 Ruin has come to our family. Hello and welcome to Darkest Dungeon in depth. I've spent dozens of hours over the last several weeks playing Darkest Dungeon. Spending so long with one game over a short period of time has left in me the desire to take a deep dive into the many facets of this excellent game of tactics, survival and Lovecraftian horror. This I will do in a series of videos released twice weekly over the next two to three weeks. Ever since before it was officially released I have thought that Darkest Dungeon is truly an exceptional game and once I heard about the announcement of the sequel I realised I'd never actually properly finished it. What is amazing about the Darkest Dungeon is that you can craft and tell so many stories about the horrible, terrible things that happen to your characters. But the thing is, it's a massive game. Especially if, like me, you don't want to just go through the easy, a radiant option. No, a game like this deserves an in-depth dive in more ways than one. I have spent over a hundred and forty-five hours playing it, nearly a hundred and fifty. And that is insane how long I have spent. I just look at some of my other favourite games of late. The Witcher 3, a hundred hours. Shadow of War, fifty hours. And now Assassin's Creed, sixty-five hours. And then we've got Darkest Dungeon, a shabby, tiny, no-name developer at the point of its release. And now it has actually got me hooked up for a hundred and fifty hours. That is impressive and it deserves praise. Disclaimer, though. Just because I have played it for a hundred and fifty hours does not mean that I am a particularly good player. I have made more mistakes than I would like to admit, but I am learning. And I have put a lot of research in each of the different sections of what will, a few weeks from now, turn out to be a fairly long video. All its parts combined. Anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour, I hope. But at any rate, without further ado, let's get into part one. Introduction and overview. Darkest Dungeon is, at its core, a game of resource management. These resources come in many forms. First and foremost, they come in the form of the dozens of adventurers you go through over the extent of your journey into the ancestors' estate. In the hamlets, the resources you manage are gold, in the four types of relics with which buildings are upgraded. Portraits, crests, deeds and busts. A fifth relic, pardon, a fifth sort of resource was recently introduced. Shards, but these I will not go too much into, because I don't particularly care about wave combat, and that's what's one of the two big pieces of DLC introduced to the game. At any point, resource management goes very deep indeed, where characters are concerned. Every class of our heroic champions has their strengths and weaknesses. The leper delivers devastating blows, but his accuracy is a problem, especially on higher level expeditions. The Helian has the ability to buff herself and her reach unlike most other melee characters, as well as take on three enemies at once in a massive assault with her glaive, but at the cost of lowered damage and speed. And the Vestal? Well, okay, she's the perfect virtuous healing machine. This isn't meant to go into the strengths and weaknesses of the different classes. Rather to reinforce my statement. Everything is resource management. The weaknesses I discussed can be neutralised with the use of Trinkets, as well as the locking in of positive quirks. Trinkets, I think, are self-explanatory. What's interesting about them is that the majority have not only a beneficiary effect, but also introduce some new weakness, some disadvantage taking away from character speed or their resistance at death's door, that is to say, when their HP is at zero and any of the next strikes they take might end up being fatal. And of course, they negatively impact an adventurer in all kinds of other nasty ways as well. Perks of the positive variety are meanwhile somewhat more interesting and they can allow for a good deal of herding customization. Using one of the buildings in town, the medical wards, you can strap under characters to fancy leather chairs and prod them with needles until the positive quirk is locked in. I.e. it won't ever be exchanged by something useless at the end of an expedition, which this game just loves doing for, well, the suffering of all of us players, I think. The process is obscenely. Expensive. Which is why I only began locking in positive quirks of characters once they had resolved level 5, i.e. became champions of their class. Definitely, because I hadn't yet realized what was a possibility by that time. Nope, I definitely did not miss that until a few hours in. To conclude on the topic of the original negative quirks, these range from mildly annoying to seriously debilitating, depending entirely on, once again, randomness and personal horrors, getting, you know, awful cuts while looking at different curios and just all sorts of horrors, really. You can also remove those in the medical ward, of course. So much for quirks, negative or positive. Resource management in town is kind of a pain, sometimes. Fully upgrading anyone building in the hamlet costs hundreds