I have been lurking around Twitch lately and have found Darkest Dungeon being played by one of my favorite turn based strategy streamers; Anzleon. It basically is a Turn based dungeon crawler where you traverse the deepest dungeons with aid of adventurers to uncover treasures and recover your estate’s former glory.
Get it! DARKEST DUNGEON on steam.
Aesthetically, I like it. The look and feel compliments everything in the game. The game’s voice acting and background music is epic which adds to the experience. I like the dark and grotesque feel especially when you know you are going to lose a character. Yes, this game has PERMA-DEATH. If one of your adventurers dies, he/she is gone forever.
I have died numerous ways already 1-2 hours in from being over-stressed, to HP going to zero and even heart-attacks when fleeing a battle. This asshole almost wiped my party.
I honestly was scared playing through the first hour. The fear of the unknown was the biggest factor here, you have to learn on the fly via trial and error.
Combat is very common to most turn based strategy games. You have 4 character slots which you can bring every mission. Who ever has the highest SPEED goes first unless you are caught by surprise. You can position them in any four positions.
Ideally you want the Tank in the front, Damage Dealer behind the tank and two supports at the back to throw out stuns/debuffs or provide heals. 1 Healer just wont cut it at the start of the game since you don’t have access to high healing restoratives at all. You are only provided a limited supply of foods that just give you 1-2 HP heals. Almost every time a unit gets it gains STRESS points, where if it reaches maximum you get a semi-permanent debuff called an AFFLICTION. Depending depending on the type of affliction it you then notice a stat decrease and the unit will start talking to itself while causing your other party mates to gain more stress too!
The crazy thing about Darkest Dungeon is not the monster encounters, it’s the random threats the game dish out to you called curios. They are interactive objects where once you click on them, you gain positive or negative buff/debuff called QUIRKS. Opening treasure boxes, book cases and fountains can do you harm. Oh and watch out for the traps too.
Let me show you the unit screen.
Under QUIRKS you see Tough (+10% max HP) which is a positive buff. Tuckered Out ((Health Below:50%) -10% DMG) and Weak Grip ((Melee) -3% CRT) are negative QUIRKs.
Bloodthirsty (Fascinated with injury, wounds, and torture. Prone to investigating Body-type curios.) and Shocker (-10% Stun Resist) are AFFLICTIONS which you identify by the icon next to it. AFFLICTIONS happen when your stress points peak and not only do you get a stat decrease like I mentioned above, your character also acts on its own while also causing your other party members to get even more stressed.
The only way you can remove afflictions is by having them do activities in your estate which lowers their stress. They can pray to god, go to the doctor, drink, gamble or even go to the brothel (LOL). Oh… and you pay for it in gold.
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I will do a in-depth review once I get more hours into the game. I like the game very much and I recommend DARKEST DUNGEON to anyone who enjoys dungeon crawlers or turn based strategy games like the XCOM and Fire Emblem series. You can get DARKEST DUNGEON on steam HERE.
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Dee
