 The Crimson Curse is not only the name of the biggest piece of DLC 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 circuit is infested all of the estate zones over time. An indicator of just how flooded other regions will be with 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 involve probably a hundred rooms each, the more bloodsuckers 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 Curios 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 talk to 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 disease. 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 off 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 calls 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 class I 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 mylennial. 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. 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 courtyards Viscount. Oh sorry, Viscount. There's also four balls 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 spang him, 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 it 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 a non-issue. Ah, game logic, almost as twisted as a fanatics logic. But what do I know? It's not like I'm a cult leader or something. At the end of the day, however, the Crimson Court 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 had lost just because my reserves of the blood got extremely low and they decided to desiccate away and die. One last point to art. 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 its self-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 amounts 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'll always treasure 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.