So I bought this game over the winter sale expecting a cool dungeon crawler. Boy was I in for a treat. I absolutely loved the art style, narration, hub world, and overall feeling of satisfaction this game gives you. I was doing pretty good for about 8 hours. In all that time I only had a single casualty, a lvl 1 plague doctor. With about 20k gold and a solid team of a lvl 3 Crusader, lvl 3 Highwayman, lvl 2 Vestal, and a lvl 2 Plague Doctor I decide to take a short length lvl 3 run in the Weald.

Holy fucking shit was that a mistake. All my food was gone by the final 2 rooms, all my units had about 25% of their health remaining. It was a complete-100%-of-room-battles run; I see the light, I'm done with the final hallway and about to head to the final room. BAM. Some 120 hp monster completely wrecks my crusader, vestal, and plague doctor in the span of 3 turns. I end up retreating with only my highwayman remaining and abandon the quest.

I then decided to take a couple of lvl 1 characters to the first Cove mission in order to get them leveled up and eventually end up retreating from there as well.

I really like this game, but holy cow can things take a turn for the worst in the span of a few turns.

Any similar experiences from you guys?

Got to the mid tier, got crushed, back to start. Yup, that more or less is how that game goes. Like, personally I find that too punishing, the only way to learn the mid game is to grind the early game (which takes some number of hours) a good number of times. And, one assumes, you'd need to grind the mid tier to reach the higher.

Mind you, I got that game back before they added a whole bunch of changes, left before the took effect, and since I completely disagree with them, eh.

Like I will stand by Darkest Dungeon being a great game, for the first like 5-15 hours depending on who you are. But the second time your mid-tier party is wiped due to circumstances completely outside of your control, or your game crippled to the point of needing a reset (real or essential)..you kinda go from either "ok, done with this" or "heck yah, my kinda grind!"

My fondest memories of darkest dungeon involve figuring out the puzzle, on my own, and implementing it. Why?

I offer the following idea. If a game is going to be extremely hard, grueling punishing, massively difficult..it needs to have a right answer. Essentially, their should be some peak a player can reach which makes the game impossible to lose. The way a game like Darkest Dungeon gets its difficulty, and its strength would be in making that peak state extremely high, and constant. You need to be on your game 100% of the time, or you will trip.

During the early-access however, this was not the case. There were fundamental flaws in the game which inserted too much randomness in the system. The player base's response to this was, essentially, to use strategies that removed the random element from the game. (ignoring stress, constant healing, etc) Why? Because screw random chance being the deciding factor in a game like this, and not my own personal skill. A run of Darkest Dungeon should be won or lost by my own merit and skill, not blind luck.

All the very best/well known rogue likes have this trait. You can always chalk a lose up to your own fault. Even games like Dark Souls, BloodBorne and such are like this. You lose, a lot, but its always your fault. Its why, when you win, its so elating. And why the challenge is worth pursuing. Can you imagine if the bosses had no patterns, the enemies no set actions, and dieing meant restarting the game? What percentage of players would play such a game? How would the general community feel now if the developers, instead of fixing some random element that forces a game-over outside of the players control..they added features to stop the players from actions they were taking to avoid such random elements themselves?

Yah, I know, this turned into a rant on the whole game! But I feel like my disappointment at what it became is the most brutal moment I had with it. Do I really care about the new mechanics? Am I whining that they took away my OP strats? Maybe..but I would gladly play the game with them if it didn't feel so much like the developers duck-taping up the leaks in their fundamental design. Essentially Punishing the players for finding ways to play the game as it should be. That, to me, is brutal.

Still, I invite everyone to buy and play it. the first 5-15 hours really is great. I have no doubt of that, and that alone is worth the price. Beyond that? Just know there are mixed opinions on the game.

@bladededge: You know that you can turn a lot of the more difficult additions (corpses etc.) off in the options now?

Personally I find this to be a really great game. I've been playing it since I first saw it here on Giantbomb a good while back. It's a game about risk mitigation and management which is weirdly fun :) Things will go wrong, all you can do is plan and prepare for when they do so that you can keep going. It takes some of the pressure off as there is no way to play 'perfectly' which is something I have been weening myself off of lately :)

Restarting is never required as the adventurers are only another resource to be spent, the town is the real character and its upgrades are permanent so restarting doesn't make any sense. THey do need to balance the resource requirments for upgrading the early important building - stagecoach, armourer and guild. IIRC you need deeds to upgrade those and they are mostly found in one dungeon type, I hope they spread that around as it means you focus too much there in the early game.

