Hello, this is The Gemsbok, and today's
topic is Darkest Dungeon, a game developed by Red Hook Studios and
originally released in 2016. Despite all of its thematic darkness and
mechanical brutality, Darkest Dungeon can be quite a joy to play. It has a balanced
mix of depth and breadth in its D&D-style strategy mechanics, making for a
satisfying experience when formulating and executing plans. Its level of
aesthetic polish stands out as exceptional, putting it alongside the
work of other artistically gifted small development teams like Supergiant Games,
Nitrome, and Team Cherry. And its level of difficulty makes for an
agreeable challenge, that requires players to develop non-trivial
strategies for longterm success, as all strategy titles should. I most assuredly
have an overall positive impression of the game, and if this were a simple
review of it, I would only feel that I was slightly misrepresenting my opinion
if I closed by giving it an unabashed recommendation. It's a very competent mix
among an RPG, a roguelike, and a strategy game, all set against a backdrop of
Lovecraftian horror—what's not to like? "SUCCESS SO CLEARLY IN VIEW, OR IS
IT MERELY A TRICK OF THE LIGHT?" But the game's literal tens of thousands
of positive steam reviews more than adequately cover its merits, so that's
not what I want to talk about here. Instead, this video will be focused on
the abundance of small design decisions, surfacing roughly between the 20-hour
mark and 60-hour mark of a playthrough, which serve to weaken the game's
demonstrable strength. I should clarify right at the outset that none of the
things I will be discussing in this video are elements covered by the title's
gameplay options (which include a number of toggles for enabling or disabling
some of the game's more contentious mechanics). Rather, the decisions I will
highlight include non-optional mechanics that unduly slow its pace, that mislead
the player to push them towards sub-par strategies, and that add challenge in
ways that feel sloppy or even unintentional. Alone, any one of them
would probably be nitpicking for me to discuss; but together, they sum into a disrespect that
the game demonstrates toward the player's time. "IN TIME, YOU WILL KNOW THE
TRAGIC EXTENT OF MY FAILINGS." Even transitioning into my list of
grievances requires beginning with some further praise, as the first topic I'll
be discussing relates to a relatively unpopular mechanic in
Darkest Dungeon that I actually think is quite brilliant: its stress
system. There is a huge amount of overlap between the content of Darkest
Dungeon and the content of tabletop RPGs in the vein of Dungeons & Dragons, with
both having: turn-based combat that plays out an initiative order; distinctions
between short rests and long rests; damage and dodge mechanics reliant on
chance; a narrator speaking over the action; "IMPRESSIVE!" character levels that increment
slowly, and cap off at a low number; abilities with limited combat
uses; and highly numerical approaches to hunger, stealth, and torchlight. One of the
mechanics that DD seemingly grabs to a large degree from D&D is how character
death is handled. When a character loses all of their hit points in Darkest
Dungeon, they are not immediately killed. Instead, they continue to stand and fight
with reduced stats while at "death's door," where any singular act of further damage
is likely to kill them. But if they can be brought above zero hit points before
they actually die, they are saved. With enough speed or multiple healers,
characters could have practically infinite life due to the generosity of
this mechanic—which allows a character to survive any attack, regardless of
damage, provided that they had at least one HP beforehand. One of the ways
that this state of affairs is balanced is through the stress system. Stress is an
attribute which characters accumulate while dungeon-crawling, and
it works sort of like an opposite health bar, as it operates by golf rules
(where a lower number is better). When a character reaches 200 stress, they
receive a lethal heart attack. This removes all hit points from a character,
or counts as a potential death blow if they are already at death's door. As
there are exceedingly few reliable player-controlled methods to reduce
stress while in combat, one can not dance with death indefinitely without a death
blow by heart attack reaching a high likelihood. But it's not what happens at
200 stress that I want to address with criticism; I like what happens at 200
stress. Stress management adds a worthwhile layer of strategic complexity
to the game, gives an additional avenue of attack to enemy designs, and (as I've
mentioned) contributes to balancing out the game's seemingly permissive
character death mechanic. Instead, what I want to talk about is what happens at
100 stress. When any player-character reaches 100 stress, they have a base
chance of 75% to become afflicted. An affliction is an almost absurdly severe
penalty: it reduces max health by 10%; reduces all status effect resistances
by 15%; reduces damage output, accuracy, speed, and/or dodging by anywhere from 5
to 25%; and gives the character a chance to do a number of negative things in and
out of combat, including incrementing the stress of all player-characters, passing
their turns, harming themselves, harming and/or applying status effects to other
player-characters, interacting with curio objects and dungeon traps, selecting
their combat action at random, and rejecting heals and buffs. And the things
in the preceding list that can happen by chance are not rare; for most afflictions,
there is a chance between 30% and 40% of one of those negative actions
against the player's wishes occurring anytime they are potentially applicable.
