The other day I posted that GOG had put Darkest Dungeon on a very steep discount. It was $5. I'd been eyeing it for years, literally, after having heard a couple of my players talk about it.
For $5 I figured that even if I got only a few hours of fun out of it I'd be okay. And heck, maybe I could get an idea or two for my own gaming.
What I wanted was a game I could play with minimal thought. I ended up with a game that takes some thought and planning. Nothing like the mind-drain that is War in the East or (to me anyway) its more complex brother, War in the West. It still takes planning.
If you're not familiar with the game, I'll give you a quick rundown:
- your ancestor was a bored rich person who dug too deep and dreamed a little too much of a dream of power. In the paraphrased words of Glen Cook, he brought back fingers cobwebbed with damnnation.
- you take a ride to a sad little hamlet next to your ancestral home, a ciffside house with a nearby wilderness, warren, ruin, and cove as well as the titular "Darkest Dungeon" and recruit adventurers to send to clear out the evil.
- the whole game is hardcore mode. It saves continuously. Everything you do is permanent.
- character death is something to try to avoid, but it happens. It's basically permanent (although there are events that affect that.)
- characters suffer stress from delving, from getting critically hit, from almost dying, from running away, from standing to fight, from darkness, from too much light (with the wrong manias), etc. Enough stress and they can go crazy, which is stressful on others. Enough stress and they can even die from it.
- injury can also kill you. Injury happens a lot.
- even totally successful delve can have negative, lasting (or costly to fix) impacts on your characters.
- you never have enough resources to go around. Nor enough space for treasure needed to replenish it. You'll find yourself tossing treasure to keep food, torches, or special unguents or quest items. Equally, you'll find yourself tossing torches, food, and special unguents to make room for quest items and treasure. Everything is a tradeoff.
All in all, it's black, bleak, very Warhammer-like, and fun.
It can be maddening, mostly when you click the wrong button and bad stuff happens. The initiative system is round-based rolling, so it's dreadfully common to have one side go twice in a row. If that side is the bad guys and they include a multi-action foe, you can get curb-stomped down from 'totally healthy and sane' to 'dead and mission failure' while you just sit and watch.
All in all, though, it's fun. I'm not likely to plunder it for ideas, not for my current gaming, but it is a lot of fun. Probably even $25 worth (list price), if I ever spent $25 for non-giant-wargame video games.
I played Darkest Dungeon back when it came out...
ReplyDeleteIt requires something I just don't have. Normally I like 'planning and tactics and strategy" games, and I don't mind games where the Learning cliff requires some dedication to scale, I play Dwarf Fortress after all.
But either I never managed to break past the first few hurdles in DD or it's RNG was just too much a fucker, but I never found the complete lack of success in DD to be fun. I mean sure, I could have a run or two go well, but it was more like 30% of my runs went well, and eventually you just can't keep pressing forward, lack of resources, lack of healthy delvers, everyone's various degrees of completely bonkers... I mean, I can lose an entire Fortress in DF in seconds due to a few mistakes or a bad RNG (Titan showing up), but for most of it I'm steady building //toward// something.
For me, DD was steadily worsening triage of wounds and missing limbs for which you barely have bandaids, let alone actual capacity to fix. And I gather some people really enjoy the story that comes out that in DD.
I haven't found it that way. I feel like I'm building toward something, but at risk to the playing pieces I'm using to do the building. For the most part, though, I think it's possible to mitigate the risks. I've played for a game year, so far - 52 weeks - and I'e lost like 7 delvers, fired a half-dozen more for lack of utility/too much insanity, and completed most of the missions I went on. I could sum all of my advice in DD up to, "Keep your focus on your delver's health and completion of the mission in that order. Ignore anything that isn't a certain benefit to either of those." Being completionist just gets your guys completely wrecked.
DeleteLike I said, something about it I just couldn;t mantle over. I had a strong 1/3 success ration, to the point I was starting over because of lack of delvers (healing, dying, too insane).
DeleteSomething I just couldn't get, but I figured I should post as a warning to others, this ain't your granddad's Rogue-like. Or maybe it is... I never really got very far in Rogue either.
It's far, far, far more forgiving than the original Rogue.
DeleteGOG.com? I see you, too, are a gentleman of class and taste.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the bulk of the game, but I always gave up when I got to the actual Darkest Dungeon. The difficulty increase, the more frequent loss of (by that point) high-level characters, and the length and grind of the final sections left me disinterested in playing further. I have come back to the game several times just to play through the lead up to the dungeon. For laughs, I did some conversion work creating Dungeon Fantasy templates for the DD classes.
ReplyDelete" For laughs, I did some conversion work creating Dungeon Fantasy templates for the DD classes."
DeleteI'd love to see that. If you've got a blogpost somewhere, throw us a link!
I've heard it gets tougher and longer. Tougher I can probably handle, but I don't always have a long time to spend on a single mission.
DeleteEven so, I don't need to play out an entire game to enjoy it if the beginning part is good. I've gotten $5 of fun out of it already. If the endgame is not so fun . . . it's okay, plenty of people start 1st-level D&D guys and leave off around 8th-9th level because they feel like it's played out by then.