of crests and one additional of the collectible ancestral resources. Paintings are the most rare of these and are a nightmare to carry as they stack in trees. And with an inventory that only has as part of the 12 items, it's something of a mess. For reference, crests stack in twelves, while busts indeed stack in sixes in your inventory during an expedition. Not that there are in plenty of each, and as you'll be going on dozens of expeditions, or even hundreds, like I have, the hamlet will expand before your eyes in due time. In my view, the best buildings to work on are the blacksmith, the guild hall and the recruitment coach, on account of the fact that upgrading the first two allows for unlocking higher level skills, armor and weapon upgrades, as well as cheaper prices in terms of these upgrades. With these upgraded, the coach can in turn be, yes you guessed it, upgraded itself in order to offer a chance of recruitment of more experienced adventurers who come in with better gear and access to all combat skills at this level they are recruited at. While you'll never recruit a character above resolve level three, they still save a bunch of money in terms of investing into gear and skill upgrades, as well as a bunch of time in terms of apprentice level difficulty expeditions, which are kind of boring after, I don't know, about 50 hours of doing them. So much for resource management in town. Coming next, apprentice and veteran expeditions, and now I did not just do apprentice expeditions for 50 hours, that was sarcasm people, sarcasm. The apprentice expeditions in Darkest Dungeon are the easiest the game is ever going to get, but that doesn't mean they are challenge free, far from it. Apprentice expeditions will introduce you to the most common enemy types in each of the four zones of the estate, and no I'm not going to talk about the Crimson Curse DLC in the courtyard here, that topic will be spoken about in its own separate section, and you'll have to wait before you get to hear my righteous anger about the whole vampiric nightmare. Back to the topic at hand, apprentice expeditions are Darkest Dungeons who have teaching you the basics without pulling any punches. The myriad curios will bleed you out and play your party with diseases until you spend a small fortune experimenting which of the provisions you have access to will bring about positive effects with every different curio. You'll work out that grabbing a couple of bandages and vows of anti-venom before a mission is as important as anything in the world, especially in such places as the Cove which is filled with things that will cut you. As each week progresses and more adventurers come to test their luck, there's a general feeling of things beginning to click into place as you familiarize yourself with the different mechanics by the dozen also adventuring classes. The best and cruelest option you have, customization-wise, is the ability to name your characters after anyone you want. Friends, family, idols, book characters, only to watch them die or be overcome by stress and turn insane. Insanity comes in different forms, most of them unpleasant to watch happening to the adventurers you've grown to care about over several missions by now. Tortures are different, whether you want to fight under the somewhat reliable security of the light, or risk taking much greater stress and damage in the dark for the sake of greater reward really depends on the kind of player you are. I was much more comfortable in the light to start with, but as I progressed I took on greater and greater amounts of risk because I knew what I was doing and also I stopped caring how many of my crazy kids would die of a heart attack. In your exploration you'll eventually come across a horrid little curio that will ask you to sacrifice a torch. If you do, this shambler will appear to an unprepared player that little eldritch horror is absolutely nightmarish. He is in fact a lot worse than the apprentice level bosses or at any rate most of them. Apprentice level expeditions often don't demand much more than brute force, with some skill and a bit of luck you often find no need for the use of a dedicated healer such as the Vestal. Except for those quests that will give your first glimpse with the eight bosses across the ruins warrens well in the cove. I remember when I first faced these during the game's beta. They seemed considerably tougher than they did now, which leads me to the tone that I've either become a lot more skilled, possible, or at over the last three, four years, is it? The developers have scaled down the difficulty during these first encounters a fair amount. At any rate, each zone houses two bosses, most of whom are grotesque nightmarish masses of love, crafty and horror. Some are more dangerous than others and you better learn to deal with them early on, if you care about progressing at anything more than a snail space. Because veteran level expeditions, that's resolve level 3 and 4 respectively, are going to take the gloves off. New enemy types appear, and the old ones do more damage, inflict more stress and get a nice little boost in dodge, accuracy and every other stat conceivable. Sending in a party that doesn't have an upgraded