Quick Look: Darkest Dungeon

cool

Get ready to get stressed!

You're the darkest dungeon

Is the secret here that Alex is actually just an RNG masochist?

You can tell us, this is a safe place.

You have to be in order to enjoy this game. (Signed - A proud RNG masochist)

This is not a safe place Alex!

Alex's pronunciation of inchoate was killing me in this; somehow it managed to surprise me every single time. For future reference, it's "In-Co-Ate"

Otherwise, this game seems really aesthetically rad and I played about 12 hours of it when it first came onto Steam, but I felt like it was too mechanics heavy in ways that really break the atmosphere and such for me. I had weird situations were high level adventurers were simultaneously begging me not go on another mission while claiming that certain dungeons were beneath them.

I love hard games and I've played a decent number of roguelikes, but certain things about this just feel too nonsensical and videogame-y like not being able to heal outside of combat, and the recent addition of corpses

alex buys a loooot of shit pre dungeon. maybe i buy too little...

Corpulent Flesh is the name of my death metal band

Corpulent Flesh is my favorite death metal band

@ohnooh You can turn off Corpses in the Options menu. Personally, I have no problem with it, since it urges players to diversify their party with members who can Push/Pull/Strike different ranks in the enemy's formation and encourages more advanced tactics other than "Take 4 Lepers and KILL KILL KILL!" ;)

Darkest Dungeon is an excellent game, and I feel like the developers ran into a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation brought on as a consequence of being Early Access. Around 5 months ago, the "hardcore" group was hammering the developer's forums, complaining about the game being too easy, posting "Killer Strats" (sic), and bragging about how they could beat every (released at that time) environment without taking a single torch with their party.

I feel that a lot of the complaints about corpses, heartattack, and so on come from people who are miffed that their super-unbeatable-hero-team they created back when the game was Unfinished is no longer viable/needs tweaking. The RNG is nowhere near as bad as some of the forum-rants make it out to be (the math is all laid out in the open if you compare your character stats with the enemy's stats) and the persistent complaint that "adventurers can't grind lower levels" is a feature that I welcome, as I feel that absent-mindedly one-shotting monsters that are 3 levels below your weakest character and taking their loot ad nauseum in order to repetitively level up a single group of adventurers into a unstoppable party of ubersoldat defeats the whole purpose of the game, which is based on the notions that

a) You WILL have casualties (and the size of your Graveyard will rival the largest "Memorial Wall" in XCOM

and

b) The entire motif of the game is "a group of grizzled adventurers, each with their own scarred psyches and demons to conceal, go toe-to-toe with unspeakable nightmares and barely eke out a victory(?)"

All in all, this is a game I'll keep for a long, long time on my harddrive.

And, as an added incentive, my quest to name all my heroes after famous cats from the internet will continue. :D

This game is a little too grindy for my taste, but yeah, the visuals and narration are faaaaaaantastic. I wish I was making more progress in my own game, but I've been stuck making lvl 1-2 dungeon runs for a few days now (and lost my bounty hunter with the +10% melee damage trait kill me).

EDIT: Woah this undulating flesh boss is cool/horrifying.

This looks fucking cool.

Haven't played this game since it came out on early access but I'm definitely gonna go back and check out the finished product. Even though I already dread getting my ass kicked.

Would someone turn on a goddamn light

Alex, for the pile of scrolls, use a Torch. That will remove one random negative quirk on the person who activates it.

@blacklab: 'This truly is... the Sensibly-Lit Dungeon'

*Gunshot*

@dasakamov: PREACH ON! And can I get an AMEN for that NAAAARRATORRRRR?!

I'd just bring in a flamethrower.

Just an FYI, Darkest Dungeon is coming to Vita http://blog.us.playstation.com/2015/11/18/darkest-dungeon-coming-to-ps4-ps-vita-next-year/

Austin is totally right about the treatment of people in the game- when I was playing this I got in this routine of using new teams of 4, sending them in with hardly any equipment, harvesting as much as possible and pulling them out and then just replacing them. It was a really easy way to raise money. My wife gave me a hard time and said it was like our countrie's (US) treatment of veterans.

