Video Gamers Podcast - Gaming Quick Takes - Darkest Dungeon

Episode Date: June 3, 2023

From gaming hosts Josh and Paul, we're bringing you even more gaming content each week.  Gaming Quick Takes are a short series of game recommendations, funny moments, off-topic chat and more. A small dose of gaming to brighten your Saturdays! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Hey guys, welcome to this Quick Take episode. We're so excited to have you here with us. In the past, these Quick Take episodes actually were only available to those who financially supported the show through Apple subscriptions and Patreon. But due to popular demand, we have decided to

shake up the perks for our supporters and we'll be releasing these quick takes on Saturdays to everyone, giving you all some extra free content that was previously unavailable to the public. And these quick takes are a little more laid back and they're hosted by just one of us so sit back relax and enjoy this quick take episode shazam boom hey everybody it's josh and i'm back with another Gaming Quick Takes episode. I've got another great game recommendation for you this time. I'm going to be talking about a game that I spent a lot of time playing, and it got its hooks into me instantly.

I had a lot of fun with it. That's a game called Darkest Dungeon. Now, this is a fairly popular game. You may have heard of it. Chances are maybe you never looked into it. You just have heard it. You know that it's a rogu fairly popular game. You may have heard of it. Chances are maybe you never looked into it. You just have heard it. You know that it's a roguelike game. But I can tell you after sinking many hours into this game that there is an awful lot to like about it.

I think the price is on point and it offers a lot to a lot of people. I'm going to start off by reading the synopsis on this just to give you an idea of what it's about. Darkest Dungeon is a challenging gothic roguelike turn-based RPG about the psychological stresses of adventuring. Recruit, train, and lead a team of flawed heroes against unimaginable horrors, stress, disease, and the ever-encroaching dark. Can you keep your heroes together when all hope is lost? Okay, so I'm going to just kind of jump in on this. I'll tell you right now that the overall Steam score on this game is a 90% out of 93,000 reviews. That should tell you that this game is very well received by a lot of people. Now, what do you do in Darkest Dungeon? Well, that synopsis kind of touched on it in a very broad sense. What you do is you recruit a party of adventurers. You take that party of adventurers down into a dungeon, and they do what adventurers do. They slay monsters, they find treasure, and they come back with it stronger than ever before. Except adventuring is not always roses and ponies, right?

It's difficult. And sometimes as an adventurer, you come up against things that are terrible to look upon. Or maybe one of your teammates gets taken out by a monster and you just witness their death. really neat thing about Darkest Dungeon is that it basically kind of feeds off of that premise that your adventurers are under an immense amount of stress. So that is going to take its toll on them. So as you go out into this dungeon and as you're adventuring and as you're killing monsters and you're finding great loot and new armor and new weapons and things like that, and your adventurers are leveling up, terrible things will happen. Adventurers will die. Sometimes you might come across a huge monster that's super scary, and so your adventurers panic. Maybe one of them

goes insane and starts attacking the rest of your party. Maybe one of them just breaks and it cannot adventure anymore. And that's where Darkest Dungeon really sets itself apart. You are going to encounter a lot of horrible things in your time in the dungeon. Your adventurers are going to bear the brunt of that. And so the neat aspect of this is as you take them out adventuring and they level up, they get stronger. And so you're going to form that team that you really want to use, but they're going to have issues. Maybe one of them becomes an alcoholic. And when you want to go out adventuring the next time, he's drunk in the bar and refuses to join you. Maybe you had an adventure that completely panicked down in the dungeon and went

insane. And the only way to cure him is to lock him up in the insane asylum until he can get treatment and then return to adventuring. Sometimes an adventurer might be really greedy and they're selfish. And so when that loot pops out from the monster and you wanted to give it to your wizard, maybe the warrior is greedy and stole the loot. And it's these sorts of things that make Darkest Dungeon amazing. It's these sorts of things that make it unpredictable and really, really set it apart from anything else in this genre. Now, there are a lot of classes that you can pick and choose in Darkest Dungeon. So the party composition matters a lot. So that's a lot

of fun to kind of play around with. Do you go with the Trinity of the tank and the healer and the damage dealers? Maybe you go with ranged people and melee people and things like that. The way the combat works is you have your four adventurers on the left side of the screen. You have your however many number of monsters on the right side of the screen. And each adventurer has different skills that they can use. Maybe it's an AoE effect where it will hit all of the monsters. Maybe you can only attack the front two monsters. So positioning does come into play in this game and in the combat. And then it's basically just the back and forth. There is a lot of strategy in the combat. Some monsters are very, very tanky and protect the people behind them. So you have to figure

out a way to either try to burn them down or maybe use an ability that pulls the guys in the back to the front of the party to where they're more susceptible to your melee fighters and things like that. Combat plays a forefront in Darkest Dungeon. That is really what a lot of this game is about. And it is spot on. There's so many options. There's so much skills that you can get, equipment that you can use. As your characters level up, they certainly become stronger. But if a hero dies, that hero is dead, and they are removed from your party forever. This is where the roguelike nature of Darkest Dungeon comes in. There is nothing that is quite as sad as building up a very strong party of the perfect classes that you really like and work together and then coming across a random boss fight in the middle of a dungeon to where it

wipes out your entire party and now all of your heroes are dead and you've got to kind of start over with the next batch of heroes that's behind them that hopefully you've been leveling up a little while. So this is again where the roguelike nature comes from. It is a lot of fun, but understand what you're getting yourself into. You are going to lose adventurers. You are going to fail. You're going to lose those characters that you spent a lot of time building up. Now, where does the permanent progression come in? As you adventure and your heroes level up and you get gold and experience and things like that,

you can unlock new things back at the town, which acts like your hub in this game. Maybe you can build up a tavern to where new heroes will visit more often, and you can recruit new heroes. Maybe you can build up the tavern to where they can de-stress, and their stress levels will go down before the next adventure. So you're not starting off half crazy and things like that. But there is that neat hub area that you spend a lot of time building up and expanding and improving upon that makes the new adventures stronger as they join your party and so on and so forth. This game is difficult. You're going to fail a lot. The boss

fights are difficult and impressive the graphics have one of the neatest kind of gothic looks if you showed me any screenshot of darkest dungeon i would know what game it is instantly because the graphics just really fit the bill in this game uh darkest dungeon 2 i think is in development if it's not actually already released already it may be in early access right now, but I'm pretty excited for that one. If you're a fan of roguelike games, if you're a fan of turn-based RPG combat, if you like a very strong graphical presence, if you like the aspect of adventurers going crazy and becoming overcome with fear or insanity. Or every character has a weird negative trait,

like the selfish aspect to where they steal loot. Or there's a lot of these different negative traits as well that come into play. It's just a really neat mechanic. It's a really neat game. Highly recommend it for people that are looking for that next roguelike to play. Currently on Steam, it's $24.99.

This game came out in 2016. I would imagine you can find it for cheaper or on sale. I think in the $20 price point, it's a no-brainer. There is a lot of time to be had playing this game. But just like I said, it is not easy. It is a roguelike. Know what you're getting yourself into before you pick this up. But it is a strong recommend for me. I've had a lot of fun playing Darkest Dungeon. All right, that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoy that game

recommendation. If you've played it and you want to chat, head on over to our Discord server. I'd love to talk about some of the fun that can be had in that game or maybe why you're excited for Darkest Dungeon 2. If you haven't checked it out, look up some gameplay footage. It is very highly regarded. Like I said, it's a 90% overall on Steam. There's a lot of fun to be had here. All right, that's it for me. I will see you all on the next Quick Takes. Bye-bye, everybody.