All my reviews are spoiler free! :)

• Darkest Dungeon
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  72 hours playtime

  68 of 84 Achievements

      "Welcome home, such as it is. This squalid hamlet, these corrupted lands, they are yours now, and you are bound to them."

Oh, Darkest Dungeon, how I loved to hate you! This is one of the best games I’ve ever played; almost everything about it is near perfection. I know the RNG is a big point of contention for a lot of people, but quite honestly, I found that if you bring the right party to the right area or to a boss, chances are, even with a few unlucky dice rolls, you’ll be ok. You may lose a couple of party members here and there, but nothing that should affect your campaign too too much. Or at least that’s the experience I had.

      "The cost of preparedness - measured now in gold, later in blood."

In fact, I think that’s the gameplay’s biggest strength. Party composition/positioning, skills chosen, the synergies between the skills of all your party members, camping abilities, all this matters more in Darkest Dungeon than in most other games of this genre– this is tactical gameplay at its absolute best. The fact that it’s turned based and that there are stats associated to pretty much every little thing you need to know, helps not only to predict the outcome of your associated immediate actions, but also what needs to be corrected in future incursions into any of the very distinct 5 (6 if you own the Crimson Court DLC) major areas in the game.

      "We dug for months, years-- an eternity. And we were rewarded with madness."

Darkest Dungeon has a very deliberate and overt Lovecraftian influence that trickles through every single aspect of the game, from some of the hero classes to enemy designs to the dungeons themselves… But the biggest contribution Lovecraft unknowingly bestowed to this game was its stress system and all the little sub-mechanics involved therein.

I’m not gonna go into too much detail about the whole stress system because there are a whole lot of gameplay elements involved and attached to it, but let’s just say that as you explore and fight, you will inevitably be submitted to the stresses of both physical and mental combat, something that this game pulls off like no other.
Certain enemies deal almost exclusively stress damage (which is not as easily cured as physical damage), and this is yet another genius move from the developers, because it often forces you to focus on these enemies first, allowing the heavy hitters in the enemy party some free reign. Juggling which enemies to attack, when, with who and how is almost a mental battle in its own right and I love it!

      "The front line of this war is not in the dungeon, but rather, inside the mind."

The art is stunning and it reminds me a lot of Mike Mignola’s, which is big praise coming from me. The frame animations are charming and to the point, the audio design is incredibly immersive, the soundtrack is incredible and the narration, gods, the narration! I can still hear the narrator going “the light, the promise of safety!” every single time I turn on my bedside table lamp during the night. I’ve gotten so many memorable quotes out of this game, which can be applied in so many real-life situations, that it’s actually kind of crazy.
This is a game I’ll definitely be coming back to at some point!

      "Remember there can be no bravery without madness."

Coming Soon: SUPER.HOT.SUPER.HOT.SUPER.HOT.