![]() You also need to manage the stress of your party, limiting how psychologically taxing their monster-slaying and treasure-looting trips are. With a permadeath system and truly difficult bosses, it’s a game likely to keep you on edge – but the stress isn’t just the player’s. The stark 2D style and imaginative animations – even the ugly ones – are sure to imprint on your memory after just a few rounds of poorly-lit tunnels, traps, and beasts waiting for you in the depths. ![]() As a platform the Switch seems like it offers the best of all worlds, but if a game doesn’t properly adapt itself, it winds up caught somewhere between them.Things are kept interesting by a turn-based combat system, 17 character classes with mostly distinct abilities, weapon upgrades, skill trees, and a ‘resolve’ system that requires you to slowly scale up your heroes’ confidence before they’re willing to try out harder areas. Somehow, an elegant, streamlined game on PC was brought to an elegant, versatile platform and they brought out each other’s worst qualities. ![]() There’s almost nothing I wouldn’t rather play on my Switch than Darkest Dungeon and, conversely, I keep thinking that I should just quit my Switch campaign and start a new one on PC. It functions on the Switch, but it never quite feels to me like it works. Darkest Dungeon doesn’t seem to find the right ways to reconcile those differences, or maybe it just doesn’t make the right concessions in its transition from mouse-and-keyboard to handheld. People who are playing it as a handheld are having such a radically different experience than people playing it on a TV that each Switch game almost contains two different versions within itself. It can be all of the above, but the more of the Switch’s versatility a game brings into play, the more it has to tailor itself to the special constraints that attend the platform’s expanded possibilities. The Switch can be a TV console that you play on from across the room in a comfortable chair, or a handheld console, or a mobile touch device. They scarcely bear any relationship to the graphic interface, nor do they really follow consistent conventions beyond, “The shoulder buttons will cycle-through… something.” It almost feels like every single aspect of the game has its own bespoke controls that operate completely differently from everything else. Darkest Dungeon’s gamepad controls are frustratingly unintuitive and awkward. ![]() The really bad news is that still might be the most practical way to play. For my part, using the Switch’s touch interface has involved a lot squinting and mis-clicking. My problems here do not seem universal by any means: Kotaku’s Gita Jackson seems to be getting along swimmingly with the touch controls, but I don’t know how she got to that promised land. All the buttons and icons feel impossibly tiny and delicate on the Switch’s screen, which never seemed small to me until I played this specific game. The touchscreen controls at least make sense by giving you some way to interact directly with the visual interface.īut I’ve struggled with that because it doesn’t feel like the interface was rescaled for the Switch. It’s telling that most of the tutorial text in Darkest Dungeon seems to be subtly pointing you in the direction of the touchscreen controls, before grudgingly acknowledging that of course you could use the gamepad.
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