And it mostly succeeded
I got a chance to get my grubby little hands on the newest port of Darkest Dungeon for the Switch. The game is here in all of its unforgiving glory. It throws some text at you during the opening scenes, teaching you the basics of survival, but it leaves the important things for you to figure out on your own. Darkest Dungeon doesn’t care about your feelings. It was created to twist and break you while leaving you somehow stronger in the end.
This is a game that lends itself really well to the portable nature of the system. The battles are turn-based, and it’s not difficult to pause during the middle of a fight and return later. Despite that, it knows how to get under your skin and cause you to act recklessly. My first several quests all ended exactly the same. One character gets stressed out, throws their fists in the air, and then starts talking mad shit about everyone else in the party. Soon enough, the rest of them start getting pissed too.
The characters are so stressed — and constantly reminding me of it — that I can’t help but panic as well. Darkest Dungeon is an extremely stressful game, and it’s got a pretty steep learning curve. However, it’s immensely satisfying once you finally start figuring out how everything works.
One thing that was continuously an issue was the teensy, tiny, menu icons. They’re certainly serviceable, and they do get the job done, but it led to plenty of incorrect touchscreen inputs on my part. Granted, this was only a problem while navigating the hub world, and it’s more of a superficial complaint. For all practical purposes, everything works exactly as it should.
It’s clearly designed for the PC, but Darkest Dungeon made the transition fairly smoothly. In fact, I didn’t run into any technical issues whatsoever. Although, I’ve heard that there have been some problems with the DLC. I can’t comment on those, but the base game is a quality port and well worth your time and money.
[These impressions were based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