Back to the OP's original comment though, I have had a few total party wipes, especially the first few times I hit level 3 dungeons. You need a fully upgraded part to take them on but that's doable. Early selection of adventurers to focus is essential, ditch the guys with the bad traits and focus on locking in good traits early on as it is a lot cheaper.

I restarted earlier this week, and I was rolling. All characters up to level 2, minimal quirk annoyances, solid weapons, I beat my first boss in the game (necromancer)...all around a great time. I was so confident with my progress and party I decided to take on a second boss - The Swine Prince. Holy shit was that a mistake or what!? I steamrolled through the entire level with plenty of food and torches to spare. Little did I know, the final boss would have a 4 row swipe attack that stuns the back 2 members of my crew, and hits the front 2 with a massive 20-25 damage.

It actually seemed unbalanced and unfair really. The spike in difficulty between the normal enemies and the final boss was INSANE! I lost my 4 best adventurers because of that damn Swine Prince :(

Ah well, 'tis the fun of this game I suppose. Time to get my revenge tonight! >:)

@big_denim: All the bosses require the right tactics to take down. if you have the right party composition and you understand the Boss's abilities then taking them down is totally doable. They are meant to be scary the first time you meet them! Also, you can always run away. Running away is an important tactic in this game :)

@arabes: Ha - ya I learned that the hard way, I suppose.

I wish there was more excitement for this game though! It's fantastic, and deserves way more support considering it launches in a matter of days!

@big_denim: Ya I think it's a great game but for a lot of people it's really not their cup of tea at all. Failure should be expected to an extent, the game is all about how you plan for it and handle it when it happens and I think that puts a lot of people off. Which is fair enough, to each their own. It drives me crazy though when people say that the game is all RNG and luck, there is an awful lot of skill involved and you need to learn what's the right call to make in a given situation. I hope they rebalance the deed requirements for the early game though as I find that ot be a bit of a grind at the moment. Guess we'll find out in 4 days :)

I played it a couple of months ago but didn't really enjoy the way punishment is brought about.

I like my fuck-you difficulty games to be more, let's say, predictably punishing? As in there's a degree of transparency with regards to where you can and cannot take risks, and the game let's you know that your current course of action will be disastrous by punishing you earlier on your path of bad choices, rather than waiting until you've sunk hours into a strategy that was doomed from the start.

Souls games are good in this I think because, for example, you can tell whether you should venture further into a new area just by poking at the first enemy and seeing whether it hits you for a tenth or a half of your lifebar in one swing. It's a great system because even if the player dies and from a game state perspective has achieved nothing they still receive a very substantial reward: information. "Okay, I actually can't make that jump, and the alternative route is filled with things that kill me in two hits. I should probably check out that other area and go back here once I'm properly equipped." This scaling of punishment ends up being brutal only if you get cocky and overextend, but it encourages exploration, just in a safe and cautious manner.

I just got no such feeling in Darkest Dungeon. I never felt that the game rewards me for being careful or encourages exploration. You brought your best party and stocked up on supplies into this new area? It's actually pretty easy, oh that sucks for you because you've bought all of these useless rations and torches and now your mains have to spend the next 2 missions in the chapel because of that one encounter where the guy kept distressing them. You've breezed through the whole dungeon and feel confident in fighting the boss? Nah, he'll actually stun all of your glass cannons and push your tank to the back. Should've predicted the fact that the boss will be hard despite the rest of the level being a cakewalk, duh!

It feels cheap because of this lack of foreshadowing. The game keeps you in the dark and promises doom and death at all times, which makes it impossible to tell whether that danger is actually there and to what extent. On top of the fact that you don't know whether you can afford to take your underleveled heroes to rank up or if it's better to expect a brutal beating, the severely choice-limiting mechanics following almost every mission locking up the members of your party for multiple weeks make you feel really helpless.

On top of that the randomness doesn't help. The same dungeon can either be a breeze to get through or a disaster that leaves you with a half dead party. Characters are consistently limited to using abilities with extremely wide ranges of outcomes, like dealing between 1 to 11 damage, or healing a damaged tank either to full health or by a hair. Combine that with how random the enemy turns' outcomes seem to be and suddenly in your game with a brilliantly innovative and interesting battle system it becomes impossible to plan more than the current turn ahead.

