Dr Wookie

Darkest Dungeon: Fear is a mind killer, and so is Eldritch Pull

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Darkest Dungeon successfully hit its Kickstarter back in March 2014: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1460250988/darkest-dungeon-by-red-hook-studios

 

However, I had no idea about it at the time. It is a gorgeous 2D party side-scrolling adventure where too much exposure to the bloody, weird, or bloody weird, stresses your party out, making them paranoid, likely to turn to drink, masochistic or depressed (for example). 

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I seem to remember seeing something about it a few months ago, but the first time I decided I needed it in my life was after seeing Jim Sterling's let's play:

 

Luckily, it entered early access today (Feb 3rd) on Steam for $20. Apparently it will be available on Vita and PS4(?) too. I've snatched it up, and am really enjoying it so far.

 

It's hard to describe, so here's a dev video to help out a bit

 

--- You play as a guy who is trying to reclaim his estate from evil forces; you use various types of heirlooms found during adventures to upgrade bits of the estate

 

--- You can attract new heroes each game week, a good thing since death is permanent

 

--- Stress is at least as important as health... if stress is too high, characters usually gain an affliction (but can get a positive trait if they

re very very lucky).

 

--- Characters can get stressed in battle or just by being creeped out... awesome victories help relieve stress.

 

--- Characters can relieve stress by taking a week off adventuring and going to the church to pray / meditate/ flagelate, or to a bar to drink/gamble/sexy time. Various character traits mean that they might get extra relief from some types, or they cannot use others

 

--- There are several ways to manage how light or dark the dungeons are. Darker dungeons are harder and more stressful, but yield bigger rewards

 

--- There seem to be 10 different classes so far, with combat abilities and campfire abilities. Combat abilities depend on where you are in your group, as well as where the enemy is, so in the example below the skill can only be used if you're in the first 3 rows, and can only target monsters in the first 3 rows.

 

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That looks super up my alley, but I'll probably wait until it's out of EA.  I'd like to see more games explore the mental/emotional stress of the kinds of horrors games put you through.  Even if they aren't deep explorations, just trying to model it at all is a good step.

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Really close to purchasing it, I just need to know just exactly how the end game plays out and scales.

 

Like I really want the ability to bling out your party.  I get that game isn't about some crazy number scaling (and I really appreciate that, I hate number inflation) but scaling something along the line of say, FTL would be awesome.

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I'm so glad I backed this when I still had spending money. It's been a really fun timesink the past few days. I've put 8 hours into it and I barely even noticed.

 

Sooo I have no clue about endgame but character progression sort of goes like this. Experience levels are analogues for the amount of stress each character can take rather than how much damage or constitution they have. All characters start out as level zero and must complete one mission to gain 2 resolve points to attain lvl one. So far the amount of resolve points for each mission hasn't increased but I've mostly stuck with short missions because even the medium ones can turn gruelling fast.

If you want to increase a character's power you have to use the blacksmith to upgrade their weapons. Such upgrades are costly however and are best reserved for people over level 3.

If you throw level zeros at a level 3 mission they quickly collapse under the weight of the evil they face and you'll be lucky to make it past two-three rooms.

 

My advice is to not grow attached to anyone and to dismiss people the moment their -ve traits outweigh the +ves even if they're your best.

It can feel like a frustrating game while you learn it and it definitely benefits from an immediate restart once you've got the hang of the game (say by week 10).

I've had a lot of experience in only placing my town upgrades into the stagecoach network and just the bar for stress relief. My aim is to basically factory farm adventurers and throw away anyone that isn't the best. Think Timothy Dalton in Penny Dreadful without the weird sex issues.

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I'm so glad I backed this when I still had spending money. It's been a really fun timesink the past few days. I've put 8 hours into it and I barely even noticed.

 

Sooo I have no clue about endgame but character progression sort of goes like this. Experience levels are analogues for the amount of stress each character can take rather than how much damage or constitution they have. All characters start out as level zero and must complete one mission to gain 2 resolve points to attain lvl one. So far the amount of resolve points for each mission hasn't increased but I've mostly stuck with short missions because even the medium ones can turn gruelling fast.

If you want to increase a character's power you have to use the blacksmith to upgrade their weapons. Such upgrades are costly however and are best reserved for people over level 3.

If you throw level zeros at a level 3 mission they quickly collapse under the weight of the evil they face and you'll be lucky to make it past two-three rooms.

 

My advice is to not grow attached to anyone and to dismiss people the moment their -ve traits outweigh the +ves even if they're your best.

It can feel like a frustrating game while you learn it and it definitely benefits from an immediate restart once you've got the hang of the game (say by week 10).

