RPG

Darkest Dungeon Early Access Review: Where is My Mind?

This is an early access review and reflects my opinions on the game at the time of its current release. Issues I talk about in the review my be changed in the ‘final release’. However, it is currently on sale for money so it’s open to criticism.

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PLATFORM: PC – Windows ¦ DEVELOPER: Red Hook Studios

PUBLISHER: Red Hook Studios ¦ Release Date: 3/2/2015

There is something disturbingly masochistic about Darkest Dungeon. I don’t usually say that about games that are, by design, excruciatingly punishing. I usually crave the adversity offered in games like X-Com or Dark Souls. There is something to be found in the small victories you achieve in them, a satisfaction born of the pain. They are to me, the equivalent of what a leather gloved smack on the bum might be to someone with a proclivity for that sort of thing. Darkest Dungeon is not so reciprocal, it’s more like someone hooking a car battery up to your nipples – there’s no payoff, it just hurts you until you burn out.

Darkest Dungeon is a 2D sidescrolling dungeon crawler with a strong emphasis on crisis management. It’s hard, and it goes to great lengths to ensure that the player will always be on the back foot, struggling to survive, let alone achieve victory. The core premise of the game is in how the various recruitable heroes cope with the stress of these overwhelming odds. As they attempt increasingly difficult incursions into the dungeons, the various stresses of adventure such as combat, fatigue and hunger will gradually eat away at their sanity, eventually leading to a catastrophic meltdown if left unchecked.

It’s a strong idea that is thematically well implemented. Red Hook Studios have done a fantastic job in establishing a tone and making every aspect of their game work toward that focus. The bleak Lovecraftian lore and grimy Mike Mignola inspired artwork compliment the games systems to create a unified atmosphere of futility. It’s without question one of the most artistically accomplished Kickstarter games ever made. The problem is that it’s not very fulfilling to play.

In their quest to make such a brutally difficult game, Red Hook Studios seems to have neglected the thing that makes difficult games so rewarding – actually rewarding the player.

Ironically the problem stems from the same ideas that make Darkest Dungeon interesting in the first place, the stress/affliction system and hero traits. Heroes in Darkest Dungeon come with both positive and negative traits for example, a crusader may have the positive trait of being more resistant to stress when fighting certain types of enemies but have the negative trait of fearing others. He will also attain new traits by delving into the dungeons, engaging in combat and undertaking stressful actions. In theory this should work in conjunction with the stress system to create risk/reward scenarios and influence tactical play. However, in practice it doesn’t function so evenly.

Nearly every action in Darkest Dungeon adds to a character’s stress level, or influences their traits in a negative way, with no positives to act as a counter balance. It’s ridiculously lopsided, even successful completion of a quest has the potential to punish you with nothing but debilitating effects. During my time with the game the negative traits of my heroes began to far outweigh their positive ones within a few expeditions, to the point that they became pretty worthless. The only way to remedy this was to let them convalesce at one of the de-stressing facilities or commit them to the sanatorium in town. This not only forces them to sit out on the next adventure but also acts as a constant drain on your resources, which are the only tangible reward for completing quests. This is a huge problem as character stress goes up way to fast, meaning that every time I completed a quest I ended up spending my reward on mitigating the damage done in pursuit of success, souring any sense of accomplishment and slowing my progress. It was akin to pulling off a successful bank job, only to have to spend 95% of the take paying off the cost of the tools used to break into the vault.

It’s a frustrating cycle, but it may well have been tolerable if there was some satisfaction to be found in the dungeon crawling alone. Sadly, this too failed to capture the essence of what it is that can be so rewarding about difficult games. This is because Darkest Dungeon’s difficulty mainly comes from the chaotic nature of the game, not how the player navigates or interacts with it. For example, the combat in itself is not difficult. It’s a fairly simple turn based system where positioning and party make up are more important than gear. You form a team of four heroes for each adventure – set their positions and the skills that best suit the team’s synergy then send them into the abyss. It’s nuanced enough that it provides multiple options for party set ups, but it’s not hard to identify the more useful skills and classes. The ‘challenge’ comes when the game decides an enemy is going to critical hit for 20 of a character’s 28 hit points and cause the party’s stress levels to skyrocket. There is no planning for or remedying the situation – player choice is not a factor, the game simply rolled a dice and it came up fuck you.

This kind of randomly enforced difficulty is not uncommon for games designed with a high ceiling for success – FTL was also, at times, guilty of screwing over the player in unforeseen ways. However, the difference between FTL and Darkest Dungeon is that the induced failures are not swift and decisive – they instead work to perpetuate the slow and numbing gameplay cycle created by its interlinked systems.

