The Darkest Dungeon Stinker: No Progress for the Average Mortal

I've played 17 hours of the 2D, turn-based combat game Darkest Dungeon on Steam Early Access, $20 USD.

As the name suggests, it is a Dungeon Crawler. You go into various maps with your team of four associates, passing from room to room, seeking gold, loot, and XP. On your way, you meet monsters, traps, blocking debris, and (the special unique twist of this game) semi-permanent Afflictions and Quirks which impede your abilities.

The Afflictions and Quirks systems are the real bitch here, as your associates begin to lose their sanity crawling from room to room, a mimickery of real-life player fatigue that occurs in MMO endgames.

Afflictions and Quirks impose debuffs on members of your party. Phobias and emotional problems like Egomania, Rabies, Unquiet Mind or Depression diminish team member abilities and coordination. The tank will cowardly retreat to a position behind cloth armor classes, placing himself too far away to execute any skills during a fight. Cloth armor classes will refuse healing, or will refuse to switch positions for optimal fighting when required. Some take bizarre risks during combat. Placement of team members is very important in this game, and becomes chaotic if the team has been afflicted.

As you progress, the odds rapidly stack against you. The larger the dungeon, the the more rooms it has. The more rooms it has, the more phobias and erratic behavior your party gains. The more phobias your party gains, the less able you are to fight monsters. If you win the dungeon, your team members still carry the Afflictions and Phobias with them afterwards.

Afflictions and Quirks persist throughout the life of your characters. You can spend large sums of money to have them cured, but you don't get very much money from dungeon crawls and have to sequester the sick player for a round before you can access them again for combat. Eventually, team members accumulate so many Afflictions and Quirks that they become a liability in combat -- evidenced by forcing an Affliction-inducing early retreat for the team. The Afflicted members can be dismissed from service forever, or die in the dungeon but the catch is you lose all progress and investments you made to empower them to fight.

The "saving grace" (more like a catch to the catch) which is you can recruit fresh team members for free, but they start at level zero and cannot have their skills upgraded until they progress.

And herein lies the rock-paper-scissors aspect of the game. You become unable to progress due to Affliction and lack of money to cure your senior team members. Curing requires winning. Winning requires senior team members with upgraded skills. Moving a recruit to senior level requires winning. A vicious cycle.

Now there may be a "right" way to play this game. That "way" may require "vertical learning" as it has been so snootishly described and there may be people on the forums who say they completed EVERYTHING in 20 hours and it was a snap because they know their shit. But this means nothing to me. I want to play a game I can finish, that is challenging, and that I enjoy.

It's not too much to ask.

The multimedia aspects of this game are very polished for what you might expect for a pre-release, and despite a few usability issues, it's ready to play. I hestiate to use the word "slick" to describe its presentation, because adjectives involving wetness always seem to allude to something disgusting, so I'll just say the program is professionally written and leave it at that.

The graphics are attractive and work. The music is atmospheric and works. The voice-overs and ambient sounds are all appropriate and work. This game works well for what it is.

Yet, after 17 hours I am bored and disappointed. Unable to progress, broke, with pools of characters who are too sick to win. So far, I have two pools of about 15 characters in this hopeless state, and I feel as if I have been denied a full game by merit of intentionally over-hardcore design.

I would normally describe this game as being "way too hard to play", but that should be reserved for games with incredibly hard fights. The game is actually quite easy to play, and the fights are deceptively easy. In fact, about 50% of game-play is fully automatic, with the remaining 50% as being choices you make from very limited sets of options. Combat is chance-based, which (if you can progress past level 1) you will assumably have more control over victory. But no, I just can't even get to level two.

So my judgement is that if the developers do not make this game "progressable" to the average player in 20 hours of game time, it has no hope of appealing to more than 2% of the people who purchase it. When sales wind down, it won't matter if more content gets added because 98% of the people who bought this game will not be able to play it past a certain point, and it will succomb to the fate of most Early Access games - developer abandonment due to audience lack of interest.

So I would not recommend Darkest Dungeon as a purchase until it is rehabilitated to easily allow leveling progress for the average player and can be completed in a reasonable period of time. Right now it is not much more than a polished demo of what could be a success if they loosen the bolts a little. Correction: If they loosen the bolts a LOT.