### Darkest Dungeon
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_Darkest Dungeon_ is pretty much exactly what I'm thinking about in terms of an ideal for the Small Number RPG. The game's combat design has so much depth and interlocking complexity to everything, but at the same time, an incredible amount of restraint was involved in that design as well. It's exactly the game I'm thinking of when I was thinking about even decimal places communicating something, and an enemy having 14 HP and 20 HP can be the difference between life and death.
Aside from stuff like the one major currency, the designers eliminated any sense whatsoever of the game's balance simply being a matter of having applied an exponential curve to everything. It's a starkly legible game once you've acclimated to it and gotten a sense of what everything means. Just in this screenshot alone, in the bottom right you can see this Swine Prince fella has 132 HP, putting it in Hyper Beefcake Thing territory, especially for this part of the game. There isn't a damage number up here, and these damage calculations aren't visible to the player during regular play, but compared to our player hero's health pool of 32, the Swine Prince's (5-9)x2 Single target attacks and (3-7)x2 multi-target attacks will feel appropriately vicious, and with a 12% CRIT chance that applies a 1.5x modifier to that damage calculation, a handful of attacks or even one devastating critical blow can bring your average character from max health to having one foot in the grave. I could get into how the fight works in greater detail but then I'd be here all day, so instead I'll also just say that there is a way to replace those attacks with a single target attack with the same damage roll but without the doubling modifier but it require special skills, and the targets of those attacks are telegraphed at the beginning of a round, and as well there is another little guy in the fight not pictured in the screenshot who doles out Stuns like it's going out of style, and who you absolutely cannot target with an attack, or the big guy will do instantly counter with a heavy party-wide attack, and if you accidentally kill said little guy while the big guy is still alive (to sum it up _Darkest Dungeon_ has a lot of limitations in terms of targeting enemies and lots of multi-target attacks in general so this is not as simple as just not accidentally choosing the wrong menu option), the big guy will spam said party-wide attack endlessly. And pretty much anyone who has played a handful of RPGs but hasn't played _Dark Dungeon_ could already come up with a strategy on how to approach this boss fight just with that preliminary information, and win if put in front of it with a good party composition and loadout. Mind you, this boss is also one of the simpler and more straightforward ones, too.
Even better, the game's numerical growth is where that beautiful restraint really comes in. Most Numbers, between entry power level and max power level, roughly double, at most. The health pool of the hardest version of this boss is 271, a few hairs over double. There's only the barest hint of non-linear progression, overall--those damage calculations for his main attacks end up being (9-19)x2 for the single target version and (7-13)x2 for the multi-target, which is about as elegant as an example as I could ask for in a game full of them. The single target version gets a minimum damage roll only 1 less than double of the original, and the maximum damage roll is one more than double. The multi-target version is the inverse, with the minimum being double the easy version plus one and the maximum being double the easy version minus one. Basically meaning that its single target attacks get incrementally (yet legibly) more devastating, and multi-target attacks dole out greater overall damage but with incrementally (yet legibly) less damage spikes.
There are so many beautifully legible yet still intricate things to the mechanical design of _Darkest Dungeon,_that, in fact, I am pretty sure it was while I was playing _Darkest Dungeon_ that the phrase of a Small Number RPG came to me. It all coagulates into a game that is as harsh as it is fair, in the sense that it lays out all of the information you need to make informed decisions, hides only the information that is most interesting to hide, and demands that you understand all of it all at once. And, I guess this is kind of central to my thesis statement here, if every visible number in the game that isn't a percentage or functionally a percentage was multiplied by ~ 100, I think a lot of that purity in the game's balance would be needlessly obscured. Or, maybe, the designers would have found ways to use it as a crutch to balance parts of the game with numerical adjustments rather than tactical ones. In any case, it certainly has the confidence to show you all of this information in as comprehensible a format as possible,
A lot of players going through _Darkest Dungeon_ for the first time end up feeling that the game is unfair, and I don't blame them, for obvious reasons, because the game is intimidating on purpose. If they stick to it, though, they learn more and get better, and they find that the game is, in fact, not unfair, but in its own way, unforgivingly fair. The numbers, being comprehensibly bite sized, lay it pretty bare. You were simply taking risks you didn't realize you were taking, committing tactical missteps you didn't consider, not exploiting weaknesses or not seeing the efficacy of the tools you were provided. _Darkest Dungeon_ will make you realize all of those increases are cumulative, that you can get a bit of blood from every stone, and you're going to need to in order to keep progressing. You were wrong to scoff at the difference between a healing ability healing 2 points and 3 points, a DoT increasing from 1 to 2. All of that adds up to put you closer to that cumulative numerical point where you're even with the enemies, and it might even on occasion make you feel like you're just slightly over them. Of course, the game has hard controls for making sure you can't get over it by too much, Quests have difficulty tiers (of which there are 3, more or less) and Heroes have Tiers too (of which there are 3, more o less). Heroes of a too high level can't go into a lower Tier, where they would likely dominate Hilariously, you can send in lower level tier Heroes into whichever Tier Quest you want, if you have no regard for them making it through in one piece mentally or physically, anyway. In fact, in the "Easy" gameplay difficulty setting (I could get into how hilariously slim the difficulty difference really is, I really think this setting is more like Faster than Easier, but never mind), it lays this pretty bare--one of the few changes made in this difficult mode is that basically Tier 2 Heroes can still enter Tier 1 Quests. And they do dominate, but, well, it isn't much help for Tier 2 or 3 quests...
