Its so-doomy-it-must-be-at-least-faintly-satirical commentary raises it sky-high, and its focus on how adventuring in frightful places leaves potentially permanent scars on your heroes' minds made it a refreshing inversion of RPG tropes, as well as an entertainingly unusual exercise in team management. I always liked Darkest Dungeon, but it was never without deep-set irritations. Long answer: corpses and heart attacks are but a symptom of a game which has clearly struggled to reconcile its dual nature, increasingly coming down on the side of obstacle and aggravation for obstacle and aggravation's sake, and I'm not at all surprised people are getting fed up.Įven longer answer: the eight or so paragraphs below. Corpses and heart attacks ain't no thing in and of themselves. Curious as to whether this was a case of knee-jerk internet pitchforks at dawn or the developers having made a bona fide boo-boo, I descended back into the Darkest Dungeon to sample its latest horrors for myself. The volume of complaints eventually caused the developers to add an option for players to deactivate corpses and heart attacks. In a game which heaps upon your heroes an unrelenting onslaught of misfortunes including bleeding, starvation, blight, phobias, fetishes, curses, traps and addictions (not to mention straight-up murder at the hands of various monsters and malcontents), this latest cruelty seemed one too many.
Other, apparently difficulty-hiking features (such as heart attacks) also came under fire. Graham summarised these yesterday, but in a nutshell: focal point for the discontent was a new system which sees defeated enemies leave behind corpses, which in many cases block your guys from attacking any still-living foes stood behind the carcass. Its own internal cold war between merriment and masochism came to a head last week, as long-term fans griped anout the latest changes to the early access game.
Was it a tongue-in-cheek romp through Cthulhian dungeons, or was it a painstaking exercise in squad micro-management and not-a-foot-wrong combat strategy? Both, in practice, but increasingly it seems Darkest Dungeon was intended to be the latter.
Red Hook's team-based, disaster-packed roguelike Darkest Dungeon always seemed slightly at war with itself.
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