So I bought an early access game because the premise of it - survival horror deckbuilding roguelike - appealed to me and after like a week of Elden Ring, Project Zomboid and Rimworld, my blood could be used as a saline solution.
About 6 hours later, here's my thoughts on Draft of Darkness.
tl;dr not good but at least though provoking about game design.
So, I see this a lot in cheap indie TTRPGs, because that's my real field of expertise for hobbies, where someone likes thing a but maybe wants parts of things b and c and just slams them together. That's how you get most D&D Heartbreakers, they're just a game they already like with something else bolted on.
So starting at the smallest layer we have the the Slay the Spire-esque deckbuilding. The thing is, Slay the Spire is built with the idea of you having one character with one deck, and encounters are balanced around that concept. Cards are easy to read, your relic for the most part are very straightforward, and you have some finite control of randomness.
Here that's not true. You can have party members, card removal is absurdly expensive in terms of resources so decks generally only get bigger and thus more random, and encounters seem to be randomly built for anywhere from solo encounters to a full party, even when that's not mechanically possible until the second area.
Every character has two weapon types they can use from Pistol, Shotgun, Spraygun, Chainsaw, Axe, Knife, Syringe, and Flashlight. They can equip these weapons and have to have them equipped to use the card type in question.
(So far the early access version seems to set them to match the main character types so it's pairs of Pistol/Flashlight, Shotgun/Axe, Knife/Syringe, Chainsaw/Spraygun, but I think the devs have talked about randomizing it for the helpers you can find?)
There's also unarmed cards that anyone can use but often aren't worth it unless you've disarmed yourself - and again, remember that removing cards is rare and expensive so most your deck will be useless.
So if you have a card that's say, Fire Pistol, it costs 3 energy and 1 pistol bullet. Your energy ala STS refills every turn your character gets, but you have to find those resources to use those cards.
Every card that requires material resources has a "conserve resource" version but it guts the power of the card. Pistol Ammo cards, for example, regardless of what they do, become a weak smacking them with the gun instead - going from about 6-8 damage to 2-3.
There is admittedly a strategic element to this that is nice that the weak hits typically are low energy so you might find yourself having done some big combo and not being able to shoot but be able to bonk, but this is a silver lining aspect.
Needless to say, this feels bad. Imagine a version of Slay the Spire where the Silent had to procure vials of poison or shivs to actually use the cards that used those, or the Defect had a set number of blank orbs they had to spend to generate them.
And if you couldn't spend those you got a card that did like 3 damage or gave you 2 block or something. It'd be miserable, also unwinnable because the game having small tightly tuned numbers means you can have character powers that do what they're supposed to every time. It also makes those runaway good runs feel fucking unstoppable and crazy good.
So in Darkest Dungeon we again have some level of control for encounters. Parties go in with 4 characters you've selected. It might not be your A-team due to stress or injury, and various things that can happen move your party around sometimes, you can shuffle them around as you need to, but that is the rule.
In Draft of Darkness you start with one character and can find as you explore 2 more party members. Party members are generic and either cops (pistol/flashlight), nurses (knife/syringe), or scavengers (shotgun/axe). They are considerably weaker and I think always start at level 1 when you find them, regardless of where or what act you're on.
I think there's 1 party member in the first act, 2 in the second, and 3 in the final one? So basically your only real hope for having a worthwhile party is to hope your act 1 recruit spawns near you and you can drag them along to every fight where they might get some experience and be able to survive.
I have had runs where playing as the default main character, Jake, I have only found cops, and we all got to sweat about pistol rounds and flashlight batteries.
But where characters are doesn't seem to actually matter. Act 2 has cyborgs with assault rifles who spray shots into my party. You'd think there would be some kind of bias for the front, right? Not really. He shoots 4 times and it seems to pick a random pattern as it wants to.
Likewise I haven't found any moves that despite their descriptions call in order or anything; one of the flashlight moves is basically turning a 30k lumen flood light on an enemy and hitting another one; the second is random, and not like, logically, the guy behind the first one.
So basically this game mirrors the look of Darkest Dungeon but doesn't actually play with the aspects involved with it, outside of more party members = more action economy = more better.
At least in theory, keeping these poor bastards even slightly alive past Act 1 is often nearly impossible as their decks are small and mediocre and their stats are terrible. Most the time in Act 2 I pick up a party member for them to die in the immediate next fight.
The game also borrows a few more bits from Darkest Dungeon; items with uses in both combat and exploration, which it does well, and the concept of light both as a physical and metaphysical thing which it... does sort of well.
Most items that have uses in both exploration and combat you typically want to use for exploration; pills (your healing item) are 10 HP a pop in the map and 5 in combat, alcohol gives you long-lasting combat buffs if used in the field but smaller ones in combat, smoke grenades let you walk through combat encounters in the field but provide buffs in combat.
You can use Flares and Matches outside of combat to illuminate the map and make it easier to see what sort of things are out there; enemies have a marked aggro radius where stepping into their map squares will lead to a fight, but having light on it makes it easier to tell. I think some enemies are also drawn to light sources if you want to skip a fight.
So anyone who has played a roguelike knows that you want to try to get every advantage you can in it. This means if you've reached a level of power where encounters are manageable, you kill everything in that area to try to squeeze every last bit of power you can out of it.
So to stop that, the game developer has included an Evil Meter. The Evil Meter starts at 0, it resets between Acts. Every time you have a fight, it goes up by 1. Only very rare events can lower it.