set of weapons in the armor is ill-advised, as both the health and the additional damage are very much necessary to deal with these more powerful foes. An over-reliance and brute force won't necessarily cut it either. Too many foes have protection that will neglect most straight-out attacks. Damage over time begins to play a greater role, in classes like The Fludgerland, A Crimson Call deals too exclusive, and The Plague Doctor, with their massive reliance and bleed and blight respectively, will come in very handy indeed. Debuffs, marking targets, stunning them. The growing necessity for more complex strategies will make you much more conscious of the intricacy and depth of combat. Take Speed for example. I recall not caring particularly about the turns my characters took rather than to one another, whether my musketeer played first or last wasn't something I put too much thought in during apprentice expeditions. Well, now that I needed a bounty hunter or a houndmaster to mark a target for my musketeer or arbalist's most devastating attack to be truly efficient, I had to make sure that it was them that played first and not the musketeer. Say that my musketeer had a baseline speed higher than that of the bounty hunter, that meant that now I needed my bounty hunter to carry a trinket that would bump his speed above that of the musketeer in order to prepare a devastating attack for the enemy backline, which often is filled with all manner of nasties that will induce nightmarish amounts of stress, the kind of stress that tends to make you masochistic, sadistic, or just a bit of an abusive bully. The point of this video, if you don't want to actively endorse bullying within your adventuring parties, make sure you've got a firing squad lining their shots at the enemy backline at all times. Difficulty spike from the previous expeditions sparks much more of a challenge with these new expeditions, and I won't lie to you, when I encountered this it felt like a slap to the face. The new enemy types introduced and not the problem, no no, far from it, it's the familiar ones that had a problem, they are buffed so insanely much armed with the capability of doing nauseating amounts of health and stress damage in a very short span of time as little is over a single turn or two, but I thought I could handle it, judging from the few short expeditions I first tackled, which is why I decided I would attempt to get my grubby hands on the first of several of the highest quality trinkets in the game, the ancestral ones. My first few long champion level expeditions were really the point I realised how much more demanding the game had become. Demanding, it felt downright and fair, sadistic even, seeing some of my favourite longest serving adventurers be reduced to nothing in the span of a turn. Well, not nothing, I suppose they were reduced to a bunch of gravestones in my Hamlet's graveyard, but that still is not something you want to go home to, is it? It was a meat grinder in brutal and delusion of control over this game which was supposedly tactical, slipping away to reveal a marked lack of control, and worse than that, the deaths of several characters I had spent tens of hours levelling up and tens of thousands of gold in upgrades in terms of armour, weapons and skills. These deaths would have blatant disrespect of my time, and I finally felt like I had truly progressed towards besieging the darkest dungeon itself. After taking a few days long break, I went back into it, I had taken time to dink it over and… well, what were the most memorable moments I had? Hmm, let's see then. One of the eight bosses, the Swine God, nearly murdered my entire party for a mistake entirely of my own making. To explain what happened, I'll need to give you a bit of background first. At some point, during my experiences with the difficulty level, I finally noticed just how useful the highway man's repost ability is. Repost allows this dashing rogue to respond to any attack coming his way with an attack of his own. The highway man, buffed with sufficient amounts of melee damage and a hard chance to crit, is an absolute beast once the punches come rolling. With a few dodge buffs as well, as offered by classes such as the man at arms or the antiquarian, he'll deliver crit after crit with barely a scratch to show for it. That ability is useful in every feasible scenario I can tink of. Every scenario but one. And that one is, you guessed it, the bossbuffle with the Swine God. You see, this God of tits and swine is something of a mentally deficient beast, taking his order from the tiny but deadly Wilbur who marks the king's enemies for him. While I had forgotten in my infinite lack of wisdom was that killing Wilbur doesn t make the Swine God happy. In fact, it enrages him, and once he s enraged, he delivers ridiculously powerful attacks to the entire party, all of which have a very high chance of stunning. The fact that I survived that particular nastiness without any casualties makes me extremely lucky, if not for having alongside the highway man a leper who is without a doubt the most physically devastating character class you can have on your roster. I would have died horribly, horrendously, and I might as well