I've had a lot of experience in only placing my town upgrades into the stagecoach network and just the bar for stress relief. My aim is to basically factory farm adventurers and throw away anyone that isn't the best. Think Timothy Dalton in Penny Dreadful without the weird sex issues.

 

Ooo that bolded bit might be a deal breaker for me.  I will still look further into the game but thanks for the explanation.

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Ooo that bolded bit might be a deal breaker for me. I will still look further into the game but thanks for the explanation.

You can send your people to a sanitarium to remove specified negative traits. Its not too costly; besides the fee you lose the use of that person for a week.

I should have added the caveat that rule is mostly for early game. Some -be traits don't matter much depending on the hero. Like minus to range on your almost pure melee guy.

I haven't found any trinkets I want to equip on my peeps yet they all come with stiff penalties so far.

Also combat can be a bit weird at times. At this point you can only make camp when the game provides you with firewood. Camp is pretty much the only time you can do significant healing outside of combat.

So the game incentivises you to sustain the horrifying combats by stunlocking the enemy so you can cast more healing spells.

It's one of those balance issues the Devs are looking into right now.

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I think I'm going to wait for this one to be out of Early Access. Don't get me wrong, it looks good, but I have a lot of Early Access games right now and I don't really feel like adding to the pile.

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I backed this; it's great. That said, feel free to wait until it's out of Early Access, as all the content is not in yet (classes, end dungeons) and there are a couple of balance issues.

 

Note: Once you're over the early gold crunch hump of rebuilding/opening your village and training your A/B team, sending three heroes to the Sanitarium each week to remove negative traits can preserve your favorite heroes.

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I've completed a few missions now (and ran away from one when it was clear my party wasn't up to snuff :eek:). I've unlocked a blacksmith that can upgrade gear, a guild that can upgrade abilities, and a sanitarium to cure bad traits (as mentioned above). I'm really enjoying it so far.

 

I am not sure how much is balancing, but things can go horribly wrong very quickly. The only really jarring  thing that happened so far was a time where I gave my party some food to heal up, then seconds later hit a hungry state, and had to starve because I didn't have enough food left... but but they had just eaten!

 

I don't normally buy into early access but the nature of the game lends itself to multiple play throughs anyway, which is why I bought it.

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In my first dungeon, I figured out that eating food healed damage, had my Crusader eat the last of it to heal up, and 2 steps later hit a hungry state. Darkest Dungeon!

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What's the story with Lepers? Mine all seem to whiff on most attacks, and when they connect it's about the same damage level of the other front line classes. Their other skills don't seem to offset it. What's their role supposed to be?

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Whiff?

I treat mine as a self healing tank. Bonus points if you have that ability that hits two for one.

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I've seen a few gameplay videos, but there was something I couldn't tell from them. Is time a resource in the game? That is, if you screw around accomplishing nothing on too many missions and make it to week 10 at level 1, are you going to be punished in some way (enemy difficulty scaling to time, or perhaps a "You must beat the game in X weeks" clock)?

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This game has some of my favourite elements of XCOM in it. It also reminds me of Rogue Legacy with its traits system; though I'm aware other games have had this too. I do like how you can become pretty attached to your characters. I made the mistake on my first run of naming all my characters after friends, only to watch them all get wrecked by skeleton men. Good game!

 

My one wish is that the characters had some minor cosmetic variations so I could tell people apart within the same class.

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I backed this; it's great. That said, feel free to wait until it's out of Early Access, as all the content is not in yet (classes, end dungeons) and there are a couple of balance issues.

 

Note: Once you're over the early gold crunch hump of rebuilding/opening your village and training your A/B team, sending three heroes to the Sanitarium each week to remove negative traits can preserve your favorite heroes.

 

Is it play-efficient to preserve your heroes?  It doesn't have to be the best choice, so long as it's not super sub-optimal (equivalent of sabotaging yourself).

 

More I think about it, I'll probably get it either way to study it.

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Is it play-efficient to preserve your heroes?  It doesn't have to be the best choice, so long as it's not super sub-optimal (equivalent of sabotaging yourself).

 

More I think about it, I'll probably get it either way to study it.

 

Oh yeah, certainly. You heroes level up as they complete adventures, and you can get upgraded skills/gear for them as they level up, so it's worth making sure our favourite heroes are looked after. Also, more experienced heroes don't get stressed out quite so easily. As you get further on in the game, some of the missions are way too hard for you to not have levelled up guys doing them.

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You can treat new heroes off the cart as fodder to get gold and building materials if you want, that's one of the balance issues currently being worked out in the early access release ("grinding heroes" for starting gold, as new heroes are currently effectively free, and you can dismiss them without penalty).

 

I've been treating it as a typical RPG where I try to preserve heroes unless they're just loaded with negative traits. Having about 15-17 hero slots so you can have 2-4 teams of 4 works best for shuttling heroes back and forth as needed.