Sounds pretty horrible, right? This mechanic is intended by Red Hook to
simulate the effects of exceptional (and even supernatural)
trauma on a character. "THE FRONT LINE OF THIS WAR IS NOT IN THE
DUNGEON, BUT RATHER—INSIDE THE MIND." In small part due to
the severity of the penalties, and in large part due to the
way that afflicted characters can rapidly increment the stress levels of
all of their companions, even a single afflicted character can potentially doom
a high-level mission. It is entirely possible to experience a stress cascade,
where one afflicted character causes the others to become afflicted, which
eventually becomes one heart-attack victim causing additional heart attacks.
Even still, though, we remain in design territory that could be included in the
game without causing any undue problems for a rational and strategic player. But
now consider the tutorial tip that is used to introduce the mechanic:
"When heroes can't take the stress anymore, they can become afflicted. This manifests
in different behaviors and stat changes. Afflictions last until you send them to
treatment in town, unless you can reduce their stress to zero during the quest."
Well, that complicates things! We can set aside treatment in town, as whether an
affliction has caused a mission to fail has already been decided before
returning to the hamlet. But it turns out, "you can reduce their stress to zero
during the quest" and this can cure an affliction. Moreover, as I said earlier,
getting afflicted is not a certainty; its base chance is 75%. 25% of the time, the
character becomes virtuous instead, which is a state that is roughly as good
for the player as an affliction is bad. There, so afflictions are not such harsh
penalties after all! . . . except that the notion that you can cure an affliction
is tantamount to a lie, and virtues have the unintended side effect of
encouraging players to play worse. "HOW QUICKLY THE
TIDE TURNS!" Yeah, it turns out that
the few unlimited combat skills that reduce stress and the
many limited camping skills that reduce stress both count as buffs that most
afflicted characters have a 30 to 40% chance of rejecting. As a result,
in a full playthrough of the entire game and all DLC content spanning over 80
hours, I have never once actually managed to cure an affliction while inside a
dungeon. The game pretends that this is an aspect where skillful play or
strategy can allow recovery from a streak of bad luck, but it
actually isn't. Virtues, on the other hand, are exceptionally powerful,
and they should definitely not be made more common unless they are first
reduced in excellence. They immediately reduce stress by 55, provide temporary
immunity to afflictions and heart attacks, add 25% to all status effect
resistances, grant a couple stat bonuses, and regularly buff or de-stress allies.
