 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, irradiant 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 my, some of my other favourite games of late, The Witcher 3 a hundred hours, Shadow of War, 50 hours, and now Assassin's Creed, 65 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, and the four types of relics with which buildings are upgraded, portraits, crests, deeds and busts. 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 Helene 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 characters 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 on the 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 realised 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 madly annoying to seriously debilitating, depending entirely on, once again, randomness and personal horrors are 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 any one 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 a spot for 12 items, it's something of a mess. For reference, crests stack in 12s, while busts indeed stack in 6s 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, an 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 with more experienced adventurers who come in with better gear and access to all combat skills level they are recruited at. While you'll never recruit a character above resolve level 3, 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 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. Thank you so much for watching this video, if you enjoyed it please click that like button, subscribe to the glory of me, ring that bell button to get notifications whenever I post a new video. Mori soon to come, a lot more hopefully. Not as much as I would like, I've been also playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey, recently checked my recording, apparently my computer really cannot handle recording that game and the 200 gigabytes of recordings I have and now shit. Oh well, bye!