Darkest Dungeon Catch All

I was able to upgrade my KS Tier from Nomad thanks to Red Hook. I finally was able to play last night. I knew I liked the core concept, art style, music, and the creepy narration going in; however after experiencing it, alone in a dark room (btw the only way this game should be played) I feel the $20 was very well spent.

Overall the game is pretty difficult and the RNG is pretty unforgiving. Things can snowball pretty quickly which cause me to restart 4-5 times due to the sheer losses (once I barely made it out of the Tutorial with a Crusader on Death's Door). I didn't find out about the retreat button nor the abort mission button until after the session.

If you enjoy difficult RPGs, gloomy art styles, Vincent Price-esque narration, and gothic horror, you'll want to experience this game.

Nooo! Demiurge the Crusader and DemyX the Harrion both fell to the nefarious machinations of the Necromancer's Apprentice! The leper, Jonman and Clover the Grey managed to escape, mostly intact. Their staggering retreat back to camp coincides with the arrival of my first Grave Robber - a grinning, wide-eyed fiend that goes by "Boog Teh Woog"...

Seriously, that Necromancer guy is kicking my backside at the moment.
And he's the first boss!

Loving this game

I played way too much of it last night and subsequently slept through my alarm this morning. I haven't slept through an alarm in years. Suffice it to say, I think I connect with this game on a deep level. I love everything about it. Hopefully they put it on the Vita so I can take it on my commute.

Just to prove it's still early access I get a crash to desktop whenever using the "leeches" skill on someone while camping. Would be interested in seeing if it can be duplicated by anyone else of it it's just a random thing on my end. Luckily it autosaves all the time so no progress was lost.



The Necromancer's Apprentice lay dead at their feet. Avenging their fallen bretheren, the experienced squad lead by Dee the Barbarian and backed up by the pistol of the Highwayman, Elysium and the mysterious mystery magic of Senior Parallax took down the wretched fiend in deadly combat. T'was the final member that dealt the killing blow - Garion the 33rd did his extended family proud, his bladed rope cleaving that foul depraved monstrosities head from it's shoulders...

Insofar as it makes sense to have favourite classes in this game, I'm really enjoying the Grave Robber so far. Not only does she look completely badass, she has some really interesting class mechanics based on party placement.

Lead Developer of this was interviewed on CBC radio Vancouver. Was really cool hear some mainstream exposure. Guy came across well spoken and sold the ideas in the game excellently. Definitely is an earl access game I'll be following.

This seems to be a good overview of the game. I learned a lot.

Starting to get the hang of this with a couple decent runs and no real problems; at least the easy missions are now actually becoming easier. However, I can't figure out how to cure afflictions, or can't you? The sanitarium will allow me to remove negative quirks, but my vestal is afflicted with paranoia and I can't figure out how to remove that if it's possible.

Otherwise the only solution seems to be to dismiss her (which, incidentally, I highly recommend to do rather than pay for expensive treatments for sub-optimal heroes, at least at the beginning when money is very tight and you haven't upgraded treatments to become cheaper yet. I only want to keep the vestal as she has both heals and some good positive quirks).

Yay! Got my first level 3 character - Dee the Barbarian. A couple of others are pretty close as well. Things get much, MUCH easier once you start upgrading their gear so that seems to be a priority. If I'm careful I can get through pretty much any 'green' mission without getting anywhere near a full stress meter on event the newbie characters,

Outlandish wrote:


Those should fade after you make them rest in the Inn/Chapel enough I think. You might need to find their "ideal" spot though, not sure if that matters or not.

* oh, interesting - characters refuse to do missions that are beneath their level. My level 3 mercs now refuse to take part in the second 'green' boss mission. That means I can't just send in an over-levelled team to wipe the floor with an early boss after leveling up in regular missions. Cool. I think.

pyxistyx wrote:


Thanks, it did indeed fade after time spent recuperating; not sure on the ideal spot as it happened first try but most of my roster seem to have only one place they'll go to recuperate anyway. Seems to be a very common negative quirk, to the point where getting 2 of those happens frequently and then you can't recuperate anywhere until you visit the sanitarium. Frankly it feels a bit too common; hopefully it'll get toned down a bit eventually.

