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Showing posts from December, 2021

Darkest Dungeon — forcing to play as intended

I first completed a run on Darkest Dungeon on Darkest difficulty sometime in 2020, 4 years after buying it sometime in 2016. I had attempted more than a dozen runs over the years with maybe up to 100 hours but couldn’t complete it until recently. DD is an interesting game where unless you played it as designed on an important dimension, it’s hard to actually complete a run. And the design being to treat the heroes as a commodity that you let die — just recruit more from the cart! (You can revive heroes at lower difficulty levels but at a high cost and infrequently.) This may be a slightly unfair thing to say about DD as my winning run had the lowest number of dead heroes; I just did more math in fights and played much more conservatively by exiting dungeons mid-instance when it started to look sideways. Even so a few of my starting heroes definitely went to the grave and I just had to trudge on with “the bigger plan”. It felt unnatural to an RPG player like me because in the genre perm