But how exceptional they are leads to a weird phenomenon, where new players are
incentivized to take the risk of letting their characters hit 100 stress
(particularly because new players will not be aware of just how much more
likely an affliction is than a virtue, and will also be under the mistaken
impression that afflictions can be cured during an adventure under normal
circumstances). It's a weird situation; It feels as if the afflictions and virtues
were designed by one member of the development team, the camping and
tutorial tips were designed by a different member of the development team,
and those two people never spoke to each other. By these elements, players are
initially misled. In actuality, if it can be avoided, it is essentially never worth
the risk of letting a character reach 100 stress unless that character is in
the flagellant class or has significant buffs to virtue chance. One should always
try to camp just before then, rather than just after then. It's not a problem that
the affliction system is in the game; it's not a problem that it has harsh
penalties; it's not a problem that it takes control away from the player. All
of that is core to the uniqueness and themes of Darkest Dungeon. It's just a
problem that the way the game gets the player to experience the system is
through a set of design choices that feel unintentionally misleading. This
issue could be easily fixed by either simplifying the effects of the system,
surfacing more of the relevant information to the player, or placing
much heavier early emphasis on the need to avoid 100 stress. Ultimately,
this is not an innocuous point that can be forgiven by referring
to the game's thematic aims. Due to the rather lax difficulty of apprentice
and veteran missions, a player is unlikely to detect this (possibly
accidental) deception until it has caused losses in several long-duration and/or
champion-level missions, thereby including the deaths of several
high-level heroes. This is an expenditure of multiple hours of the player's time
being thrown in the trash, just to undo the bad strategic advice given and
implied by the game itself. Large chunks of the player's time are being wasted,
simply because of the precise way that the affliction system is implemented: the
incredible harshness of its secretive mechanical effects, the fiction that it
can be overcome at regular intervals, and the false hope
of glowing virtues. "MECHANICAL HAZARDS,
POSSESSED BY EVIL INTENT." We're going to be stepping
outside of the dungeons for this next topic, as it concerns the character
management that takes place in the hamlet between missions. This is another
area of Darkest Dungeon where there are elements of design that feel like they
don't fit together properly. As with the prior section, this leads to an
unnecessary consumption of the player's time—but the greater issue is how it
negatively impacts the moment-to-moment experience of the game. And I do not mean
that it simply provides the types of negative psychological experiences
targeted by the game's themes; it's neither sadness nor tension that is
created by what I'm about to discuss, but rather boredom
and disinterest. "IT IS A
TRAVESTY." In the rebuttal section
further along, one of the aspects of Darkest
Dungeon for which I'll be providing praise is the way that it builds an
attachment between the player and their characters, then provides very real
threats to the lives of those characters. Some of the first messaging the game
gives to the player, in between its intro cinematic and its main menu, showing
every time the game is loaded, underscores this aspect of the game by
saying as follows: "Heroes will die. And when they die, they stay dead. How far
will you push your adventurers? How much are you willing to risk in your quest to
restore the hamlet? What will you sacrifice to save the life of your
favorite hero?" But what I'll skip mentioning when I get to that praise is
the fact that the game's ability to foster that kind of attachment has an
expiration date, due to the precise configuration of how the town and
character roster are handled. The game clearly wants the player to maintain and
utilize a balanced roster of characters. Thus, removing stress or
negative conditions for them via activities in the safety of
the township temporarily removes them from the pool of available characters
for dungeon missions. And the game provides a steady flow of new characters
that can be conscripted for free at the stagecoach. So far, so good. But now, let's
dig into these features. After completing a mission, any given hero is liable to
leave the dungeon with any or all of the following things: an elevated stress
level, an affliction, one or more diseases, one or more negative quirks
that merit removal, and one or more positive quirks that merit
reinforcement. In theory, barring a limitation imposed by available gold and
ignoring the rare chance of characters getting multiple relevant detriments or
boons during an outing, this constitutes at most three in-game weeks that a
