Darkest Dungeon Early Game Review

I have a long and frustrating history with "Rogue-like" games. I love them and I suck at them in equal measure as I mentioned in my iNethack2 review. That being the case, of course I was interested in Red Hook Studio's Steam early access game, Darkest Dungeon. The game started life as a Kickstarter campaign, getting fully funded and delivering.

Darkest Dungeon is a role-playing dungeon-crawler in which you try to reclaim your ancestral home and lands around it from the corruption and evil that has taken root. You do this by recruiting heroes and going off on weekly missions getting ever closer to the next hurdle in your path to your ultimate goal. Simple, right?

Where Darkest Dungeon shines is how it takes the simple dungeon-delving premise and twists it up and makes it brutally hard. Think Lovecraft madness/mental trauma mixed in with X-Com's permanent death along with the base management. Or maybe it is a bit like 10000000 where every run gets you some resources you can use to upgrade your home base (the Hamlet) before going out again. But I get ahead of myself.

Darkest Dungeon takes the usual risk-reward system found in most RPGs and ramps it up to 10. Every time your adventurers go out on a mission, they become stressed. That stress can be caused by their encounters, other party members or just the build up of being used multiple times and leads to them collecting phobias, maladies, diseases and any mess of issues that will make them less effective until they have a chance to rest. Resting and treatment can't take away all of the effects. One of my characters is paranoid, which affects some of her stats, while another became so despondent on a trip to the ruins that he started to make defeatist comments during every battle that stressed out the rest of the party. Based on this and the limited resources available to you, a balance has to be made between taking "fresh" party members out or bringing along a higher level one who is a little bit whacky.

That risk vs reward is built upon by choosing what materials you want to take with you on your mission, more food and torches might be good. What if your characters are hit by monsters and start bleeding? Better stock up on some bandages, etc. All of those items will take pack slots from potential treasures you find on the mission that you want to bring back with you. Then you have to make the choice between upgrading buildings that help relieve stress or those that upgrade your characters' weapons, skills or armor. It's all a set of trade-offs that you will get to work through as you play Darkest Dungeon.

The game-play itself can be managed with mouse or keyboard only and the combat is turn-based with your characters taking turns against the monsters you encounter based on an initiative-like system. You can't rely that you will always get to go first. To make matters more difficult, each being in a battle lines up X X X X vs Y Y Y Y with each position being important. Some of your attack skills will only work from certain positions and can only hit certain other ones on the other team. Have a ranged attack? You probably want to place that character far to the left of your line and they will be able to hit the middle to far right of the enemy's line. This gives you strategic options in how you compose your team so that you can best wipe out the enemies you face. I have found that having a healer, someone who can stun the front ranks of the enemy, someone who can stun the back ranks of the enemy and a tank out front is the best at early levels. What options you will have will depend on the characters that arrive via coach to the Hamlet for you to recruit.

All of this fun is presented in a moody hand-drawn-esque style that is great. The music adds to the macabre feel of the game - like you are playing a horror role-playing game. The only drawback I have seen so far is that the combat and missions do get a little repetitive. Though that is offset by the tactical management of your resources and the depth of options you have at your disposal as you take your characters off to their death, which as I mentioned is permanent.

If you like Rogue-like perma-death games with town upgrades, resource and character management where you have to min-max your way to success, which can fall from your grasp at any moment, then you should be playing Darkest Dungeon right now! I give Darkest Dungeon 4.5 horror-filled screaming adventurer Mick Happies. I wonder if there is any room at the bar for my tippler of a jester?

Armada Review

For those who have read this blog for a long time, you might remember that I loved Ready Player One by Ernest Cline when I wrote my review for it back in 2011. Effortlessly mixing pop culture with a futuristic scavenger hunt plot, that book was great. I have definitely been waiting for the movie to come out and I was glad to hear that there was a second book by Mr. Cline for me to try, Armada.

Armada is not a sequel to Ready Player One, it is a standalone novel set on Earth in the near future. In Armada, the story is told by Zack Lightman, a high school student and world-class player of the game Armada. In the Armada game and its companion game, Terra Firma, Zack (and millions of people around the world) fly drone fighter planes or drone robots and use them to try and stop a fictional alien invasion of Earth. Things get interesting from there.

Armada is dripping with references to science fiction video games, movies, TV shows and books just like Ready Player One. In the first chapter alone, you will lose count of how many nods there are to (if you are a certain age) the games you loved growing up. (Where is Missile Command on my iPad? Did I miss it in the app store?).  To go along with that, you have the typical hero's journey going on here. Zack is a kid with only one parent, having lost his dad when he was very little, who has skills but little direction as to what he wants to do with himself and over the course of the book is plucked out of his comfort zone and forced to step up and achieve his potential.

Armada is a fun book. Mr. Cline knows how to weave the nostalgia and geekery into the broader story and while some of the plot twists are telegraphed a little too much, they aren't disappointing when they happen as you think they might. Not as unique a story as Ready Player One, Armada still satisfies and is a fine addition to Mr. Cline's growing body of work. If you like video games, science fiction tropes and a fun story, go get a copy of Armada right now. We may even get a movie of it like we may for Ready Player One. Armada gets 4 Mick Happies. Now I am off to play a video game.