Salubrious

A grand and intoxicating innocence

  • She/Her 🏳️‍⚧️

Hey, don't ask me my opinion -- I'm nobody. Just pretend I'm not here.

I mostly just post about things tangentially related to The Simpsons, or Morrowind or The X-COM Files.

29 | 🇦🇺 | ⬅️⬅️


So last week sucked for no real reason other than that it did, but Friday I left work early with a migraine, had a decent nap extended awake lie down then spent almost the entire weekend playing Darkest Dungeon 2.

My opinions on Darkest Dungeon 2 are a very similar to my opinions on Darkest Dungeon 1, except kind of more so. It's a charming game with great presentation and most of the time deceptively deep turn based combat, but when the combat falls apart - whether that be because your positioning got messed with, you got into a badly presented puzzle fight, or you just got really unlucky - it really falls apart. I don't mind the shift to a rogue-lite Slay the Spire sort of structure for the sequel, it's a lot of fun, but it also really exacerbates a lot of problems I had with the first game while also losing some of what made it stand out as interesting.

Both games open with a screen saying "Darkest Dungeon is about making the best out of a bad situation" but that feels way more true of the first game, in which making the choice to limp away from a dungeon with what you've scrounged together which might not even cover the cost of the expedition actually feels like a choice, versus the sequel where you can end your run at an inn to keep all the meta-progression candles you've found and forget about everything else because none of it carries over. When someone dies in DD2 it really fucking sucks, not because you have to worry about how the loss of this person will impact all of your future expeditions and how you're going to account for the hole they've left, but because now for the rest of your run until you reach an inn you have to deal with your party being out of position (unless it was your back row that died) and possibly being locked out of vital abilities until then. In DD1 this was a good indicator to get the hell out of dodge, and if you got into fights which would be harder due to being 1 man down and being unable to use some abilities you could flee from them, but in 2 there's no backing out of a fight so you're forced to struggle with this handicap until you can get to an inn and probably quit.

Plenty more complaints about the game (like the bosses taking way too long because they have way too much health) but I have overall enjoyed it so far. Its biggest flaw is that it makes me think about the first game a lot, which in turn makes me think of Mordheim: City of the Damned, which makes me want to play Mordheim: City of the Damned. Maybe I'll install Mordheim again. Oh but Mordheim makes me want to play Battletech...



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