I really wanted DD to be 'that game' for me, and I've tried getting into it two times spanning a course of several months, but man. It just sucks so much when you can't seem to prepare for anything. I don't mind a challenge but one thing I do not like my games to make me fell is helpless.

I guess the most brutal thing that happened was having almost all my party go insane at the same time thanks to my vestal freaking out, then my crusader attacked and killed my highwayman, and then the crusader got melted by acid or something, and the only one to make it out was my bounty hunter, which I was happy about since he was my best character, and he went on to absolutely wreck the next two bosses.

This was when it first hit early access about a year ago though. I haven't played since then, because I want to experience the complete game all at once, with all the classes and town events included. Sadly, that means I won't be playing it until a ways after release. I've been keeping track of how it's changed though.

The part where Ocelot and Miller fuck with Emmerichs leg.

Felt compelled to share my moment of despair since it left me completely speechless last night.

So I enter into a long dungeon in the Cove area on the hardest difficulty. Goal is to simply explore 90% of the rooms. I'm rocking a party of four lvl 6 characters, all equipped with various ancestral and very rare trinkets. For the first 70% of the dungeon, it's a breeze. Only problem after that first 2/3rds of the dungeon was that I ran out of torches so I was exploring in the dark. This brings me to my unluckiest encounter yet. I come across a group of enemies that consists of two thralls, a grouper and a shaman. (it's important to note that the thralls are the ones that explode after a short amount of time, damaging your entire party)

Immediately off the gate my entire party is surprised and moved around. (I'm using a Crusader, Vestal, Highwayman and a Hound Master) The enemies take their first few shots at me and then it comes time for my attacks. Every single one of my heroes miss their attack. Another round goes by and I'm unable to kill any of the creatures. This leads to both of thralls exploding and bringing my whole party to deaths door. At this stage my party is all sitting at over 100 stress thanks to fighting in the dark and the shamans stressing attacks. I choose to bail out of the fight and not risk the remaining enemies killing off any of heroes. Thing is, as soon as my party escapes the fight they're all hit with additional stress. This gives my vestal a heart attack, and since they're on 0 HP, they instantly take a death blow. It really sucks. As I go to collect her trinkets and give up on the dungeon all together, I quickly notice that her death gives the rest of my party stress. This in turn creates a terrible chain of events involving all my heroes having heart attacks one after another. Since none of them have any HP, they all immediately die. Not only do I lose my progress in the dungeon, I end up losing 4 of my lvl 6 heroes and all my best trinkets.

In a fit of rage I deleted that save and started over.

The wait time for PS4 release

Took my A squad out for a jaunt and ended up fiddling with some item requiring a torch to activate, turns out it was some massive secret boss that wiped the floor with me :(

@sunbrozak: ouch that sucks. I don't know about you, but to me it's not so much the fact you lose your party and items, though that sucks too, but it's the realization that you spent a good chunk of precious hours (and in game money) to get those characters to level 6, and now basically have to start all over again. yes you do have a lot of sweet items that make the grind much easier, but that's the thing, it emphasizes the grind and kinda loses the fun factor in the process. I guess you circumvented that by completely starting all over haha, don't you regret that now though?

Yesterday I had a similar shitty situation happen. I was gonna take on the 16 pounder in the Weald. Everything was going fine, had my lvl 6 Houndmaster, Hellion, Leper and Vestal, all decked out with very rare and ancestral items. The fight was going great, had no trouble killing the flame dude each turn and was slowly but decisively hacking away at the health of the cannon. Then flame dude manages to survive one turn and BOOOOOOM!!! They all survived but everything after that went to shit. I kept missing and after another boom, my hellion was on death's door and died immediately. The cannon was getting very low on health though, so I thought fuck it, in it to win it! I focused all my damage on the cannon, even the vestal. Then my houndmaster died, and my leper and vestal were on Death's door. Cannon had 4 hp left. My vestal used illumination for...3! And then proceeded to die. Then it was my leper's turn, just one hack and it would all be over. I click the mouse aaaaaaand....MISS! MOTHERFUCK! Of course the turn after he died and there I was, four lvl 6's gone and a boatload of expensive items. I really did not want to continue playing anymore, but then I realized I'm a bit addicted to this game, so I went back to grinding low level dungeons. It was painful, but I did kill the Sunken Crew later on that day so I guess everything's not lost. In retrospect, probably should have picked a different party too.

