![]() ![]() ![]() So, enough about difficulty, let’s talk about what you actually do in Darkest Dungeon. As the title screen states when you start each session, heroes will die and you will fail at times so striking that careful difficulty balance was crucial in enveloping players within the cursed lands of the Hamlet. This is key as making Darkest Dungeon too easy would destroy much of the atmosphere and sadistic charm which surrounds Red Hook’s dungeon crawler. Luckily, the difficulty has been fixed for the most part and Darkest Dungeon is now inhabiting that difficulty Goldilocks zone, which makes each dungeon crawl a struggle but never an absolute slog. So many variables had to be balanced in order to ensure successful combat encounters, that most dungeon crawls would either result in squad wipes or retreating parties coming back utterly debilitated. The addition of Heart Attacks, which instakilled overstressed adventurers, and corpses, which blocked enemy on the backlines, made late game encounters a micromanagement nightmare. After that, the balance swung back to the unfair end of the spectrum. ![]() As a result, the balances went too far the other way, with certain heroes and party compositions becoming unstoppable and making difficult dungeons a breeze to run through. It needed some in-depth balance changes in order to stabilise the game to place it in that nice area of being punishing but fair. ![]() When it was initially released, I thought it was at the mercy of an RNG system which was heavily against the player. My personal opinion on Darkest Dungeon has been all over the shop during its development. Having finally come out of Early Access and been through a myriad of both positive and negative changes during that development period, has Darkest Dungeon emerged as an ascendant being that glimmers in the pale moonlight, or is it a festering husk that should return to the depths from whence it came? Among the Gothic crowd was an Early Access title called Darkest Dungeon, a devilishly hard dungeon crawler that took heavy inspiration from the work of Lovecraft to show just how arduous the experience of delving into the depths would be on the mind. Gothic horror had quite the calendar year in 2015 with Bloodborne, Sunless Sea and the Order 1886 all taking elements from that particular genre of horror to make their game worlds seem that little bit more uncomfortable. ![]()
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