As promised, we are concluding our 'Darkest Dungeon' thoughts with 'The Color of Madness'. The Color of Madness is the third major piece of DLC Darkest Dungeon released. Kicking off with 'The Crimson Court' followed by 'The Shieldbreaker' and then 'The Color of Madness'. There is also 'The Butcher's Circus' which we will not focus on mainly cause it is PvP focused and we are not fans of PvP outside of fighting games and we don't even enjoy PvP in fighting games these days.
The Color of Madness is a slightly slimmer offering compared to 'The Crimson Court'. We do not have any new classes included this time and the Farmstead is a new location but along the way we revisit older locations but with new lighting and game conditions. Also whilst it has a small story, the main draw is the 'Endless Harvest' where you fight waves of a mixture of new and old enemies as well as a couple new bosses. The new bosses are pretty cool especially The Miller. The other major boss is The Sleeper which is a good fight as well but draws from a annoyance with newer bosses Red Hook studios has designed in that it focuses on team damage instead of focusing on just a couple heroes like their previous bosses (The Necromancer and The Collector comes to mind).
Another cool element of completing the 'Color of Madness' is new trinkets which you can purchase with the new currency 'Shards' which you can only earn through fighting through 'Color' or beating the new roaming boss 'The Thing from the Stars'. LOL we will discuss 'The Thing...' a little later, for now, the trinkets are a mixed bag to me. Some are good, some are great and some are pretty meh. I am slowly collecting them all like I did with the 'Crimson Court' sets but I'm in no rush for these ones.
As mentioned the Miller is a cool boss especially with his backstory being another poor soul caught in the Ancestors machinations. His gimmick of summoning helpers but also having a specific trinket that weakens him and he actually weakens himself when a party member has it. This trinket, a locket of his wife called Mildred even fully protects you from his party wide Area Of Effect (AOE) attack which is a nice twist. Beating the Miller through is only the beginning and you can keep fighting and then fight the afore-mentioned Sleeper whom has a prep stage then a big battle. This battle closely resembles the final Darkest Dungeon battle but not as drawn out and whilst hard, it is doable with a strong team which in my case is 2 Shieldbreakers (who are probably my favorite class in this game), a Vestal to health heal and a Jester to stress heal. This team rarely lets me down and I've even gone beyond the Sleeper once and the missions got even harder and I almost died when I ran into a very aggressive Swine Prince boss. All bosses however fall to wayside when compared to the new wandering boss 'The Thing from the Stars'
This monstrosity haunted my thoughts and unlike the Fanatic in the Crimson Court, is a re-occurring wandering boss much like the Shambler (another very hard wandering boss). I was actually scared to fight him even with my special scouted team and to my surprise I actually beat him the first time we thought. I even looked up tactics and end up not using them and we actually won pretty easily ironically. After all the set-up and thinking this might be the endgame boss, he was hard but definitely beatable with the right team (in my case A Arbalest, Houndmaster, Crusader, Hellion). However I can definitely see him being a real hard fight in highest difficulties due to his ability to constantly buff himself and shrug off even the hardest of hits. I remember one re-match where I let him buff himself too much and I felt like I was throwing rocks at a unbreakable wall. I can honestly say, at higher difficulties and without a good set up (and some OP Crimson Court trinket sets) this thing would be a nightmare.
The story is great too. Darkest Dungeon is a game that wears its Lovecraftian roots proudly on its sleeve so of course it'll pay homage to one of H.P's popular stories 'The Color out of Space' The Thing for the Stars is definitely a homage to one of the amalgamations that happened later in said short story. It is cool that Red Hook was able to go back to their Lovecraftian roots after taking a slight detour with the Crimson Court and focusing more on vampires. As I mentioned, the Miller's story is tragic and in the end, rebuilding his Mill is pretty cool because after you do it, you no longer get random meal checks when playing the main game and random meal checks was definitely one of the annoyances when playing the main game.
So on this note and blog, we have drawn to the end of our Darkest Dungeon coverage. Overall I had a amazing time with this game and I've invested a lot of time in it but just like 'Risk of Rain 2' (my last obsession) I find myself playing it less and less and wanting to focus on new games. As mentioned above, The final DLC 'The Butcher's Circus' is PvP focused and is not my jam and Darkest Dungeon does have a fan made mod called the 'Black Reliquary' which is a complete re-hauling of the game and even makes its harder (if that was possible) and some people consider it a more truer sequel then Darkest Dungeon 2 (which we will one day play as well) which I may consider playing (that and the fact that is completely free). Darkest Dungeon started as a game I was low key afraid to play because I heard about its wild difficulty, big learning curve, losing heroes to afflictions constantly and just the scope of it and in the early days it lived up to those infamous moments where all my heroes were stressed, I ran out of food just before completing a quest and I was playing by the seat of my pants and it gave anxiety like no other game but now I've really enjoyed playing it and it now rates up there with Risk of Rain 2 as one of my new favorite Roguelites.
A Roguelite blog? Yeah I do not know what you are talking about 😏😐😏.
AV
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