character would be unavailable before being brought back up to optimal
condition for their next outing. But here are a few complications: the stress
relief mechanics have between a 20% and 30% chance to detain characters for one
or two additional weeks; even fully upgraded stress relief centers do not
guarantee a low enough stress level to bring a character into a mission with
confidence, sometimes requiring two weeks of treatment; stress relief activities
have a further roughly 20% chance of applying quirks that can themselves
merit treatment; stress relief activities can apply week-long debuffs that make
those characters unfit for some dungeons; at most three positive quirks can be
locked at once, meaning that a preferable new quirk requires two weeks of
treatment to replace a previously locked-in asset; and, as noted before, it is
possible for heroes to contract multiple diseases or acquire multiple new quirks
of either polarity while in a dungeon. In a worst-case scenario, this can mean
more than one consecutive in-game month where some potentially important
characters are sidelined, translating to over five hours of real time playing
Darkest Dungeon without access to those characters. The developers are clearly
aware of this state of affairs, as the number of available stress relief
activity slots for each week caps out way up at 16 to 17, with the maximum
upgraded roster allowing room for a whopping 28 to 31 heroes (these ranges
depend on difficulty settings and DLC installations). When the campaign was
early on, the roster was small, the dungeons were short, the diseases were
rare, and the mission payouts were low enough to force decision-making in the
hamlet—every death felt like a dramatic punch in the gut. That was amazing! The
game had effectively instilled an emotional experience in the player. I was
personally naming every character, training them from zero to hero, and
feeling every threat to their fictional wellbeing with every
ounce of my non-fictional empathy. But further along, as the roster size,
reward payouts, and mission length grew, things changed. Longer missions mean
characters exiting with more stress, more quirks, and more diseases. Higher payouts
mean decision-making can be skipped, as it is possible to just build everyone
into optimal heroes over time through slow effort. And a larger roster means
individual characters are diminished in importance. A player comes to care about
a character by playing as or with that character, "A BOND FORGED BY
BATTLE AND BLOODSHED!" not by shuffling them
between hamlet buildings in between missions. And
character deaths are a lot less impactful when there are at least 20
backups sitting around back in town. You end up with two pools of characters: a
group of powerful characters that you used to care about, who spend the vast
majority of their time sitting in the hamlet, slowly gearing up to be used once
every four or five hours; and a group of weaker characters, that you never cared
about, who you send on farming missions to accumulate resources for buffing the
important characters. The heroes you want to use are usually left behind, and the
heroes you don't want to use are usually brought along. In the end, you no longer
really care about either group, and the immensity of the roster combines with
the increasing level of incoming recruits to make the once-indispensable
characters feel disposable. I stopped bothering to name characters about
halfway through the campaign. The developers have at times addressed this
phenomenon as though it's a beneficial emergent property of the game's
difficulty, where players get angry at losses and stop naming people out of
spite. But it has very little to do with the challenge of the game. Players
ceasing to care about their characters because a once-engaging game has
devolved into a bloated, farming-oriented slog before even getting halfway through
the campaign has nothing to do with anger and frustration, has everything to
do with boredom and disinterest, and is not a positive outcome. That line of
reasoning by the developers becomes a transparent bit of defensiveness when
you consider how blatantly it contradicts their far more widespread
claims that the game is essentially an oppressive and immersive Lovecraftian
horror game about the breakdown of these characters as individuals. Moreover,
without spoiling anything, some of the most impactful events in the game's
final missions rely heavily on assuming that the player still has an emotional
investment in their characters. Compare this to the design of similarly
roster-based strategy title XCOM: Enemy Unknown, where individual characters are
just about never locked away for more than two consecutive missions. It still
remains necessary to maintain a balanced roster of characters, yet—even though the
individual characters in that game are more fragile, with lower health pools and
a lower chance of surviving a loss of all HP—I continued caring about, fearing
for, and personally naming characters throughout the entirety of the campaign.
