Recent reviews by nurp

7.8/10
One word: atmosphere.
Stunning Mike Mignola-esque art style. Half the reason you'll be playing this game is to gape at the fantastic art direction. The character design, the area design: Lovecraftian and morose - every sprite is something to behold in this game.
Fantastic soundtrack and effects. My personal favorite would be the Siren's, but the rest of the track is nothing to wave off. The sounds of battle and breaking minds drive this game to another level.
And to top it all off, the sexiest narraration to ever bless a game - ever. Thank you Wayne June for making my time with this game unforgettable.
In terms of gameplay, which honestly does feel secondary to the style, is quite simple. The majority of your time in this game is going to spent in dungeons, fending off hoards of beast, undead, and corrupted human alike as you attempt to complete whatever sadistic quest you sent your heroes on. These function as your main source of income, trinkets, and insanity in the game. The dungeons are played through in a turn-based crawl with 4 heroes in a party, slipping through dark hallways where you can come upon anything, and making your way through rooms that can hold treasure or horrors. The treasures- in true demonic fashion, can also grant all sorts of nasty side-effects to your heroes if not investigated properly. The combat, as previously mentioned, is turn based, you and the enemy waiting for the other's assault to end before commencing your own. Many attacks merely do damage, in the form of a crushing blow or festering DOT. Some characters, though, such as the Man-at-Arms, have a variety of moves that can benefit his own team as well as apply crippling debuff to enemies, like reduced dodge chance or accuracy.
However your merry band of misfits' health bars are not the only thing to keep an eye on. Darkest Dungeon features a unique system of stress that slowly builds up in your heroes, or jumps up due to a particularly lethal or stressful enemy attack. If a heroes stress meter reaches a hald-way point: he or she, the majority of the time, will gain an affliction. An affliction is the very human hero's mind responding to extreme circumstance: based off of real life reactions. They can become irrational, paranoid, fearful, or a whole other bunch of nasty mindsets that not only can wrench them from your control, but also affect their fellow heroes. At 100% stress, the hero will have a heart attack and die, ingloriously, in the mud. I did say most of the time though, for on rare occasions, a hero will meet the fear and stress head on and say, "Get out of my way." They become powerful, stalwart, or focused. In this case the hero gains a "virtue". Virtues function similarly to afflictions in that it can affect the hero or the whole group. This can be stress relief, automatic healing, or damage bonuses that can all turn the tide of battle dramatically.
You don't have to let it come to this roll of the dice, though. Several options for stress relief present themselves both in dungeon and in the hamlet, which I will touch on later. In dungeon, certain heroes have or can gain abilities that allow them to reduce stress mid-battle. This can be vital to a quest should you head in a particularly stressful direction. Another mechanic in certain longer dungeons is the ability to make camp. This gives your heroes a moment of respite to eat, heal, or train. Many heroes have "camping abilities" that can reduce stress. Unfortunately for us, the night holds many horrors for an unaware party, and can destroy an expedition should you not prepare for it.
Once your party arrives back, you are in the Hamlet: a large hub for stress reduction, battle preparation, and medication. Here you can manage your heroes, upgrade skills and equipment, and collect more heroes from the stagecoach to throw at the monstrous dungeons. Before sending your heroes back to the dungeons in their various states of mental disrepair, you may want to let them have some time off at the bar, brothel, or gambling tables, or for the religiously inclined, an abbey sits on the hill offering prayer, meditation, or penance.
There is also a Sanitarium where heroes can be rid of diseases should they collect any. Here, quirks can also be managed. Quirks are another vital aspect of Darkest Dungeon. They are the strengths and weaknesses of your heroes, who in the end are flawed people. Quirks can affect many aspects of hero, including damage dealt, stress taken, or preferred methods of stress relief in the hamlet. The sanitarium can remove negative quirks or lock in beneficial ones. Just remember that these "heroes" are all, and always will be, expendable pawns to your mission. They will die, so don't get too attached.
Speaking of your quest with as few spoilers as possible: your goal is to shut off the flow of corrupted eldritch horrors spewing from a gate to another realm that your mad ancestor released. To do this you must first purge the land of every boss that defends the estate that holds the gate. This includes madmen prophets, necromancers, war machines, masses of endless writhing flesh, and some creatures that only appear in the pitch black.
Good luck.

Now, before this is written off as an entirely positive review, allow me to say a few things first. To put it gently, this game is an unfair slog. If you enjoy grinding and entire save profiles failing at the flip of a coin, this is a bonafide 10/10, however if you are most people, you'll find yourself smashing your monitor in. Thankfully, the devs are very responsive to their user base, and have made many changes to the game in order to please both the masochists and the common player. Without options to turn off certain very unfair mechanics, this game easily could have fallen to a 6/10 due to RNGitis: the tendency of a game to rely too hard on random number generation for gameplay. However, thanks to these additions, the game now can appeal to a much wider range of players, and has earned a place on my personal Hall of Game.

it's ok