Recent reviews by thys111

Fun quick game that tests your tactical senses and reflexes. Great to get when on sale
8/10

I made the mistake of playing Darkest Dungeon for the first time with the Crimson Court DLC installed. If it's your first time, I recommend doing it vanilla on the first run as CC isn't just an addon, the new mechanics introduced will creep into and consume the base game as time goes on. Enemies from CC will slowly start to appear more frequently in regular quests, with an infection meter on the left to show you the progress. The CC mobs have a random chance to infect you with the "Crimson Curse" when they hit your characters. Once your hero has the curse, they will need to consume blood vials or else their status degrades, from craving to wasting. If they do not get blood for long enough, they can actually die! Hence you need to go to the CC area for blood farming runs to feed your infected guys which consumes valuable heroes for a week when you could be going on other quests. Also when you go farming, you can have more heroes get infected, which means you need more blood to keep your guys happy. Perhaps this was Red Hook's way of making the DLC's impact on the base game behave just like an infection.

Anyways, this can greatly prolong your gameplay experience, I spent about 95 hours of time for my first run, and CC adds even more tedium and difficulty to a base game that has those in plentiful amounts. A recent update changed it so that you can farm blood on special short quests so it's easier now, but it alas remains a boring, momentum-killing task.

Pros:
-Very strong theme with minimal story narrative. It's up to your own imagination to fill in lots of blanks. Your "Ancestor" narrates actions and events throughout the game, which adds a lot to the atmosphere. Background sounds get more creepy and haunting as your light meter decreases, battle music gets you pumped up.
-Stress meter is interesting and puts a lot of pressure on the player manage stress wisely
-Decent amount of customization, you can upgrade your base "the Hamlet" with lots of different things to improve stress healing, recruit more guys, get more items, etc. There's lots of trinkets that you can equip, up to a max of 2 per hero, however most of them are junk due to their negative side effects
-When RNG is nice to you, the gameplay can be very rewarding
-Art style is nice, dark medieval designs, but not too grimdark looking.

Cons:
-Extremely tedious: This is by far my biggest complaint for the game and stops it from becoming a great one for me and just makes the game average. The game has permadeath, so if you lose a hero they're gone forever. The game is highly RNG dependant. So... if you have some bad rolls and one mob of enemies crit you, you can easily lose your only lvl5 Houndmaster which was holding your A team together. There's a special event where you can revive one deceased hero but it's very rare. That's even in a good scenario, you will likely get team wiped more than once which can be extremely crippling, more so in the beginning when you have limited money and recruits. Losing high level guys can set you back HOURS, forcing you to regrind the same enemies over and over again in low lvl dungeons.

The game is fun at first but after you spend about 15-20 hours with it, and learn most of the mechanics, have beaten the first round of bosses, then that's pretty much the whole game experience. There's no other new mechanics, each of the bosses have easy, medium and champion versions which are the same but with more damage, and different resistances. The enemies are the same except for one new Champion enemy that only appear in the hardest versions of the areas in the game. You grind the same enemies over and over again, go through the same hallways, have the same heroes and skills available to you (except with high ACC %s and dmg). The final "Darkest Dungeon" area has some different enemies and slightly different mechanics so it is kind of refreshing but it forces the savage grind on you in a whole new manner; every time you complete it, those heroes you complete with have a "torch" next to their name so they cannot go do another mission there (because it was so mentally scarring durhur). Which means for you, that AT LEAST 4 sets of top lvl heroes need to be grinded in order to complete the game to the ending. Artificial longevity at its finest.

The Crimson Court dungeon is similarly bad, it's an "Epic" sized dungeon which means it cannot be completed in one run and requires a huge amount of traversing the same areas over and over again to find keys to unlock gates to kill the boss. You can go the wrong way and have to do a large amount of backtracking for a key. There's 3 difficulties to the CC dungeon which means you have to beat it 3 times in order to complete the DLC and each time is the exact same with the same enemies on steroids. I likely spent 10 hours in there, and was so bored after the first run that I watched Youtube on my other monitor as I held the right arrow down to move.


Overall:
I give this game 7/10, if the middle-to-end game content had FAR less grinding, then it would have been an easy 8 or 9 out of 10. The game needed more things to reward you for progress and shortcuts for grinding new champion heroes when you're already 50 hours in and doing the same thing over and over again you were doing at 20 hours in.

tl;dr: 7/10 extremely grindy RNG game with good theme that you will play while watching tv in the foreground