If the goal of Darkest Dungeon's design is, as its developers have repeatedly
alleged, to showcase the psychological toll that classical adventuring can have
on its protagonists—then a smaller roster size, lower availability of gold,
and/or inability to remove negative quirks (à la Rogue Legacy)
should have featured heavier in the design; such limitations
would force the player to bring psychologically damaged heroes back into
duty. If anything, the design featured in Darkest Dungeon unintentionally pushes
the opposite theme: not that heroes are forever altered by their questing, but
that heroes can overcome just about any trauma, no matter how horrendous, if they've
just got a month or so to spend relaxing. "CURIOUS METHODOLOGIES AND APPARATUS CAN
CALM EVEN THE MOST TORMENTED SOUL." Without maintaining
limitations to mandate difficult decision-making, the entire set of
mechanics related to persistent character detriments have as their
(hopefully unintentional) primary effects a dulling and slowing of the game. This
issue is exacerbated by the restrictions on characters re-entering the final
mission area, as—even at their most permissive—those restrictions
essentially require that 16 characters be fully groomed to combat perfection,
with amenable trinkets, equipment, quirks, and abilities. This translates directly
into considerable additional farming, well after the game has run out of new
content in the four standard dungeon areas. On the subject of new content,
although the majority of this analysis doesn't really dig into the DLC, the
trinket set bonuses and district buildings (both principally from the
Crimson Court expansion) are further extensions of the design decisions
highlighted in this section. Both trinket sets and districts allow
characters to get noticeable upgrades that include essentially no gameplay
drawbacks, which makes them extremely enticing. But since they have no directly
detrimental in-game attributes, they're balanced in another way: by requiring a
massive amount of repetitive farming to access them. In an echo of general hamlet
management, a situation where limitations and challenges could have led to
additional engagement instead dangles treats behind hours of redundancy in a
manner reminiscent of a free-to-play title. Instead of placing a focus on
stress, tension, and trauma, the rhythm of the hamlet management in Darkest Dungeon
is an area of design that yet again simply seems like it harbors some
contempt for the time and effort of its players. Through this aspect, Darkest
Dungeon morphs from its stellar early game as a compelling strategy title
about characters adventuring in incredibly harsh circumstances (aligning
well with the stated thematic aims of its developers) . . . to its grindy late game,
where middling characters are churned through dungeons to power up
increasingly forgettable hamlet-dwellers (aligning poorly with the game's thematic
aims, and serving to unnecessarily stretch the
game's duration). "THIS SQUALID HAMLET,
THESE CORRUPTED LANDS— THEY ARE YOURS NOW,
AND YOU ARE BOUND TO THEM." This section begins
with talking about the corpse mechanic—but not in the way you
may be expecting. Famously, during the game's early access development period,
players enraged by the addition of the mechanic (where felled enemies drop
temporary corpses to maintain positioning, rather than vanishing)
rallied against it so vociferously that an option was added
to the game to turn it off. "THE THING IS EVEN MORE
HORRIBLE IN DEATH." Personally, I would never think
of turning corpses off, as I actually think they are a terrific addition that
deepens the strategic gameplay of the title. Without them, it would almost
always be reliable to funnel combat activity through a heavily buffed and
supported frontline striker. With them, varied approaches and balanced team
compositions are required. My personal gripe with the mechanic is entirely
different: that it does not extend to the player's party. When a player-character
sustains a death blow, they simply vanish, making the far left position of the
character lineup immediately unavailable. But character abilities are
intimately tied to where in the lineup they're standing. Some characters have
full suites of mutually advantageous abilities, all of which can only be
accomplished from one or two of the four available character positions. Losing a
character is already a huge disadvantage, but this state of affairs essentially
means that multiple characters can be completely destroyed as combatants
by a single character's death. "THIS ONE HAS BECOME
VESTIGIAL, USELESS." Situations where
a fight could still be won against the odds with just
two or three living characters instead become impossible. Characters leaving
corpses behind would have been one way to address this, but simply allowing
characters to continue occupying empty positions would have also been a
perfectly acceptable solution. Having neither feels like
a horrendous oversight. It is deeply annoying to lose a boss
encounter simply because one's surviving characters refuse to stand
a few feet to their left. "THE THING IS MORE TERRIBLE
THAN I CAN DESCRIBE." If this side effect of
character death is an intentional design decision that was fully
considered and purposefully implemented by Red Hook, then it is at least as
egregious in terms of wasted player time and energy as are the mechanics
discussed earlier. There is no logical reason that a long-range fighter would
rush into close combat after the death of a comrade. Even if the automatic
movement of characters upon the death of their allies were retained, to simulate
the notion of the enemies clearing out the frontline and closing in on the