Once it gets over 8, it starts to spit out meaner and meaner encounters for the Act you're in. Once it is over 11 it has a chance to spawn an extra boss that you have to fight or run from that will chase you until it gets an encounter. If you get it over 15 you just start getting fucked with by the game with random bad events!
Now to be fair to the developer it is a small team or maybe one guy doing this, as first game, and he's said the superboss isn't supposed to spawn in act 1, so that is currently a glitch, though the rest is as designed.
Every level is randomly generated. It has loot, it has monsters, it has a merchant or two per act. You move one square at a time, and monsters seem to either stay still or move every two or three movements you make.
Every weapon type except knives has a resource tied to it. There's the cash you use when dealing with merchants. There's the credits you use for the ATM/3D Printers you find. There's a sort of magic flower petal you use between acts to heal and remove cards from your deck.
There are all those weapon types I mentioned, as well as hats, shirts, and parts. Also items; pills, vitamins, anti-radiation meds, alcohol, energy drinks, matches, flares, smoke grenades, and I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting something else.
And gear is... very diablo esque. There appears to be about 3 variants of every weapon type and a dozen variants of the three armors and then everything has a level, a quality (trash/flimsy/decent/premium) and a list of modifiers that give it different stats and substats.
Small numbers. Clearly delineated effects. Straightforward mechanics. In LobCorp, Red, White, Black, and Pale damage all do different things that're easy to work out and have corresponding resistances.
Byt this. Why does this have Physical, Electric, Chemical and Dark damage types as distinct things? No clue. Why does everyone have it? No clue. Why can I get a weapon that boosts damage types that character can't deal, like a pistol that does dark damage when all pistol cards are physical? Got nothing for you.
Also why is the number scale for offense and defense from 0 to 80 and it has Dark Souls style fractional scaling? No idea. I have no clue what the math means beyond bigger numbers better.
And then yeah, all the gear has random stat ups on it; crit chance, speed (did I mention everyone acts on their own speed, not a turn or anything?), and energy.
I've had runs where I got to act 2 and just bled all my resources out because the game refused to give me ammo or gear that actually did anything worthwhile.
I've had runs where the merchant looked at my no healing all pistols group and went "I have shotgun shells and a literal clown suit, take it leave it."
The game likes to hand out debuffs and dots that go away based on your exploration (so if you get them late into an act fuck you) and the curatives for them do not exist or are rare and hideously ineffective.
Act 2 has a bunch of android enemies who have attacks that can inflict 5 to 10 points of radioactive contamination that they will gleefully use every turn.
Radiation is damage and a stats down. The only cure for it is exploration letting it tick down (which damages you) and the anti-rad pills which are... -5 rads and also rare as hens teeth.
that radiation machine gun jerk I mentioned? Can give himself dodge (just flat avoid the next attack for every stack of it you have) and bullseye (Crit chance go up).
but as it shakes out as best as I can tell you are at the utter mercy of the RNG to have anything remotely resembling a decent run, and it's not liable to give it to you.
You have Diablo 2-style stats where leveling them up increases your sub stats. They matter for events in a binary way. Realistically everyone wants to level Vitality and either Strength or Intelligence depending on what kind of damage they do.
Between runs you can buy more cards via random booster packs and they are random; I have some cards where I have more than you're allowed to put in a deck. Why? Did I miss other cards by doing that?
Or you can buy or unlock alternate gearset items for your characters, but swapping them costs your between run metacurrency you get for runs, so... you have to choose between unlocking stuff and playing with your unlocks.
Cut out anything that just adds complexity to be complex. Simplify the math as much as possible. Stop adding mechanics that punish the player for playing your game.
So apparently a popular tactic at one point was to just have a cop in your party flashlight rave everyone into submission so the rest of the group could heal or kill the enemies without spending tons of resources.
So the devs added a thing that if you been Blinded you get a temporary buff that makes Blind effects just Stagger you instead for awhile, which is a tiny removal of your turn gauge total when it hits.
It's hair-pulling because it feels like if it wasn't so committed to being incredibly complicated then it could be a game that gets mentioned in the same breath as all its inspirations.
And I like complex games! I literally mentioned both Project Zomboid and Rimworld in the OP! But both of those games know exactly what they want to be and don't just throw in mechanics to throw in mechanics!
It seems neat and it's kind of going for dark fantasy deckbuilding roguelike but I found it sort of... very poorly explains a lot of what it wants to do and the ramp up is -really- real.
Additionally as you build your deck you have to build in sources of mana because while your basic attacks take any mana and so do some other cards the more specialized cards require a special mana type.
My understanding of the game as it stands is there are four mana colors - Red for Physical, Blue for Arcane, Green for Nature, and Yellow for Divine - but Divine is like, a special opt-in based on levels you gain over the course of the run.
Instead of taking a specific route like Slay the Spire there's an 'Event Deck', and the Event Deck will always have certain events, most of which are monster fights.
So if you have a really good run of an area you can just save your rests for the very end and go "you know what maybe I'll pull a couple cards out of this deck that I'm not getting mileage from I don't need to heal up."
Like I think the axe is your basic "do X amount of damage" attack, but you can also pick like, the Longsword, which does less damage but it's an attack that also builds armor.
About 6 hours later, here's my thoughts on Draft of Darkness.
tl;dr not good but at least though provoking about game design.