My first in-depth review, so be gentle.

Darkest Dungeon is a dungeon crawler rogue-like RPG, where you step into the boots of an heir that has returned to his home to reclaim it from the darkness that dwells inside it. It's a harsh, unforgiving game that will not let you return to earlier saves or give you a leg up (except for the in-game items). It's a mix of decision-making, battle tactics and party composition, with a dash of RNG.

Now, there's a lot of people that complain about the RNG being unforgiving, cruel and often ruining dungeon runs. To that a knowledgeable person will say "that's the point". Sometime's Lady Luck will be on your side, and you'll be scoring crit after crit, while dodging the enemy's attacks. Other times, your party will be crushed in the first few encounters. One of the skills that DD require is, as earlier mentioned, decision making. RNG reinforces that. Do you think you can handle another corridor before you make camp? Do you think the next room will have the trinket you're looking for, or are you gonna stumble upon a ghoul and lose half of your team? We will all make bad decisions in the beginning, but it's the point - we learn. We learn to take more items than we really need, we pay more attention to the characteristics of every dungeon (for example, that bleed builds are great for some and subpar for others). Or, as I also have done, we don't learn and bull rush ahead, hoping that luck will really let you find that last trinket.

You could say that's the point and dynamic of the game. You start out young, bold and brash, and learn, often painfully, how to run this horrid hamlet. And if you're any good, soon you'll notice that you can, at least partially, go against the RNG and win. Trinkets, well-built characters, your own experience and knowledge. And suddenly you're done. You've beat the game, maybe at Radiant, maybe not, but still you beat it. And it doesn't seem so scary anymore.

For those of you who find the visuals and soundtrack important for your experience, DD delivers. The audio is great, both the music/ambient and the narrator. The spoken lines and the battle music really get to you and stay in your head, and the low-light soundtrack is spine chilling in certain circumstances. The visuals are gritty, dark and down-to-earth. No knight in shining armor, rather a leper or a kleptomaniac crusader. It makes you appreciate the human nature of the characters and everything creates a distinct low fantasy atmospehere, reminiscent of Warhammer Fantasy.

I don't think there's a point in going into the depths of game mechanics and individual cases of stuff. I will just sum it all up, saying that Darkest Dungeon is a game balancing well on the scales of fun and difficulty. Even with its sometimes dull grinding for a specific item or leveling up a character, it keeps you hooked enough to keep playing and recreating that Dark Souls sort of satisfaction when you finally cross a milestone. The hurtful, "I've spent so much time on this but it was worth it" kind of smile.

Edit: added the audiovisual section