. . . . and resistance is ended, I bought it, I am in! I am very happy that I managed to hold off on this one until now. There are only a few games that have been on my wishlist for as long, taunting me to buy during early access.
I loved Darkest Dungeon but after reading about it being in effect an RPG where the town was your main character I got hooked into postponing unit advancement in order to progress the town developments ahead of the curve. This was surely setting me up for “success” but also turned the game into a grind eventually, and I stopped playing. Sound familiar to anyone?
This one I am just gonna play. No reading of guides or tips.
Love the freaking visuals already. I might just stare at the screen for a while . . .
The reason for why I love Darkest Dungeon is its tone, its atmosphere, presentation and most important, the narrator. The gameplay is good, however, I never finished a run to completion. Maybe progress is to slow? I will try this…
One concern I have for this game is the dev’s attitude toward QoL suggestions.
Late in EA, they added the enemy abilities to their in-game Humonarium. Like minion abilities, these abilities have tooltips. Unlike the minion ability tooltips, which display the skulls on the left (minions) and the helms on the right (enemies) (exactly as they’re positioned during battle), the enemy tooltips display the helms on the left and the skulls on the right (opposite of how they’re positioned during battle). So when you bring up the Humonarium during battle, you have to mentally flip the tooltip before processing it.
So it was suggested, during EA, that the enemy tooltip orientation be changed to match that of the minion tooltip orientation. Their response a week ago?
Also suggested during EA was to grant the player access to Iratus’ passive skills and artifacts during combat. I wonder if they see no reason to do this, as well.
Made it past the first floor boss on normal. I used the default party for a few battles (it’s a very decent beginning party) but switched over to a shade-liche-zombie party for the rest of the way. A really good combo.
Still getting used to all the changes since I last played. There are a lot of them.
Ugh, that’s pretty disappointing. Hopefully the reply in that Steam thread was just an off-the-cuff flippant response during a bad day. Because it’s a real dick way to reply to a constructive comment, especially when the constructive comment goes out of its way to also be complimentary.
If an artist’s specific vision includes an awkward UI, I hope they’ll make that clear up front so I can avoid their game.
I am a massive Darkest Dungeon fan, and I’ve been back in the genre recently: I took Mistover off of my backlog at the beginning of quarantine (wants to be DD but iteratively improved and more Japanese, only really gets there on the latter), and then did a quick Bloodmoon run of DD on Switch over the last couple of weeks. I haven’t played Iratus since… PAX East 2018, I think? But it had promise, reports are good, and I jumped in yesterday for the $16.
It’s pretty good! It doesn’t really get there on polish (both art/sound and presentation/ui/ux), at least not to DD’s level. It’s fine enough for an indie in its own right, but having just replayed Darkest, it’s an obvious gap. However, it is much more successful with its choices to iterate and improve, both on some aspects of combat (though I think in the end DD is tighter, but this tries and mostly accomplishes some cool things) but especially at the strategic level. I do worry that eventually it’s going to feel a bit fiddly playing with the big picture stuff between every fight. At least for now, though, I’m going to keep playing to see how a run ends, what the rest of the troop unlocks look like, and what a more optimized path can do compared to the first couple things I’ve thrown at the wall.
Mistover seemed interesting, but lacks any voiceovers other than Japanese. That, combined with the children graphics made it a no-go for me. Its on Xbox Gamepass, in case you have that, for pc!
DD definitely has its flaws, but the underlying idea has an enormous amount of appeal. I’m pleased there are so many different takes on it, I like some of them (Deep Sky, Iratus so far) more than the game that inspired them.
I have only played 2-3 hours so far, but I am really enjoying it. I loved Darkest Dungeon as well, but really hated the end game where it got really tedious. Hoping this game doesn’t bog down like that.
I still don’t have the game down, so I am playing at the easiest difficulty to learn it. I am still struggling to put it all together enough to be competent, but the game is pretty easy at this difficulty. Have only lost one minion from an executioner one-shoting (critical hit) my zombie. I have not had a boss fight yet.
Each class has 6 skills, and I think I have 7 classes unlocked, so it’s a lot to remember. Every battle I find myself rereading what everything does. I am never sure if I should go for stress or damage attacks and I haven’t found the perfect party. Seems like you could get some great synergies going (like setting the archer to the attack anything that moves and grouping her with minions that have push/pull skills). Each battle there are so many choices I kind of feel crippled with decision. Not a bad thing, and I am slowly getting some strategies down.
I do miss the fun of finding treasure. There are artifacts you can get for Iratus himself, but all I have found are some one-use skills that were pretty boring. You can equip minions with stuff, but all I have seen is things that give you minor stat bonus or level gains. There aren’t cool weapons and armor to get it doesn’t seem like. Loot is often just a list of minion parts so far.
