So I thought I was finished with Darkest Dungeon 2 after I reviewed it on release, but it turns out that while I wasn’t looking they released a whole new game mode that’s more like a strategy game. In general I think the new game mode works a lot better with the core gameplay, but that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is one of the story modules that goes with it, which is “What if witches were actually inhuman monsters and it was okay to kill them to the last?”
Tag: Darkest Dungeon
Darkest Dungeon 2
Darkest Dungeon 2 is, obviously, the followup to Darkest Dungeon, which I previously reviewed. The developers deliberately wanted to take the sequel in a different direction instead of just making Darkest Dungeon again, which I support. Unfortunately, that direction was completely at odds with it being a roguelike.
Darkest Dungeon
Yes, I finally got around to this one! I’m… rather ambivalent towards it.
Darkest Dungeon is a party-based RPG roguelike where you compile a party of 4 from 17 different classes and send them on expeditions into Lovecraftian nightmare dungeons. The key mechanic is that mental health is just as important as physical: Events like low light, critical hits, and certain enemy attacks will degrade your characters’ sanity, and when it gets to be too much they will go insane, followed by dying of a heart attack if pushed even farther. (Permadeath is, of course, a feature.) Insane characters create a death spiral where they will stress out the rest of the party with every action, as well as randomly disobeying orders or skipping turns. It’s very easy for even a well-balanced party to be completely destroyed if too many characters start going insane.
I found it to be an interesting idea, but the actual gameplay I found very grindy and frustrating, and I’m left feeling that the designers did not succeed in conveying their intended message at all.