On a different note, I think there should be more stats attached to your heroes. Like how many dungeons he or she has done, what was the most powerful enemy they vanquished, stuff like that, gives your heroes a bit more personality. Also I wish the afflictions were a bit more fleshed out, had a bit more identity to them. If you believe you are possessed by a demon, wouldn't it be cool if that manifested itself a bit more dramatically? I love this game, I feel this could be one of the best games I ever played, I really hope they do more with it's potential in the future.

@pilgrimm1981

There was certainly a time after I deleted the save and started anew that I felt like I'd just made a big mistake. After all, I had sunk about 35 hours into my previous save file and that file still have some high level heroes left. But it didn't take long for me to appreciate how much I've learned about the game and its mechanics once I got back to the grind. Knowing which heroes work well together and what I should invest my resources into has really made the progression fly by. I've put another 8 or so hours into the game and I'm already rocking a handful of level 4 and 3 characters, and I've only lost one hero. I don't doubt that I'll hit a wall again once I'm into the hard dungeons, but this time I'm not spreading myself thin on heroes so if something does go wrong I'm not immediately returning to the apprentice runs.

I do agree that there's a few additions I would have loved to see in the game. As you said, more stat tracking and expanded afflictions would be fantastic. I also think some sort of relationship mechanic between your party members would be interesting. What if your heroes formed attachments or animosities to one another, that affected how well fought together? And in turn, heroes might become more or less courageous when a party member they have an attachment with is killed/injured. There's a lot of possibility there. It's cool to note that the game does have somewhat of a following in the modding scene. People are changing elements about the games balance, adding additional colour palettes for heroes and even introducing new characters. I don't know if adding a whole new mechanic is possible right now but I'd love to see the game get steam workshop support in the future.

Biggest issue I've been having is going up a difficulty (lvl 1 > lvl 3 > lvl 5) and having enemies seemingly dodge 50% of my attacks and crit 50% of the time. The annoying thing is it doesn't even feel like an exaggeration. It doesn't seem to even out until I upgrade skills. Apparently that 5 increase in accuracy matters A LOT.

I've lost entire groups because my characters can't hit for shit and they'll get full stress or just get killed.

Rolled with my hardest, most upgraded level 4s to the Hag (Crusader, Houndsman, Vestal and Arbalest)...

VERY quickly realized my mistake: the Crusader, my main damage dealer, can ONLY attack the cauldron. Got absolutely WORKED by the Hag and had to retreat, though I fortunately didn't lose any. I think the solution is to upgrade my Blacksmith and Guild to allow for lvl 4 upgrades, but yeah: mid-tier is where this game gets REAL and you flat-out NEED to get used to the idea of retreating.

So I just found out that the end game dungeons have the RNG tuned up to absurd levels. Both characters and enemies end up with high dodge chance, high crit chance, and huge damage ranges, so each fight is like playing a slot machine.

And you can't just upgrade your characters to fix this issue, I got the highest upgrades and it was obvious the upgrades only increased the weight of the RNG each time.

Kind of a shitty way to end a game that I thought was pretty great up until then.

@levio: I actually found the enemy crit chances got kind of silly even by the time you start doing Champion-level (level 5) quests. The achievement percentages for the "beat the game" achievement are still quite low, because anecdotally most people lose patience with the game somewhere in the endgame. Also the grind to actually fully upgrade the town is insanely long, especially to fully upgrade the blacksmith.

^^ This has been my experience with the game as well. I loved the first 25ish hours playing the game for three days straight three weeks ago. Enjoyed the next 10 hours a lot still beating most of the mid level bosses (excluding the Brigand 12 Pounder which I have yet to to try) throughout this time first try with only a handful of casualties. I think I've lost only 6 or 7 adventurers total.

But as I grew curious of attempting the first one of those level 5 quests - a short one in the ruins of all things - the realization hit me instantly in the very first battle, after having my first two attacks dodged while two big crits landed on my crew already in the first round, that the RNG might've just gotten the best of me, for now at least. And that I really did not have the time to keep playing this game for the next 30+ hours grinding new bold adventurers to replace the ones that would eventually die in these high level dungeons; even if I started doing that for a couple of hours just to see if it would hold my interest.