 

Note that you're almost required to have a couple teams going as once heroes pass certain Resolve levels they won't team with heroes of lower levels ("I'm not babysitting").

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I've noticed that everyone that I watch play this skips buying skeleton keys. I've been bringing a couple with me whenever I can. They seem to pay for themselves. 

 

Whiff?
I treat mine as a self healing tank. Bonus points if you have that ability that hits two for one.

'Whiff' means that they miss. 

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I've noticed that everyone that I watch play this skips buying skeleton keys. I've been bringing a couple with me whenever I can. They seem to pay for themselves. 

 

I've been watching Baertaffy play this and am kind of irked by how many items he brings to dungeons, generally at least one of everything. The effects these have with certain objects are nice, but I'm not sure it's worth it to bring them just on the condition that you'll have the chance to use it. Plus more often than not it seems like my inventory ends up chock full of loot whether I bring extra items or not. Although I do bring at least one key always. Keys and shovels.

 

Plus I only recently stopped bringing torches, so what do I know?

 

What's the deal with trinkets though? Most of them seem fairly useless, but then a few exceptions are just off the charts good. Like the Hellion gets one that raises damage and bleed chance without any downside.

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Bringing certain items gives you greater advantages if their optimal corridor/room items spawn. For example, the animal carcasses in the Weald (or more disgustingly the corpse cart in the sewers) will give you 10-16 food if you use medicines on them to cleanse the meat. Lets you bring less food and 1 medicine is cheaper than a stack of 12 food. I stopped bringing bandages; as long as you have good healing or a plague doctor, not necessary. 1-2 shovels is almost always useful (clears blockages, loots graves). 1-2 holy water to make sure that icon isn't cursed. and 1-2 keys, if only to get a few extra heirlooms from an unlocked chest.

 

Trinkets - Most are tradeoffs. If one of your characters is low on the trinket's negative trait (for example, I have a 0 dodge Crusader), you can stack trinkets that further reduce that stat and just get the benefits; nothing goes below 0.

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Bringing certain items gives you greater advantages if their optimal corridor/room items spawn. For example, the animal carcasses in the Weald (or more disgustingly the corpse cart in the sewers) will give you 10-16 food if you use medicines on them to cleanse the meat. Lets you bring less food and 1 medicine is cheaper than a stack of 12 food. I stopped bringing bandages; as long as you have good healing or a plague doctor, not necessary. 1-2 shovels is almost always useful (clears blockages, loots graves). 1-2 holy water to make sure that icon isn't cursed. and 1-2 keys, if only to get a few extra heirlooms from an unlocked chest.

 

Trinkets - Most are tradeoffs. If one of your characters is low on the trinket's negative trait (for example, I have a 0 dodge Crusader), you can stack trinkets that further reduce that stat and just get the benefits; nothing goes below 0.

 

You can use shovels to loot graves?! Of course! Why didn't I think of this!

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Yeah, I picked up on some these uses, they just still feel entirely to situational for me and in most cases don't warrant bringing along the item. Except keys for a couple of extra heirlooms and shovels to avoid the massive amounts of stress caused by clearing obstacles by hand. The actual, intended uses of bandages and antivenom are even worse though, I've definitely never encountered a situation so far where it wasn't an easy option to just let my healer take care of any cases of bleeding or blight and not have to spend any more gold.

 

There's probably something to be said for playing the game in a slightly less than optimal way though. I've been using the sanitarium to remove almost all negative quirks from my core group, and while that has made them a lot more reliable, the game has also lost quite a bit of personality in the process. It's been a long time since anybody actually got stressed out in a dungeon run for me.

 

My case with trinkets was more that besides these fairly even trade-offs between one skill and another, a couple of them promise raw power with nary a downside. Seems a bit weird.

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I don't think I've seen a trinket with no downsides yet. You may want to file those as bug reports, to make sure the developer hasn't missed them.

 

Re: Bandages and Antitoxins - unless you're running a group with absolutely no healers, you're right, these aren't needed. Maybe in the last two dungeon areas the effects will be front-loaded and deal massive damage; then I could see the point in them.

 

Having a global situation (gobal events?) where certain types of healing just don't work or are reduced in potency would be a stick-it-to-you challenge. People are also wondering if they're going to have attacks on the village to keep the tension ratcheted up.

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The one I'm thinking of is for the Hellion and gives +10% damage and 15% chance to bleed skills. Although maybe I'm reading that wrong when I assume it's damage done not taken, and chance to cause bleed not be bled.

 

Some of these are phrased a little awkwardly. I'm pretty sure the fasting pendant read "+100% less food consumed" although that seems to be changed now so I guess they're working on everything anyway.

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