Darkest Dungeon Review (space_dio)
I'm going to challenge the normal negative review complaints a little bit. Is it too hard? Honestly I'm not sure. I don't think the dungeons are too hard. Very luck based sure, you die a lot sure, that's common in the rougelite genre and I don't think that part is that much worse than any other.
The problem is that Darkest Dungeon is not a rougelike. Or even a rougelite. It's an RPG. It REQUIRES you to grind and level characters. The only thing rougelike-ish about it is that the dungeons layouts are randomized, and permadeath. RPGs also have sequential dungeons, random encounters, and randomized loot drops. If it weren't for permadeath, it would play exactly like a turn-based JRPG.
There is no skill based way to complete a higher level dungeon in DD without leveling characters in low level dungeons. And unlike actual rougelikes, it punishes you for losing. They took "punishing" much too literally. In fact, they seem to have spent a lot of time thinking of creative and complex ways to punish the player. It literally requires you to just wait for your characters to heal and recover from the permanent damage they take while fighting. I don't mind dying, but I HATE waiting. There is no reason for this gameplay choice other than maybe sadism? You should never include both grinding to level characters along with permadeath. Avoiding grinding is one of the central reasons to play rougelikes over traditional RPGs, and that's the thing they decided to bring back. You can't manage the hard dungeons if your whole party of four isn't high level, so losing even one character requires you to go back and grind a new one if you don't have a replacement.
Most rougelikes suck me in. I die a hundred times, and every time I die I think "THIS time I can do it!" Even in rougelites with a lot of metaprogression, once I unlock a level, I always have a decent shot at beating it when I launch the game. In Darkest Dungeon, when even one of my characters dies, I think "time to give up and play slay the sprite on max ascension for six hours and die over and over"
In order to start having fun with DD after losing all my characters to bad RNG, I need to grind the first two dungeons for several hours to stand a chance at the higher level dungeons I managed to unlock. And the early dungeons aren't actually hard! So I'm actually NOT being challenged 70% of the time I'm playing, because I get punished for losing when I do face a challenge, and the punishment is grinding. Imagine deciding to punish your player for losing to challenges by making them play the easy part of the game for a hundred hours.
The bummer is that every other part of the game is awesome. The combat is awesome, the lore is awesome, the dungeons are awesome, the artstyle is awesome, music is awesome. But I don't want to play it. Sometimes I think about giving it another try, and I always get bored and feel like I wasted my time. I think that for me, the one change of figuring out a way to remove the grinding would turn it from a 4/10 to a 9/10. They could let you recruit characters that were already high level once you've unlocked the high level dungeons. The combat would still be exactly as challenging, but you wouldn't feel like you wasted your entire save file if you get a bad roll and lose every character.