have quit the game right then because I really liked that party. Another favorite moment of mine was when I nearly got partywiped while fighting the formless flesh. This was nearly at the end of the game, and I had allowed my recent successes over previous bosses in the Crimson Court's counters to get to my head. I thought I was immortal, you know, we re basically gods, and didn t spend too much time considering who would best do in my fight against the formless flesh. Not that losing three of my four characters was bad, at that point I truly had left caring about what happened far far behind me, and this had the added benefit of unlocking the lone survivor achievement I began worrying I would never get. It s an achievement you get for killing a boss with a one man left standing if it wasn t self-explanatory enough. The man of the hour, a flagellant who literally managed to bleed out the flesh with his techniques of ex-sanguination while he himself was perilously close to bleeding out. I particularly enjoyed listening to all the different boss entries, which finalized the Ancestors' myriad tales of how he managed to screw over just about every type of living being he met. Not a nice guy, my ancestor, till I could have guessed as much. I m a piece of work myself, you see. It was rewarding to at last unlock these pieces of the average puzzle. Annoying June s tailor performance is such an absolute joy to listen to. This truly is among the best examples of how much atmosphere can be injected by the right narrator into a title that doesn t necessarily have much of a story to it. And let s face it, the story here is a bare-bone excuse to go through this ridiculous gauntlet for a hundred hours or more and having fun with the exceptionally well-written one-liners makes that all too easy. But to return to the late game, I do think it borders on being tedious more than it should, for comfort s sake. More could have been done, perhaps, to make the game feel challenging in a way that doesn t also waste your time or give you the perception of wasting your time at any rate. At the end of the day, I do feel like with ample preparation and a careful team composition, a lot is in your control, but for a few in-game weeks there, I didn t. And that seeped away at the fun of it all and nearly made me reconsider doing this deep dive. The Crimson Curse is not only the name of the biggest piece of deals he released by Red Hook Studios, it also happens to be the most annoying disease that your characters can contract when attacked by gigantic blood thirsty mosquitoes. I absolutely loathe, loathe, loathe how having to do all the Crimson Curse supersedes everything else in the game. The reason? Blood Circus infest all of the estate zones over time. An indicator of just how flooded are the regions will be where the carriers of the Crimson Curse is on the right corner of the Expedition s menu. The more you ignore the exhausting boss maps that s involved probably a hundred rooms each, the more Blood Circus you ll end up having to face, which in turn means that before too long at all, no matter what level, your adventurers will be diseased blood craving lunatics, refusing to act stabbing others for a taste of blood and generally acting like the insane band of weirdos they usually are, but amped up on drugs. The Crimson Curse is a pain to manage. In all four stages, it weakens your resistance to bleed, blight and stun effects. It takes a percent of your maximum health away depending on whether you are diseased, craving the blood or wasting away for want of it. Unless you re in the Default Crimson Curse condition, chances are control of your character will occasionally be wrestled away in desperate search for the blood, which incidentally lowers the actual chances of finding blood. That is, as dungeons are explored, random characters will activate Curious before I ve had the opportunity to ensure the proper items are used to get the best loot possible. On and on this goes, it s almost as if the developers top to them themselves. Oh, what are the most annoying quirks an adventurer can get? Oh, here s an idea, let s stick all of them into one single, easily-transferable DZs. The boss battles themselves, though, are well designed and challenging in just the right way. The problem is that having to do five or more expeditions to get to the boss rooms wears you down. But in terms of design, as well as her place in the greater narratives of the estate, I thought the counters, the main antagonist in this DLC, shown. In her shift between different forms, delivering deadly attacks and debuffs, healing herself while seeping over the health bars of my characters, I will admit I felt a great sense of accomplishment at having managed to kill her on my first try, if barely. The battle that caused me the most grief has to be the one against the baron. Not only did I lose the most adventurers in the insane trek before I got to his room, but the first team I sent nearly got wiped off entirely. I think I managed to get nearly two full party wipes before I got him. That sure stung. Something else I love about this content update is the new classic introduced as part of the Crimson Curse, and of course it's all about blood, pain and agony. The Fludgeland is probably the most unique of the classes, because he works best when he is stressed out in a strike away from death. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Fludgeland is the best representation of the self-employed millennial. When he is on death's door, the Fludgeland gets buffed to her heaven. All the high quality Trinkets restricted to this class are all about greater resistance to death blows as well as higher damage, and unfortunately the Fludgeland isn't exactly immortal, even with these items on. The very first Fludgeland I leveled up all the way to champion received his death blow after two hits on death's door in the fight against the courtier's viscount. Oh sorry, viscount. There's also a fort boss that you can choose to beat up repeatedly for Crimson Court Trinkets after the Countess is defeated. It's a statue corrupted by the blood or some such thing, and I would most definitely categorise it as a mini-boss, compared to the insanity of the Baron, the Viscount and the Countess herself. The reward you'll get for repeatedly putting him over your knee and spanking him bloody red is a Crimson Court Trinket, which can be good if you really enjoy having disease characters laying around because otherwise the Trinkets are not all that effective or efficient. There is one more boss, the Fanatic, a madman who wanders through normal dungeons every once in a while with his own personalised stake to burn the disease done. That man dislikes the Crimson Curse nearly as much as I do, which makes me curious of one thing and one thing only. Whenever he is defeated he drops two vials of the Cure, the only thing in the game that can, you guessed it, cure infected players outside of defeating one of the three big bosses of the DLC up to the point you've defeated the Countess. Unfortunately, the cure doesn't make the one that drinks it immune to further infection down the line, so at the end of the day doesn't seem as valuable as I first thought it would be, but it does make me wonder. If he's got access to something like this, why not give it to the resident plague doctors in the Hamlet, see if they can produce a cauldron or two of it and make the infection an on-issue. Ah, game logic. Almost as twisted as a Fanatics logic. But what do I know? It's not like I'm cult leader or something. At the end of the day, however, the Crimson Curse experience was definitely the least fun I've had over my time with this game. That's largely due to the fact of being forced to cut short any personal goals that I might have placed for myself in order to deal with a major epidemic of diseased characters weakened by the Crimson Curse. In a game where player choice on several tactical and strategic layers is key, this piece of content more often than not took that choice away rather than add to it. The fact that the titular disease acts like an affliction, i.e. what your characters most often get when they reach a stress level of 100, means that you'll get penalized whether there are characters who are craving the blood or for those who've just drank a dose. The most jarring example in both cases whether blood thirsty or craving, there's a chance that your characters will attack others in the party. Imagine how frustrating it is to have a character on death's door only for a blood thirsty character to finish them off. And don't even get me started on all the characters that I have lost just because my reserves of the blood got extremely low and they decided to desecrate away and die. One last point to add. The trophies from these bosses are absolutely useless. I wasn't happy with the Crimson Curse. Its visuals, new narrative elements, music and flagellant were sweet, absolutely. But most other things were beyond draining and the fact that the main content of Darkest Dungeon becomes subservient to the DLC is an enormous minus to my mind. A better alternative I told is the colour of Madness DLC which is an endless mode with an interesting aesthetic of its own. Although much smaller, I do believe it's more enjoyable for itself contained nature. I would also say that once I play the Crimson Curse, the Darkest Dungeon, which I will not be going in-depth about, is a lot easier. All too easy in fact. It's not challenging at all compared to the insane amount of challenge that I face in the Cauchy Art. And this I'm afraid is where my critique comes to an end. I did originally mean and want to talk about the Darkest Dungeon itself but since all my footage has gone haywire, I've decided there's just no good way of going in-depth without it, not the way I'd have liked to. And going through another few dozens of hours just to redo these videos, that's not something I have the time for. I've always treasured a few memories, how I had to sacrifice two of my characters to defeat the endgame boss, or how a couple of Elvish cultists giving me the finger nearly had me foaming at them out. It's a long story, but a story that will ultimately remain untold. Thank you for watching. Please don't forget to subscribe, like this video, share. And if you want plenty more content, follow me on Twitter, WordPress, Facebook. See you next time. Bye. Don't forget to ring that bell.