I'm sure there's a lot that needs a good balancing, but I am so monumentally impressed with the state of the game. I was expecting far worse/incomplete from Early Access. Thought I'd put a couple hours in and set it aside till final release and now I'm worried I'll overplay and be done with it before it actually comes out.

Had a full-party wipe last night after I got stubborn about trying just one more room (looking for a third of three religious artifacts) and I went in with just three party members, two at low health. Huge, huge mistake. On the other hand, after a quick, successful run this morning, I was able to level up two of my squad. Feels good!

I was almost in disbelief when I briefly couldn't find this catch-all. Glad it's here!

Well I've only put in about 90 minutes into DD and this is probably the first game to legitimately pull my attention away from Destiny's death grip. There is a lot of good, practical advice on the Steam forum (along with the usual complaints, trollish or otherwise) that was encapsulated in Tyler Sigman's guest post on Polygon (linked above already).

I promptly wiped the starting heroes in my first dungeon run. Since then I've learned to mouse-over every enemy during combat to see their resistance levels as well as resist the temptation to rummage through every trash heap I come across. Retreating back to town is also crucial, as is upgrading that stage coach early so you get a healthy flow of fresh recruits coming into town each week.

This may be a RPG roguelike but there is a surprisingly amount of resource management approaching that of XCOM.

Just downed the necromancer apprentice; fortunately my favorite heroes just happened to be a pretty good makeup for that fight I think making it pretty easy, didn't even have to camp.

Which brings me to a question: anyone happen to know what triggers "religious"? After getting ambushed during camp twice in a row I noticed that my vestal has (an expensive in terms of resting skill points) a skill that reduces the chance to be ambushed in camp, but only if she's religious. I've seen a god-fearing quirk, not sure if there's anything else. I didn't want to spend 5 points without being sure I'd get a benefit so I skipped it and of course got ambushed. Those ambushes end up completely undoing any good I get from camp; I'm not sure if the AI gets crit bonuses when they ambush or if I was just unlucky but each time I've been ambushed it's been an enemy crit fest and I've ended up with far more stress than when I went in to camp in the first place. I need to look into whether there are more anti-ambush camp skills available, I haven't bothered with that survivalist tent yet.

Hi. Picked up the game tonight. Weird thing is I have to run it in window mode otherwise I can't select the campaign button as the cursor doesn't register. Only game I've had to run In window mode. Anyone else have this problem?

Very interesting game.

Thanks filthy enablers! Lost party members on my first 2 outings, but managed to complete the quests. It seems like sticking to short quests early on is the thing to do. And as was already pointed out, stuns are sooo useful. I tried the leper-melee hero, but his accuracy is terrible. I like the halberd-lady. Stunlocking the first two enemies is fantastic.

I love this game. Just when I start getting cocky, my main group of 4 heroes hits level 3 and I go for my first level 3 mission and have to abandon less than halfway through. Still in decent position, but stress relief and provisions wasted on that ate up a goodly chunk of my spare gold. Still had enough backup heroes at level 2 to handle the level 1 missions easily enough to begin rebuilding my gold stash, but it's good to see the game isn't going to give in easily!

Also, I wonder if there's a limit on quirks; my highwayman would appear to have used up (graphically at least) all the available slots for listing negative quirks. Most of them weren't even too bad so if you can get some manageable negative quirks it might actually be a good thing. Unfortunately I did end up hit with no way to relieve stress with the final one so I had to cure one. Hoping for a nice easy one to replace it and test whether or not there's a maximum.

oh, here's a thing : make sure to unequip any items from anyone you send for booze. You can sometimes get a random event at the end of a week where the person gets blind drunk and loses one of the items they are carrying! Lost one of those red heirloom item that way :O Not sure if it turns up later again or not, as of yet.

So this happened last night, with my best frontline guy:


Sigh. You want a vision, stud? I'll get you some mushrooms.

Was counting on him going up against the necromancer too.

