I did a search and the only thread I saw on this game is an unreplied one from early last year. If I missed a megathread somewhere, please merge.
I bought and started playing Darkest Dungeon last night. It looked really interesting from the trailer, but I refused to buy any Early Access game...last night I made an exception. The one thing everyone said in every review is "even though its early access there is more content than most finished games". This is true. I spent the entire night playing like a friggin addict. Its rare I lose track of time, but I did during my first session.
If you are considering picking up this title, I highly suggest you do. The tone and atmosphere of the game are worth it for the experience alone. The core mechanics of the game hinge on the type of player sanity (stress) that make the Lovecraftian universe so endearing. Gameplay is actually extremely simple, but also surprisingly complex. Obviously the game itself is a turn-based dungeon crawler that has a new stylized animation spin on a very old style of game (reminding me of those old first person dungeon games like Wizardry).
The true highlight for me is also the most frustrating part of the game for me, and that is the Stress. As your heroes adventure they will get more and more stressed out. Some enemy attacks specificaly stress them, meanwhile some actions will cause them to freak. Once they reach their max they get a negative trait and start to freak out...which cascades by freaking the rest of the party out. Eventually you have a group full of insane lunatics all shouting random things (associated with the type of trait they picked up) and sometimes doing specific things you can't control. Sometimes though, they will have a heroic moment and power through the stress to pick up a positive trait, but this is rare.
While playing, when I was in a dungeon I just wanted to get out and get back to town so I could log off and play something else like Skyrim. But when I got back to town I just wanted to "do one more dungeon". I realized that the dungeons were effectively stressing ME out and had to tip my hat to the game and the developers.
BTW, after 11 Weeks (basically 11 dungeons) I have lost almost 10 heroes. I've only been doing the basic "green" difficulty dungeons. I haven't even thought about trying a hard one. So don't get attached to anyone. They can die in the blink of an eye.