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 permadeath is very rare. On mobile gacha games where heroes are a commodity and they “die” through fusion, you don’t feel like you’ve failed because fusion moves you forward. Plus, the horror and survival underpinnings of DD create attachment as you feel as though you have shared trauma with your heroes.

My question over the years of failing to complete DD was — is this good design? A game that refuses to let you win unless you play it as intended specifically against established genre norms and player psychology.

It’s a dumb question of sorts, of course you need to play by the rules. No one completes Mario side scrollers by running to the left. The uncomfortable feeling I had here was more that I was playing something that felt like an RPG (DD arguably is one but the element is subservient to it as a rogue-like survival crawler) and you had to treat your party as expendable meat to some extent if you wanted to win. 

Another way of thinking about it would be if DD would be a better game without that dynamic. My gut feeling is it wouldn’t be, because the stakes are too low then. The permadeath contributes to the tension and mood, it fits with the overall design. 

So if it fits but doesn’t feel good how do we solve this? Some ideas:

1. Have permadeath happen much earlier and at a higher frequency early game so players expect this dynamic. I had many runs where the first perma happened after a dozen hours and it was a fairly high-leveled hero. I felt like I failed to protect my party, although from the designer’s POV this was perfectly normal. The game taught me too late.

2. Honor the permadead heroes and have their demise drive you forward — not back. Maybe the dead heroes leave a dying gasp asking for you to avenge them. Maybe the enemy that killed them will have a bounty tag on it. This way their deaths are not cheapened, keeping the stakes high, but also become tied to the way forward.

For what it’s worth, I booted up the game again yesterday on the plane to try and start another run, but I was still bothered by the permadead design and switched to Slay the Spire (again) instead.