He'll be back after a couple of weeks, the same thing can happen with the brothel as well.

pyxistyx wrote:


Good to know. (And hilarious.)


Yeah, there were a few things I learned a bit late. Like that the quests have levels associated with them. Wonder what number is? Duh. It's why I lost one guy. My entire party was max-stress and on death's door, but I did manage to finish with three paranoid, selfish, masochistic piles of fear.

Also learned that I can click and drag shovels onto locked containers. Cheaper than skeleton keys, although I'm guessing there's a downside to it (less loot? chance of destroying it? traps?)

Is there any reason why I can't just keep taking lower-level characters on low-level quests? There doesn't seem to be any game mechanic driving you forward in that sense (like nations withdrawing in X-Com).

What happens to provisions that you don't use at the end of a mission. Wasted money? Partial refund? I guess I'm supposed to learn what sort of baddies on what sort of missions do what sort of damage and prepare appropriately.

This game is cool, but I have one complaint: combat animations take too damn long.

In one particularly awful mission, I had three of my four guys afflicted with Irrational which makes them autoattack and babble nonsense. I was tempted to go read a book since 90% of combat was slow text scrolls and autoattacking.

Definitely some early access pains.

The game has an awkward glitch playing on a surface pro whereby it doesnt scale well at all. Need to play in windowed mode at an odd resolution. The game is almost all the way touch friendly (some of the right clicks are awkward). Once they get the resolution issues fixed it will definitely be playable with the stylus as a mostly touch game.

After dinking around with easier missions, so I could better learn the risk/reward mechanics, I finally attempted my second go at the apprentice necromancer; this time with a party of level 2s with skill and equipment upgrades. Also, smarter party composition. Was monumentally easier this time around. Say what you will about the RNG, this game rewards/penalizes smart/dumb play, and I dig that.

I really like the game but wow is it hard. Every character I have is at max stress. I can't afford treatment and I keep wiping going through the first area. I may have to start over grrrr.

My one complaint right now is the pause on the chat bubbles while in combat. It stays on screen too long for me and I usually just want to get on with the combat. EDIT: to be clear, I like the chat bubbles, they had a lot of flavor to the game but I think they stay on screen too long (for me)

Also, I can't figure out what determines initiative. Anyone know?

Tyops & Rooks - When a party gets stressed out and starts to go south it definitely starts resulting in too much chatter on the screen that drags out a doomed dungeon foray. To me, though, this is exactly the kind of problem you expect to see in Early Access and hopefully something Red Hook is paying attention to as they tune the game. Fingers crossed, anyway.

Initiative has to do with the speed rating of all the participants, but even then it comes off feeling random to me. I'm assuming its like everything else, base ratings giving advantages/disadvantages along with random number roles that influence just where the turns shake out each round.

Also, I think someone earlier in the thread (too lazy to look) mentioned the idea of just dismissing level 0/1 adventurers that you haven't invested much in if they get overmaxed on stress or negative traits, rather than deal with the expense of trying to restore them. They haven't gained enough experience or useful abilities to be worth the cost of keeping them around, unless they're in a character class you like and don't have a backup for. I think that's pretty sound advice.

For me, once I got used to some of the easier missions (clear rooms of monsters, explore 90% of rooms), I was able to do 3-4 consecutive successful runs without generating much stress. That puts a fair amount of coin in your pocket pretty quickly, and it came with the benefit of getting multiple squaddies up to level 2.

Cool! That's the three low-level bosses (The Necromancer Apprentice, the Swine Prince and the Wizened Hag) taken care of! Think I'm getting the hang of this

Yay patch, removing incompatible quirks and sanitarium fixes seem to be the biggies in this one. The quirks thing will likely be a very welcome fix for me.

edit: or not, my highwayman just once again picked up the quirk i just healed off him that won't let him visit the brothel even though he will only visit the brothel in town thanks to another quirk. Either that isn't what they meant by incompatible or it isn't fully fixed.

Hrm, I was wrong about shovels being cheaper than skeleton keys. But I guess shovels let you clear those debris piles without taking damage.