further heroes, it remains an obnoxious imposition to prevent those characters
from spending their action to then move further away on their next turn. So, a
funny thing happened literally the day after the article version of this video
was published: Darkest Dungeon's final DLC, the player-versus-player Butcher's
Circus, was released. And by sheer coincidence, it features
corpses for player-characters in order to address this
exact issue in that mode. But, at least for now, that player-character corpse
system has still not been added to the single-player campaign—meaning that, even
though it's now in the game, it's still absent from the vast majority of the
game's content. As it stands, situations that feel like they should be entirely
and even trivially winnable despite losing a character must often be
immediately abandoned instead, simultaneously bringing about two
negative consequences: unnecessarily throwing away the 30 to 60 minutes that
the player spent getting there, and discarding a clear opportunity to create engaging,
dramatic, tense scenarios for the player. "TERRIBLE VISTAS OF EMPTINESS
REVEAL THEMSELVES." It is fair to assume that, by this point in the video
(if any of them are still watching), the game's most ardent supporters have long since
declared that I am missing the point of the game—that the game is
intentionally frustrating as a means of communicating its themes about
trauma, stress, and dark revelations of the human psyche. Along these lines, I
applaud the game for the way it builds up investment and attachment in
characters, only to allow them to permanently die in sudden and tragic
twists of fate; the way characters can perish from an overwhelmingly massive
quantity of stress just as easily as from physical attacks; the way its later
missions are truly difficult and can not be won with lazy or haphazard strategies;
and the way its gorgeous artstyle, somber music and sound design, and
cynically macabre narration all sum together to establish a dour
and oppressive tone. "THIS HORROR MUST
BE UNMADE!" I love all of that! This video is
not a complaint about the game being frustrating or depressing, and I would
hope that my long history of praising games that are famous for their high
difficulty levels and thematic darkness could make that
abundantly clear. "THIS MAN UNDERSTANDS THAT ADVERSITY
AND EXISTENCE ARE ONE AND THE SAME." As an aside, anyone
complaining that Darkest Dungeon is too difficult is probably
just stubbornly refusing to reevaluate their strategies upon reaching the
highest-level missions, and may even be the type of player who refuses to use
any ability that neither deals damage nor heals. No, instead, this video is a
complaint about a game whose affliction system plays make-believe that it is
itself subject to strategic play, when it is typically better avoided; whose many
redundant systems and random town events come together to counterproductively
reduce the emotional impact of character deaths; and whose character positioning
system can turn a single lost character from a large setback into an actually
impossible arrangement. That the game's structure loses the interest of its
players along the way is a statistical fact: even at the game's lowest and
least tedious difficulty setting, only an abysmally low roughly 4% of players
have actually beaten the game's campaign, according to Steam. For
reference with regards to other indie titles that are at least as difficult
across a few genres, that's about two-thirds of the share that have beaten
Super Meat Boy, less than a third of the share that have beaten Opus Magnum, and
less than a fourth of the share of players that have beaten Hollow Knight. This is
especially regrettable because some of Darkest Dungeon's very best content is
tucked away in its final missions, yet has never been reached by over 90% of
its players. Darkest Dungeon bills itself as a game about 'making the most
a bad situation,' but that's inaccurate. In truth, it's a game about 'making the most
of good situations,' by capitalizing on synergistic character abilities and
strokes of good luck. The game's actual bad situations are the things that can't
be overcome—such as lengthy stress removal rituals, grindy town and
character upgrades, and unevenly implemented or misleading mechanics
operating at apparently cross purposes. It's meaningless to suggest that one
must make the best of the game's bad situations, when the bad situations in
question do not make the gameplay more difficult—they just cause the game to
take considerably longer to play. "THE SHIFTED CORRIDORS AND SLOPED WALLS OF
OUR ANCESTRY ARE BEGINNING TO FEEL FAMILIAR." There is really only one thing
that unites all of the seemingly strange design decisions detailed in this
analysis, and turns them from clumsiness into something more concerning: that all
of them serve to make the game take longer and be slower. It takes time to
repeat quests that spiraled out of control because afflictions are falsely
presented as small setbacks that are curable under normal circumstances. It
takes time to repeatedly manage stress, afflictions, diseases, positive quirks, and
negative quirks for characters while farming resources with others. It takes
time to make additional attempts at bosses that only beat the party because
dead characters moved living characters irrevocably out of position. There is
some very solid strategic gameplay in Darkest Dungeon, especially when playing a level five
or six mission with a carefully selected team. "GREAT ADVERSITY
HAS A BEAUTY." But to get to it, one must reach through
a few layers of sticky, time-wasting gunk. I like Darkest Dungeon; it's a great game . . .
