party but i'm still just gonna be walking up and attacking them twice until they die and then going into the next room take tile 17b okay take one arch take one bookshelf take one stair i'm gonna flip my biscuits ah so what do you reckon you think we need to do alternative recommendations in this review i think we do i think i've been quite mean if you're in the mood for cooperative fantasy adventure i would be foolish not to mention gloomhaven or the upcoming sequel frosthaven as crunchy and complicated as descent is breezy gloomhaven has combat so good you keep thinking about it after the game is over as opposed to legends in the dark where you barely need to think about the combat while it's happening and if you can handle the extra rules that are in gloomhaven it's also the cheaper and longer game alternatively if you like the sound of almost all of these mechanics but for half the price and i feel really cheeky saying this but descent second edition still has stock available that game now also has an app that lets you play it totally cooperatively or you can try my favorite mode the all versus one campaign but only do that if you're willing to suffer the slings and arrows of players getting real grumpy at one another over a rules dispute so yeah while this game wasn't for me i am no less excited to try the next game that comes with a companion app and not for nothing if your group of friends doesn't have anybody who wants to be a dungeon master i think it's really cool that a screen can step in and play that role for you which is why i am very excited to announce this shut up and sit down is releasing a new app for when you don't have a friend who wants to be a dungeon master and in fact you don't want to go into a dungeon at all i'd like to introduce shut up and sit down colon descent colon the road to becoming a legend in the dark but i do have an early beta so i believe that i can just set these two and i can go to the shops take care everybody you are in a cursed bog there is a tree there is some imps i move and attack twice the tree is dead search the tree you receive 900 mosses and two bones okay he's gone we don't have to do this anymore you enter the next room no tape tile 7a no there is a chest no there is a well oh i actually have a feet to interact with a well well what's the worst photo of quince you have probably this one

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 213,886

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Descent, Descent Legends of the Dark

Id: 9rOxJ4XBFOo

Length: 23min 1sec (1381 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/macgamecast]

Savagely entertaining. Quinn’s can’t be beat.

[u/Haen_]

I have a few questions for anyone who has played it.

1. How long does all that stuff take to assemble?
2. Is there any point to the board? The review makes it sound like everything is done through the app except maybe die rolling.
3. How does it play solo?

[u/KnightQC]

There is just way too much happening on the apps for me. I love when an apps helps with harder part to manage or bring a little plus to a game. But I feel like everything could be on the apps with just a little more programming, so the physical part is not even necessary.

And it's even sadder when you consider the best tactic seems to be only attacking AND the price of the game...

[u/laxar2]

Game aside, I think this was one of their funniest and most entertaining reviews.

I wonder if descent would have been better suited to have gone with a jaws of the lion style map. That way they could have cut the price and avoided direct comparisons to frosthaven and full gloomhaven. Also, it probably would have made it a great welcoming game for those new to dungeon crawlers or people who have only played video games.

Right now it seems to be sitting in an odd niche. It doesn’t sound like it’s a great strategy game or a great video game. If you want a 150 dollar board game gloomhaven is the obvious choice and there are tons of cheaper video games.

[u/KingMaple]

The "human loading bar" critique is absolutely perfect. You're just playing a mediocre story based tablet/phone game.

[u/VonLaserface]

Seems like a fair review, well done and entertaining if nothing else.

Not the sort of thing we'd enjoy playing but I can certainly see the appeal.

[u/Key-Cryptographer583]

Walk up and hit it two times until it's dead.

From the designers of Roll a 6 win a cookie.

[u/vanruyn]

I've played a few sessions of Descent and I really do enjoy a lot of it. It has been fun (at least for me) to build the rooms and explore to see what is around each corner. I like the simplicity of the monster AI. The presentation the game has is stunning. And the app really does a great job keeping things in order.

My experience through Gloomhaven was indeed a lot of fun. However, someone else mentioned it in this thread and I agree that Gloomhaven is more of a puzzle than a dungeon crawler. I never felt like we were exploring dungeons and such, but figure out the answer to the riddle of how to avoid Oozes and grab the item at the end. By about the 10th mission, I also absolutely hated all the bookkeeping and information that had to be kept up with. Ended up downloading 2 separate apps to help and while they did help, there was still little things that kept slipping through the cracks with how much had to be logged. Its kinda one of the reasons I haven't gotten around to actually finishing a Kingdom Death campaign.

Although I do have Star Wars Imperial Assault and Descent 2nd Edition, I haven't played through them yet (I would prefer to do the 1 vs all as I haven't really nailed down the AI on the apps). Played through Lord of the Rings Journeys in Middleearth and sold that as I didn't enjoy it one bit (although I'm hearing 5 players isn't recommended which is how we played it) I've been playing Descent Legends of the Dark solo and once I beat it, at the moment, I would still enjoy going through it again. I have no interest in going back to Gloomhaven (hence why I gave my copy away). I even kickstarted Frosthaven but didn't actually commit to it as I knew I had my fill of that system. I think I also enjoy chucking dice.

[u/Galindan]

Why is this a board game? This looks like they started making a video game and then decided to jam it together with a board game making the video game clunky and slow and the board game a mere distraction.

It doesn't look like I should play it over DND or Divinity Original Sin so what's the point?