Conclusion

Darkest Dungeon denied me any sense of accomplishment by locking me into a meaningless cycle. A cycle it perpetuates by failing to establish a sense of progression and tainting success. This is ultimately what made Darkest Dungeon such an unfulfilling experience. I tried so hard to love it, I picked it up again so many times after walking away in frustration, because I truly believe in the idea and wanted it to surprise me, but eventually I got tired of spinning my wheels. Einstein defines madness as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – perhaps to love Darkest Dungeon, a game so fascinated with insanity and rooted in repetition, one must truly be mad.

Child of Light Review: Frankly, Mr. Shankly

PLATFORM: Windows – PC ¦ DEVELOPER: Ubisoft Montréal ¦ PUBLISHER: Ubisoft

RELEASE DATE: 29/4/2014

The phrase ‘If looks could kill’ springs to mind when reflecting on my time spent with Ubisoft’s ‘indie’ RPG, Child of Light. Aptly so, as in invoking that cliché I find myself rather relishing the swift death that never came upon first taking in its gorgeous visuals. At least then I wouldn’t have been privy to the paint-drying drudgery and misguided attempts at charm that lay within.

Child of Light is an insidiously average game in that its mediocrity is efficiently masked by the phenomenal art direction. The pastiche storybook environments and character designs are filled with a charm that betrays the amount of care and effort that has gone into their crafting. Sadly, the visual elements are the only part of the game with any real substance – everything else feels, superficial.

The most notable example of this, with no surprise, is in the story. Princess Aurora is dead – stricken down in her sleep by an illness, vaguely characterised as a ‘chill’. However, Instead of passing on to the great beyond, she wakes atop an altar in the mysterious land of Lemuria. Unsure of where she is, or why she is there Aurora, with the help of a new friend, Igniculus the firefly seeks to find a way home. On their journey they will make new friends and together overcome the malevolent creatures of darkness that stand in their way. The narrative structure is fairy-tale simple by design – in keeping with the storybook aesthetic – the hook, and subsequently, the problems come from the stories delivery. Everything, from dialogue to expository collectibles is told in rhyming verse.

At first this seems an interesting and original way of exploring a game narrative. However, after a short time it becomes clear that this is nothing more than a desperate attempt to cover up inadequate design with ‘quirk’ and ‘charm’. The use of poetic verse as a way to make an otherwise simplistic tale more interesting would be fine, but it is executed so poorly. The writing flip-flops between rhyming schemes on a whim, showing no care or consideration to structure or flow, the role of syllables is almost always ignored, leading to clumsy, stunted rhymes, and the pronunciation of words in a few of the narrated sections are broken to fit in a way that would make even Kanye West blush.

Worse still, since the entire cast speaks in broken stanzas it’s impossible to know them as characters. No one has a voice of their own, they stumble all over each other, finishing each other’s sentences in a desperate attempt to fit whichever rhyming scheme is host to the current verse and at the same time come across as whimsical. Ironically, it just comes off as flat, clunky and uninteresting. Child of Light relies entirely on the ‘idea’ of poetry to make it appear charming rather than using actual poetic technique to present an engaging narrative.

Mechanically Child of Light feels just as half-hearted – there is absolutely no fun to be had wandering this wonderfully illustrated world – traversal is a senseless chore. This is due to one silly design choice which renders any kind of level design utterly pointless. Very early on Aurora is granted the power of flight, meaning that she can go anywhere – all the time – with nothing to hinder her progress. From this point on the environments may as well be completely flat. With full access to everywhere in the game, there is no need for exploration, backtracking or platforming. All that is left is to drift from one ungratifying plot point to the next.

As a matter of fact all of the systems are similarly revealed to you at the beginning of the game. There is no gear to obtain or upgrade and you cannot customize the characters in any meaningful way. Even the combat, the only truly RPG element to the game, reveals all of its secrets from the outset.

The battle system is a pretty faithful approximation of the one found in Grandia II, first released for the Dreamcast at the turn of the century. It’s a turn based system where characters stack actions on a timeline that runs along the bottom of the screen, the interesting thing is that all actions have a start-up time and if an enemy is attacked during this period it will cancel their action and knock them back on the timeline. Of course this can happen to you as well but it is a fairly gratifying risk reward system with enough nuance to be entertaining for a short time. It’s a solid system, as it was over a decade ago – the problem is that it doesn’t do anything original with the concept, nor does it develop over the course of the game. The rules of combat at the start are exactly the same as they are at the end. Again, simplicity is fine but when there is no variety it lacks a sense of progression, and without progression it’s just kind of…boring.

Conclusion

Child of Light is a disappointment. What at first looks to be a beautiful and charming blend of Japanese and Western design turns out to be nothing more than a façade – no amount of artistic talent can distract from what is ultimately a hollow experience. Mechanically unambitious, and poorly conceived, who knew Ubisoft could write such bloody awful poetry?