but if it weren't bogged down with the gunk, it could have been a staggeringly
exceptional game—an indie strategy masterpiece on the level of Slay the
Spire and FTL. If one is being particularly uncharitable (which would
probably be a pretty fair way of describing this video), one could say that
Darkest Dungeon is a game with 30 hours of truly incredible content that takes
at least 60 hours to complete "THE CAMPAIGN
IS LONG." The design decisions covered
in this video, and some others of this kind, truly do seem to serve the
primary purpose of swelling the duration of the game. There is nothing inherently
favorable about continually stretching the length of a game to be as
long as possible. On the contrary, none of these things became
grating issues to me while playing until after I was over 20 hours in.
Actually, the eloquent narration of the ancestor in Darkest Dungeon includes a
line that captures this concept very well: "MONSTROUS SIZE HAS
NO INTRINSIC MERIT, UNLESS INORDINATE EXSANGUINATION
BE CONSIDERED A VIRTUE." So that's what this video is,
then—a bit of bloodletting.
This video essay delves into several aspects of the mechanical design of the Lovecraftian indie strategy game Darkest Dungeon which serve to unduly stretch the game far beyond the time it takes to experience all of the game’s content.
Along these lines, special attention is given to three aspects of its design: the specific details of how the affliction system is introduced and integrated into the game; the mismatch between the pacing of the town/character management mechanics and the pacing of dungeon mission progress; and the seemingly sloppy way that character deaths and character positioning sum together to destroy the odds of unlikely victories.
Finally, in the ensuing rebuttal and conclusion sections, the notion that these attributes may be justified by the thematic content of the game is addressed.
I'm curious as to whether you think the affliction/virtue mechanic would differ if the game never erroneously tutorialized that it was possible to be overcome mid-mission? My personal experience is that I entirely forgot that line even exists over my multiple attempts to beat the game (which I haven't yet, :( unfortunately). Rather, mainly learned of how it works by how it performed, and as you said avoided 100 stress at any moment.
Secondly, as to the " character attachment" and "making the best of a bad situation" goals. I too had the understanding that things usually only go well when everything goes well, and when things go bad it usually leads to complete failure. What would you suggest as a remedy? Something like characters who don't grow drastically stronger but are more relatively viable during higher difficulty missions?
I don't think the affliction thing is as big a deal really. The grinding is a way worse issue. As much as I love the theme I totally agree that it's unnecessarily grindy. As if the developers were really afraid to let players live with afflictions. I honestly dislike that one can straight up cure PTSD-level trauma in a month.
I think it would have been much better if a character would have to live with their affliction forever but that the impact of afflictions was not so massive. If for example that character gets more stress and more negative events in specific dungeons or against specific enemies, forever and incurable. This would allow you to still use them often but have to maybe train a replacement for their spot for use in some special situations.
I really want to finish the game but every time I try to pick it up again, the grinding gets me.