But since I would need to either get the high-leveled adventurers killed to have space for new recruits that would be able to complete quests that actually raked in money and heirlooms, or simply recruit new adventurers until they've run their course then axe them and start the cycle again with a new band of folk that would be disbanded, I surrendered. You beat me, game. Now, I might be OK grinding the stuff if the adventurer roster could go higher than 25 just to alleviate at least some of the grind.

This is a difficult game to think about when recommending to (some) people because of my own experience with the game. It is as if my extremely high excitement and curiosity had been squelched all of a sudden as I was starting the late game randomness. If someone has the time and the willingness to grind beyond reason this is an excellent game with its brooding presentation and neat tactical battles. The (affliction, disease, stress, death's door etc.) systems in place are cool and they certainly give the game its unique personality, and even if the UI can feel at times a bit clunky, it gets the work done just fine. Perhaps I'll revisit the game somewhere down the line again though I doubt I'll ever carry on through the end.

I just started but my 2nd time in the dungeon my whole group got stressed. I was just luck to finish the level and get them to de-stress. This game is no joke.

Got to my first Champion dungeon. Went for a short one in the Warrens so I brought my A bleed team of Vestal, Grave Robber, Houndmaster, Hellion. Vestal was the only one with a dodge under 40 and speed under 7. Everyone was at equipment level 4, skills at 5, and they all had some kick ass trinkets for their class. First move in the dungeon so Torch was at 100%... ambushed, party makeup is screwed, Vestal is in the front and Hellion is in the back, Grave Robber and Houndmaster swap spaces. Every single Enemy attack was a crit, all hit my vestal, she was dead before anyone on my team got a turn and my Houndmaster was on Deaths Door and bleeding and died as soon as his turn came. This followed immediately by failing to run and then every hit being a crit AGAIN and my entire team wiped.

This was my first Champion dungeon. I figured "Well RNG just wanted to fuck me and it did" and got new recruits, started working on the grind again and a bit later tried a short Champion dungeon in the ruins. Same fucking thing happened. Ambush one step out of the entrance with my A Blight team, party order fucked, entire enemy team went before me, every hit was a crit, and the first enemy was the Skeleton Champion who did his massive AoE which crit everyone and put them at deaths door, followed by a failed run and another party wipe. I put the game down after this because the only way I can find myself playing is if I go into the data files and cheat and if I do that then I might as well stop playing and so that's what I did.

This is sad to me because I loved this game up until this point. The Veteran dungeons were the best blend of fun, stress, and using your skills to succeed and the RNG gods didn't make you feel so ungodfully helpless. Every time shit went south you could find a way to salvage it. Champion dungeons seem to just go "Let's see how badly I can fuck you and to hell to you if you want to try and enjoy yourself". Such a shame that the game that I enjoyed so much up to that point couldn't stick the landing.

@captainjudaism: Yeah, for the past few weeks I've been at the wall of "I have quite a few level 5 guys, but actually sending them on a Champion-tier quest is mostly a suicide mission." I haven't had the full party wipes you have, but I have had enemy crits kill one dude in the first fight in the dungeon, and the remaining three are beat to shit, so there's really no point continuing so I just abandon the quest. That has happened several times.

I think I've completed one or two short Champion quests without casualties, where I used scouting to avoid as many fights as possible and did the absolute bare minimum required to satisfy the quest objectives. That's about the most success I've had. The enemy hit rates and crit rates are really absurd on Champion-tier quests. Also I still need more deeds to max out the blacksmith, because that thing is just a bottomless pit.

There is a beta patch out today(?) that shoudl do a good bit to reducing the grind. A new class that increase the loot you get, the ability to trade heirlooms in town (not sure how this works yet), reduced heirloom costs on certain buildings and the ability to recruit levelled characters from the stage coach so you don't have to grind out upgrades. Should make for a better game :)

I'm coming here to post my least brutal moment so far.

I started a mission in the Cove, mid-tier difficulty, going after the Alluring Siren boss. Trying a weird party lineup, with (back to front) Plague Doctor, Bounty Hunter, Crusader, and Highwayman (Highwayman does Point Blank Shot, and for the remainder of the battle he fights from the 2nd position). No dedicated healer, just minor heals from Plague Doctor and Crusader, and then good camping heals from Plague Doctor. Also I compensated for the low healing by buying literally as much food as the mission would allow me to bring.

But then WHOOPS I didn't buy a single torch even though the mission is medium length. Thought about just retreating, but instead nah, ran straight toward the boss, beat the shit out of the Siren, mission accomplished with no deaths.