The Banner Saga Review: The Beautiful Struggle

PLATFORM: Windows – PC ¦ DEVELOPER: Stoic ¦ PUBLISHER: Versus Evil

RELEASE DATE: 14/1/2014

Time is the enemy. Fighting time is as futile as fighting air – you cannot win, so why try? The Banner Saga is a fight against time, and sure enough I constantly felt like I was losing. So why did I keep trying? Perhaps it was my innate distaste of fatalism, or perhaps it was simply that losing has never looked so beautiful.

9

Created by new developer Stoic, The Banner Saga displays a level of visual polish to be revered by indie and mainstream developers alike. This is impressive but not entirely surprising, as while Stoic is a young studio, it is a studio made up of experienced pros, the likes of which have worked for titans such as Bioware, Retro Studios and…NASA?

As would be expected from a team with such an impressive résumé, the world of The Banner Saga is artistically very well realised. It is gorgeous, and the world is dripping with rich, genuinely interesting lore.

Set in an unforgiving snow scape, inhabited by nomadic Vikings, immortal giants called Varl and shambling monstrosities known as Dredge, the story of The Banner Saga is understandably bleak. The main goal is to lead a caravan of warriors and clansmen to safe refuge – managing resources to avoid starvation and fatigue, while simultaneously attempting to outmanoeuvre the ever-present threat of the Dredge. Times are hard, and hard decisions must be made to survive. Amidst this strife it is difficult to perceive a happy ending, which is fortunate, because there is no happy ending. The Banner Saga is a game about struggle, death, loss and resource management.

2

This point is driven home early. Unfortunately, The Banner Saga fails to deliver on the promise of what could have been an interesting exercise in choice based gameplay. Your decisions, which have a direct impact on who lives and dies, never seem to bear the weight of their consequences. As a result it becomes too easy to switch off emotionally. There are several reasons for this, but the most obvious are the seemingly arbitrary text-based decisions you are required to make when guiding the caravan. These often have something to do with rationing supplies or choosing whether or not to face an enemy head on. But on some occasions they can lead to the permanent death of your battle units – outside of battle. In a game about risk management this would usually be acceptable, but the flavour text describing a possible life and death scenario often does not reflect the impact your decision can have. As a result the experience as a whole comes across as random, like a choose-your-own adventure novel – you picked option C, turn to page 37 to die. The way your heroes can be so casually tossed aside in a text prompt makes them feel like an expendable resource – which is no-doubt the point. However, the same can be said of losses to the caravan. Clansmen, fighters and Varl can all die due to a lack of supplies or during confrontations with Dredge, but the only indicator of this ‘tragic loss’ is that a number at the top of the screen changes. Any obligatory guilt felt from a decision that caused deaths fades almost immediately, as there is no real consequence other than a smaller tally of clansmen and a slight blow to morale. The numbers in your caravan ultimately don’t matter – they don’t contribute anything substantial – so why care? In the end the only number that counts is your renown.

Renown is The Banner Saga’s answer to resource management. It acts as a universal currency – used for everything, from buying food and equipment to levelling up your characters. Because of this, there will never be enough to go around. It is impossible to keep everyone fed and at the same time keep your battle units well equipped. This is obviously an attempt by Stoic to add a sense of consequence to your actions. However, when said consequences are so farcical, there is no reason not to sacrifice lives to be better equipped for combat. And you will want to be better equipped for combat.

7

Time not spent in dialogue windows, or managing your caravan will be spent fighting in tense, deliberately paced encounters. Opposite to the story, which fails to ever establish a sense of weight to your decisions, the combat insists on it from the very beginning. In battle, every decision matters. Careful positioning and attention to the turn order are essential to achieving victory, and the AI won’t hesitate to punish players who don’t consider these factors – even on normal difficulty. To add further challenge, defeating enemies isn’t as simple as reducing an opponent’s health to zero. All units have a health meter, which doubles as their strength, dictating how much damage they can inflict, as well as an armour rating which must first be lowered to do any substantial damage to their health. This makes for some interesting tactical opportunities, as it is necessary to decide whether to go after an enemy’s strength or armour as the situation dictates. Overall there is a more considered mentality in the design of the combat that harkens back to unforgiving strategy games of old. It has a feel of permanence that makes it a far deeper and more gratifying experience than the story.

5

CONCLUSION

Stoic have created a world with a wonderful sense of tone and place, and it looks absolutely stunning – I just wish I wanted to spend more time in it. The lore and art are both rich and well-conceived. And the combat has a level of depth that once fully comprehended makes for a rewarding diversion from the narrative. However, the story itself lacks finesse. It never made me feel the weight of my decisions, and so I couldn’t help but feel emotionally disconnected – by the end of the game, I just wanted it to be over. For patient gamers, or those that need to scratch the itch that only a strategy game can, there is something here – a beautiful, shaky journey of promise. But for those seeking something more, perhaps this is a Saga better left untold.