And so the Numbers ramp up, but not much. They increase by perceptible amounts. You feel the increases about as much as you would expect, and your heroes begin to feel powerful in comparison to the challenges put forth. You recognize there's a substantial difficult increase between Tier 1 and 2, but you also find that the spike isn't so bad after you can numerically get on top of it, learning some more tricks along the way too of course, new party comps, new combos, honing the way you move your way through quests. Everything starts to feel really good, and yes, you reckon with the fact that the game was always fair, you just needed to get much better at risk assessment, and because you do, that becomes obvious.
Why I rant and rave about _Darkest Dungeon_ as one of the GOATs (despite forgetting to make room for it on my [Insert Credit Video & Game Poll](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/990-2021-forumsinsertcreditcom-video-game-poll-results-thread) submission, oops!!!) however, is because of the transition between the middle and final difficulty environment (basically, Tier 2 to 3). I should point out that numerically speaking, there aren't _that_ many Numbers that increase by a totally unexpected level, as in, a way we would think of as mildly to moderately exponential rather than linear. The baseline for enemy accuracy is bumped up more than linearly, max damage of attacks gets a decent bump, Debuff Resistance is scaled in such a way where your really suppressive strategies are going to require more luck but nothing is rendered obsolete. Most players will enter their first Tier 3 Quest brimming with confidence, having seen a cavalcade of horrors, and will most likely begin one and end up seeing mostly recognizable threats. They hit harder, have more health, and some of your old tricks don't work quite as well, but nothing is that different, right?
It's likely during that first Tier 3 Quest that _Darkest Dungeon_ will pull the rug out from under you once again, because not only are all of those reasonably increased numerically communicated threats acting upon you cumulatively, but that's also when old enemies get new moves, and new more dangerous combinations of enemies appear, and most deliciously, brand new enemies that only appear in this Tier come to absolutely ruin your day. Tier 2 has a few of them, but the Tier 3 enemies are really interesting in the sense that they aren't so numerically impressive as to feel like they're just arbitrarily made more threatening than any other enemy. Rather, most of them simply represent vicious new tactical challenges you have to overcome. If any _Monster Hunter_ fans who have played a lot of any of the games before _X/Generations_ are reading this, think of the first time you tried G Rank hunts in any of the games before _Generations_ and lost your damn mind when a familiar monster whips out a new attack without warning and shreds through your crappy High Rank armor for ~ 60% of your health bar. It's a lot like that.
It's at this point that _Darkest Dungeon_ once again makes many player feel that the game really is unfair after all, that the player numbers are just not large enough, that all of their tricks and strategies were child's play. I mean, all of these numbers point to that, how are you supposed to contend with this climb in incoming damage or these meaty health pools? This is a really common sentiment. Doubly so once it kind of sinks in that the numerical advantage available for you to build into isn't going to keep you feeling that same sense of security you probably had during the middle tier. Once again, though, the solution is just that there is, somehow, more depth to uncover, more effective strategies, more ways to assess risk and even more importantly maximize reward. I guess this turned into a _Darkest Dungeon_ review at some point but to bring it back to the concept of the Small Number RPG, the Numbers at this point really don't leave you with any hope of returning to a position where you feel in control because your numbers are big enough. It communicates your only option; get better, and it's saying you need to get better at a game you probably thought you were totally hot shit at already. And, boy, overcoming that second major difficulty hike and being able to look back in that same way as the first one, and accepting that, no, the game wasn't unfair, you just hadn't yet learned everything about it, was so, so fulfilling. I had _Darkest Dungeon_ slap me back down from that point after dozens if not over a hundred hours of play, _twice,_ before I finally felt like I was capable of beating it on a third near complete playthrough. Maybe that makes me not very good at the game, but damnit, I really can't think of any other single game where I had to put in probably something approaching 200 hours before I felt capable of beating it once and for all (mind you, I had become so intimidated by the final challenge that when I finally committed myself to it, I crushed it beyond all recognition, which was itself a pretty goddamn satisfying way to experience it I must say), and I was still learning things by the end of that third playthrough.
Anyway-
### _THE BOTTOM LINE_
### _DARKEST DUNGEON IS COWBOY SURGERY_