The dungeon map is a bit boring. There really aren’t many decisions you can make. Sometimes you go one direction or the other, but often you are on rails.
Ultra wide screen isn’t really supported. It will go to that resolution but the game stretches static screens and there are black bars on each end of the gameplay screens. Hardly a big deal, but kind of disappointing. On the other hand, it runs great on my 3 year old iMac, so anyone with an older machine, this is probably worth a try.
It doesn’t. One of the main reasons I really like it.
Don’t worry, You’ll find plenty of it. You can find some pretty cool items specifically for your minions to equip. Some are class specific and some can be used by any minion. The chances for finding items for Iratus can be increased by building and upgrading a structure and by choosing a particular skill in Iratus’ skill tree. His items can be permanent or one-time use. I have found about 50-50 of each. The really good stuff you won’t find until later in the game.
Does the tutorial cover the buildings in the graveyard also? It seemed pretty half-assed to me. I learned a few things but then all of a sudden it was over. Never covered some things that I’m still trying to figure out on my own. I crafted an item in the Alchemy tab but it took me a while to figure out that: 1) it could only be equipped by monsters (and why is there some sort of red X behind it, making it seem like it can’t be used?), and 2) how to actually equip it on a monster. I still don’t know if it’s working or not. The red background makes me think it’s invalid, or has to be activated somehow.
It’s pretty annoying that the building requirements don’t just list the monster name. Instead it gives you a really hard to see image and you’re supposed to somehow know that you need to sacrifice one in order to build that building (or upgrade it). I went over to that tab on my own and eventually figured out what I needed to do. Soon after that the game said ‘Tutorial over!’ and that was the last help I received. Maybe they mention the buildings if you don’t build one on your own?
This game took Darkest Dungeon and made it its own, stripping stuff that was tedious, removing the decidely unfun elements (your characters getting afflicted by things completely without any regard to context), and streamlining the heck out of it without removing much of the tactical depth nor the joy of trying out different combinations of the various classes. Where Darkest Dungeon felt like a grind (even after all the patches), this is snappy and doesn’t waste your time. It feels like there’s always something new just around the corner.
I’ve finished the first level of the map and am now on the second, fighting the dwarfs. I’m very much looking forward to continuing the journey.
Each minion has 2 equipment slots you can put things in. Some equipment is specific to a class of minion. If so, the item tooltip will say so. All minion equipment has a red background so no issue there. If it will go into one of the minion’s equipment slots, it should be working okay. Not sure about a red x. I’ve never seen that. If it’s not minion equipment then it will show up on the artifacts screen, which is for equipment that Iratus himself can use.
As for the buildings, typically you’ll want to get the Library and Obelisk up first since those give Iratus more XP per battle and give more diggers souls (required for upgrading buildings) respectively. If you click on each building it will pop up a screen telling you what each one does. It seemed straightforward to me.
I’m there as well. About halfway. Much harder going on the second level than on the first. Those little suckers are tough.
A little cutscene after beating the first boss/act would have been nice! Other than that I’m thrilled. The second difficulty level seems like the right choice; after ten battles on ‘easy’ I started over and I have not regretted it so far. My hunter lady is still doing all the work and I need to come up with something new I guess but focussing on her ultimate and building up wrath paid out (while the others support/tank).
I am about at the end of the third area on the second difficulty and this continues to be good, but my worries have unfortunately come true with some of the between-battle fiddliness, for lack of a better term. It takes a lot of clicks and time to ultimately do the same thing between every fight (rotate people in and out of the arena and the healing location, maybe do a GY upgrade, see if that level up gave me enough points to actually do anything), and it takes a LOT of clicks and time to reconstruct a minion that just died (grab the parts, maybe some alchemy to at least uncommon, put them together, give it a brain, remember which skills and stats you picked, click it all through). The latter is particularly unfortunate given that they’ve made a decision to make the characters more disposable than other similar games.
(I mean that both in how easily it is to have one randomly offed and in how easy they are to replace. The design of crit mechanics in particular leads to a very wide damage distribution, with one shots from very high health definitely a thing; I can only imagine on the higher difficulties. It’s also somewhat harder than similar games to control who’s getting hit. That’s offset by the fact that unless you’re absolutely hemorrhaging undead you’ll be able to put a near-exact copy back in there right away… it just takes way too much menuing to actually do that.)
It did really nail the addictive core loop, there’s some real depth in working out the mechanics and bringing the right team for the battle (given that you generally know what’s coming), and I think I’m going to put in what will end up being 15 or 20 hours to finish a playthrough. I just feel like a lot of the actually mechanics of playing the game are 90% there and I really wish they had figured out the last 10% because what is here is really cool.
