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[Darkest Dungeon] ...You remember our venerable house? Opulent and imperial...
The Ender
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
You will arrive along the Old Road. It winds with a troubling serpent-like suggestion through the corrupted countryside, leading only - I fear - to ever more tenebrous places. There is a sickness in the ancient, pitted cobbles of the Old Road, and on it's writhing path you will face viciousness, violence and - perhaps - other, damnably transcendent terrors. So, steel yourself, and remember that there can be no bravery without madness.
The Old Road will take you to Hell, but in that gaping abyss, we will find our redemption.
Were you looking for the best game that is going to be released this year? Well, take a seat and relax - your journey ends here. Darkest Dungeon is a hero / party management game & dungeon crawler with superb narration & writing, a jaw dropping comic book art style and hard core Rogue-like difficulty. You recruit heroes, assemble them into 5-member parties, assign them special abilities & provisions and then send them out to be mercilessly butchered by shambling monsters & ruthless brigands while searching for gold & trinkets. This is the deepest & most well combat system I've ever seen that does not use a traditional square or hex-based map to determine movement & attack ranges; everything is about manipulating your party formation (and that of your opponents). This not only means that combat is fast, since you don't spend many turns just moving pawns into position, but that the AI can & does pose a credible threat to your heroes (most traditional combat grids are just too much for an AI to handle).
Dungeons are laid-out in a grid pattern, filled with lots of traps & other clickable stuff that may provide boons or hindrances, depending on how you choose to interact with your surroundings & what provisions you brought with you. A big part of the game is deciding exactly how much survival gear & consumables you're going to be hauling with you into the dungeons; every torch, shovel or field ration you bring along will improve your heroes' chances of surviving the excursion, but the up front expense of these items eats into the potential profit of your adventuring.
The game also features a prominent light / darkness mechanic that allows you to effectively set the difficulty of a given dungeon: the more torchlight you create by igniting torches, the less damage you take from monsters and the more likely it is that you'll ambush foes. Running through a dungeon in the dark, however, has huge benefits (assuming you can survive the ordeal): treasure spawns in much greater quantities, and rare magical artifacts can be found in abundance.
The audio & visual treatment here is just stunning; you can immediately appreciate just how much impact some well done low-key animations can provide after just 15 minutes of play. If you enjoy narrators that punctuate the action happening on the screen, this is one of the best examples of it (if that's not your thing, i think you can turn it off). It's not exactly 'next gen', but it sure looks just as gorgeous as any of the titles given a big budget showing-off at E3.
I am looking at this game but it is in Early Access and I have been burned by Early Access before...
Darkest Dungeon should be out in October, so it's not something with a long road ahead of it.
The game as it stands is a finished, polished product. There are some rough edges on it that will probably get buffed-out for the October release, and there are a couple of dungeons that are not yet implemented, but it's as good to go right now as any professionally published & sold product. You won't be buying half a game.
That being said, given that October is only a few months away, you may wish to wait until then so you can experience the full package or whatever.
I have bought this game and I am getting MURDERED! Plz help! This is frustrating!
Okay; this game is hard, and at times it is just downright unfair. So, first, you do need to sometimes accept that a quest will go horribly wrong and abandon it to cut your losses.
That said, there are some key strategic & tactical plays that you can & should take advantage of:
- When setting-up provisions, check to see if you have one or more campfire logs (the length of the dungeon will determine whether or not you get these; you can't buy them). Your food buying decisions should be most heavily influenced by these logs; whenever you set-up camp in a dungeon, you'll be given a prompt for how much food you wish to consume and awarded an amount of healing according to the amount of food consumed. You almost always want 8 spare food for the camp so you can choose the Feast option, which provides the maximum heal. You will usually want about 20~ pieces of food beyond that just to deal with hunger procs (eat hunger proc demands 4 food, so 20 food gives an allowance of 5 total procs - enough to deal with most dungeons).
So, if you have a log in your inventory, bring at least 28 food. if you have 2 logs, bring at least 36 food. If you don't have any logs, bring 20 food + whatever you think you need for some supplementary healing.
- For most runs, bring at least 16 torches. Make sure you have torchlight at 85 or better before entering a room that you think will have a battle in it.
- Do not attempt to run with no torchlight until you have a level 6 party.
- For safety, most parties should include either a Vestal or an Occultist for healing during fights (mostly just to mitigate the effects of enemy crits).
- Kill the mage! Seriously, where possible, aim for the squishy enemies at the rear of the opposing formation. These enemies often have stress-delivering attacks that can cripple you if left unchecked.
- Focus 1 target at a time, and kill opponents whenever possible. Killing enemies should always take priority over damage efficiency.
- While camping, try to spend most of your time units on the buffs, not the health or stress heals (that's what Feast is for). Clean Guns & Sharpen Spear will end-up saving you far more effective health & stress points in the long run than Wound Care or Encourage. Do not get hung-up on trying to clear stress from someone who already has half of their bar filled-up; it's better to just give them a break in the tavern or church later rather than dumping all of your precious campfire time into clearing stress that will likely just pile-up on them again.
- If you have a bad fight that you scrape by with one or two party members sitting on Death's Door, just abandon the quest. Death's Door is there to save you from a bad crit; trying to use it as a resource beyond that will get your whole party wiped-out.
- if you're not above cheating a little bit, there is a list of all of the clickable stuff in dungeons and how to interact with them to guarantee positive outcomes.
Not much more needs to be said.
If you're even remotely into dungeon crawlers, this game will keep you busy for quite some time.
With Love and Courage
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Doh!
I did search for one but didn't see it.
Might as well leave a link to it.