This game is pretty cool, although I've found the UI to be a little cluttered and clunky at times.

Hulking Swinetaur!

vinny and austin were on fire! I love this game but it stressed me the hell out

Get this thing guys! It's on sale at the moment on gog!

I added this game to my wishlist on steam this morning but that UI is really chunky and might make me not want to get it. Has anyone else played it and found the UI to be better?

"Swarthy" meant suntanned back when paleness meant richness as you never had to work in the fields.

Still not a fan of corpses, it's too inelegant a fix compared with the rest of the mechanics, and kinda not needed now that PDs, Occultists, and others are now buffed. It's really the only bad thing I've ever encountered in this game other than the copypasta (creepypasta?) bosses.

@austin_walker They named all the villains in this game using that MetalBand.exe twitter account you were talking about the other day.

Metal as fuck

Even though I already own this I'm real tempted not to go back until it's on Vita because that seems like the perfect place for this.

This game looks super rad, thanks for the "quick"look!

Wasnt this also coming to ps4 later?

Your wife's observation is CHILLING in how accurate it is...he said, sending another level 0 on a Medium length mission...

For those curious about the article I mentioned in the Quick Look (on Darkest Dungeon, sanity mechanics, and mental health), here it is.

I'm really liking this game. Good video.

Looks really cool, fantastic narrator & art style, but INSANELY masochistically grindy!

There's a Mike Mignola aspect to the art. Pretty excellent.

2016 is going to be a good year for games.

It's weird that Alex hadn't seen the secret room thing before with all his time in the game, but the same happened to me. I got that pop-up tutorial, but no room appeared on the map. When it actually happens a star appears on the map itself and you walk up into the room at that point in the hallway and get some awesome shit if you have a key.

I'm still really liking this game, but I've cooled on it the more I've played. The game is built on crazy RNG, but the harder dungeons take that to the utmost. After a few runs having characters you've spent 5k+ gold on die out of nowhere due to multiple crits it gets a little tiresome. The game dances the line between frustrating and rewarding, but I reached a point where bullshit deaths and constantly curing diseases / bad quirks pushed it into the unfun range.

Also I couldn't believe they didn't get jumped while camping. I must be really unlucky because I've gotten jumped literally every time I haven't used an ambush-prevention ability. I thought it was automatic.

"Who's that BIIIG MAN" - StreamFriends FTW

Nice meaty quicklook.

@vinny

Well, if you wanna see things in the Lovecraftian bent and decide if that is enough to disturb you in the modern day, just look up teratomas. If you don't, well just imagine excising a moist ball of flesh from a person's abdomen and inside is a bunch of hair or perfect white teeth...

Who turned out the lights?

It's not called "The Darkest Dungeon"...

Edit: It says "the" on the front page but not the actual quick look page

I love the shit out of this game. Already clocked over 50 hours in it.

i've only dabbled in this so far. is it even worth it trying to keep a core team sane and going for an extended amount of time?

Nooooooooooope. This game is all about damage control and keeping fresh supplies of non-crazed party members going. Sanitarium trips to remove Quirks are EXPENSIVE, especially when the quirks become "locked" (though diseases are relatively cheap and tend to be FAR more devastating, so treat those ASAP), so your veterans are also going to be your least stable.

@graham_nix: I had the same experience, I enjoyed my 16 hours with it but I'm not playing anymore. At some point it stopped being scary, and long animations simply became annoying (didn't see the option to turn them off in the menu). All the systems that are there to make the game artificially harder also annoyed me (you can't use abilities of battles, can't fight too long or someone will say "stop playing with your opponent!" and stress everyone, heroes on higher lvls can't come to lower lvl fights etc.) EDIT: typos

@tribski: install cheat engine and set the speed to about 1.5 or whatever you're comfortable with. made the game much more enjoyable to me after the first ~30h.

@apothaeos: might be worth to check back, they tweaked the balance a lot over the last year. It's very important to upgrade your skills and armor before you do veteran missions and start with short ones (also equip fitting trinkets). it is a bit grindy. Also you always have to see retreat as being an option.