Saturday Morning Gaming: Darkest Dungeon 2
When I first moved to Colorado Springs in the early 90’s, I heard stories about some of the stuff they did to cadets at the Air Force Academy as part of their training. Like, one of the stories involved wilderness training that dropped the cadets in the middle of the forest for a week with a rabbit. I’ve heard that they tell the cadets “don’t name the rabbit”.
We talked about Darkest Dungeon last year. “A game about making the best of a bad situation.”
Instead of being a game where you were asked to identify with the guys doing the dungeon crawl, you were asked to identify with the old man in the back of the tavern handing out maps and asking people to go and clear the dungeon out.
And the dungeon isn’t one that is cleared out by an enthusiastic party of adventurers. It’s one that might be cleared out, in theory, by a bunch of grizzled alcoholic dungeon crawlers that have a great deal of trauma to recover from. Oh, and if 20% of them die in the process? That’s *LOW*.
It was a game that treated the dungeon crawlers as a means to an end. They were a resource to be spent in service to a greater goal. Don’t identify with them. Don’t give them nicknames.
It was exceptionally difficult and exceptionally depressing and surprisingly fun. I don’t think I’ve gotten more than 25% into the game before my best heroes end up in an unusable state and I felt like I had to start over from scratch.
(Apparently, there’s a youtube series devoted to a playthrough that beats the game in 12 weeks. This is unthinkable to me. I’m tempted to watch it to see if there are any techniques I could pick up… but I’m also irritated by the fact that it’s apparently possible to beat the game in 12 weeks when I have only barely gotten a quarter through the game in 99 weeks.)
Well, it turns out that there is a sequel coming.
Early access begins this year. I guess that means that we can expect the whole thing come 2022.
I’m looking forward to becoming obsessed again.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is “Jack Rabbit” by Don Van Dyke and is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
I have yet to beat the game, but I’m making progress. I’ve beaten the first level of the Darkest Dungeon and I’ve made two unsuccessful forays into level 2, and I’m in week 91 in my current run.
The big obstacle I had to overcome was reluctance to try the more difficult missions. “My heroes (meaning ME) aren’t ready for this. Just two more weeks of upgrading the town. Maybe next week.” I’ve come to realize that tackling those longer, more difficult missions and killing the mini-bosses is key. Your heroes NEED those more powerful trinkets, the greater hauls of gold and heirlooms, the larger experience gains.
And if a few heroes don’t make it back? Hey, I upgraded the Stage Coach for a reason…Report
Yeah, I saw a piece of advice that said “upgrade your roster size, upgrade your stagecoach, get your roster large enough that you don’t need to pay for stress relief because people destress just by sitting around… AND RUN AWAY. SERIOUSLY RUN AWAY THE ONLY DOWNSIDE IS STRESS.”Report
Running away is one talent I’ve yet to master, unless it’s an obvious “you just lost a party member and now nobody’s skills work because they’re out of position” situation.
My favorite is when you DO run away and the stress causes a heart-attack chain reaction in your party, kind of like the old panic bug in XCOM2.Report
Darkest Dungeon is one of those games that I played, and I liked, but I never really dug into for some reason. However, seeing it is available on the Switch, I might try it out again. It seems like a game I would play more on a handheld while watching TV.
My current addiction is Monster Hunter Stories 2. I finished the story over the weekend, and now I am digging into the post game content while waiting for my wife to finish so we can do co-op stuff together.Report
It’s a game that subverts tropes. Not storytelling ones (though, I guess, it does do that a little with the whole “let’s reveal what the ancestors did” thing) but RPG gameplay tropes.
Half of the fun is in exploring how the game isn’t Final Fantasy.Report
I just bought a copy with the Crimson Court and Color of Madness DLCs. Hopefully I will stick with it this time.Report