Recent reviews by soup

all of the character art is AI generated. likely the backgrounds of stages too.

radical robot rail-grinding shooter with a high energy soundtrack and doomlike gunplay that rewards playing as fast as possible, doing dramatic slides under enemy attacks and going crazy in close quarters? hell yeah

combat rewards sponging with healing items rather than baiting/dodging attacks. magic seems drastically more powerful than any other combat style. crafting skills will ask you to roll 10-20% odds for crafting an item with items lost upon failure, even after significant progression, which results in a lot of pointless farming for ingredients including (without great luck) having to farm 5-10x the amount of materials necessary to craft a given item. skill progression (which is meant to allow you to mitigate this) plateaus extremely quickly and devolves into a mindless grind if you want further skill levels.

If you are looking for an MMO-grind type experience in a singleplayer game, and steady, granular progression is for you, then you will probably enjoy this game much more than I do. if you do not think you will enjoy the systems in this game but want to give it a try anyway, be wary of the standard 2 hour refund window as the progress ceiling fell just outside of this window for me.

I truly think I would enjoy this game if not for the awful controller compatibility.

Beyond the "press any button" start screen, the game refuses to read any inputs from my controller. The settings do not contain binds for controller, only for keyboard. Further to this, I attempted to bind keyboard inputs to my controller using steam's functionality for this, however this has no method of binding movement to a control stick. After having wrestled with this for over an hour and struggling with the rather uncomfortable keyboard controls in the introduction sequence, I have decided to leave this review.

Enjoyable game at an accessible price with stable performance on low end machines. Basic progression is enjoyable, the side game breaks up the action well and late-game achievement hunting is challenging but fair. Filling in the encyclopedia and unlocking new minions for the first time was the highlight for me.

EDIT: Post Early-Access the game's content has expanded significantly. I continue to recommend it as a fun entry in the genre.

No innate support for my preferred controller (gamecube) which is very common to use in the platform fighter genre.

No ability to play a 3-player free for all in a custom game (enjoy playing 2v1 teams if you have three players).

No character progression unless you play matchmaking (playing casually with friends will never make character progress).

I hope these three features change in future, but as-is this game is wholly unappealing to me.

Cute and straightforward game with satisfying progression. Combining class training to find new classes is fun. The gameplay is simple but enemies can interfere with your strategies to make you think, especially if you play blind.

My few minor gripes are a few minor typos, the lack of a more clearly visible day counter and the lack of a pass turn button.

The game is quite short and only takes a couple hours to complete, but additional challenge modes and difficulty options make the game more replayable. This is a cute little game and I am very satisfied with the price.

The game tries to replicate an old release of the video game Realm of the Mad God. It does this well, but it fails to see the flaws that were around back then and what should be changed to build upon the genre instead of (more or less) making the exact same game.

The developers are (allegedly) aware of the fact the current iteration of their game is a copy and (allegedly) this was their intent for self-fulfilling reasons. There have been claims that the game will change and carve its own niche later, but I personally do not consider it to be worth following news to see what changes.

Darkest Dungeon is a game about making the best out of a bad situation.
That is the disclaimer the game gives you when you turn it on. This game is designed to be incredibly difficult, forcing the player to cut their losses or decide how much they want to sacrifice relatively often. Despite this, the game is rarely unfair in its difficulty.
There may be upgrades to your character's weapons, skills, armour and trinkets, but the greatest progress you will make in this game is through knowledge. The game knows this, so in the apprentice level dungeons you start with, the odds are tipped in your favour and there is plenty of room to make mistakes as you learn the overall mechanics, what enemies are capable of, and what your own characters are capable of. As you gain the confidence and equipment to tackle higher level dungeons, you will face new enemies and mechanics that you have not seen before, and it will become more difficult to adapt.
This same concept carries over to the boss fights, which have a strategy you have to figure out to defeat at higher levels, but at lower levels, they are easy enough to get by without a specialised squad. However, at the highest difficulty levels, even with a specialised squad, you will be tested. This is how the game enforces excitement, and dread.
No matter how well you prepare at higher levels, and especially the final missions set within the Darkest Dungeon itself, there is the dread of failure. Dread of losing higher-level beloved characters that took you a great deal of effort and investment to reach such levels.
The final levels in the Darkest Dungeon will test the ability to adapt to knew information and salvage the situation that the game has been training you to learn to an absolute extreme, as the difficulty levels are at their highest and retreating from these missions will result in a character's death, beyond your control.
Dread, fear of the unknown, the beautiful visual design, sound design, narration, and theme, all come together to create the incredible experience that defines Darkest Dungeon. Darkest Dungeon is a game that has achieved what it has set out to do flawlessly, and no game could excite me more.

Lovely graphical style, good sound design and solid gameplay. Large difficulty curve when learning might make this game not for you, but if you enjoy games that feel like the odds are against you, you'll love risk of rain.