Darkest Dungeon 2

This is a misery porn Rogue-like game with turn-based combat. You assemble a team of 4 characters and venture across a ruined, apocalyptic world in the futile hope of somehow saving humanity.

Caveat: this game is a sequel to Darkest Dungeon, and superficially resembles the original, but it's a totally different game. In the original you manage a roster, equip your team for a mission, and then attempt to survive the mission. This game is structured more like Slay the Spire, with a branching path you must follow from node to node—no backtracking allowed. However, you can start over anytime you like and your characters miraculously come back to life.

I played this game for 11 hours before giving up in disgust.

THE GOOD:

• The graphics and sound effects are amazing. They are perfectly thematic. I found myself frequently looking closely at the animations because they were so cool.
• I like the little stories they developed for each character, which you experience as you unlock their abilities. They are creative and interesting.
• It's apparently no longer possible to lose the campaign, whereas the original (in non-Radiant difficulty level) could at some point trap you with a useless roster from which you couldn't recover, or simply give you a Game Over screen if you waited too long.

THE BAD:

• They took everything good from original game and mixed it up into something bad. This game is not fun. It's the opposite of fun. It's miserable. It's misery porn. If you like suffering, I guess you might like this game.
• They've reduced the game from a 360 degree challenge of dungeon delving into a series of combat encounters. It got dull for me really quickly.
• The combo feature (multiple party members working together to tag an enemy with an abstract "combo" symbol, which another party member can take advantage of) is overly difficult to pull off and vastly underpowered those rare times when you do manage it.
• You start out miserably weak compared to the bosses and looking down the barrel of an endless slog to grind your way up to being able to beat them. Maybe this would be OK if the game were tuned differently, but the combat gets pretty stale and repetitive surprisingly quickly. The original DD1 kept combat fresh by forcing you to change your party of four often and giving you many different environments to explore. DD2 allows you to grind the same party over and over and seems to only have two environments. Probably, this is a concession due to the massively more ambitious visual effects, but it comes at a huge cost to replayability.
• The relationship mechanic really ruins this game. Your characters randomly form relationships with each other, which can cause them to actually start harming or helping each other during combat—depending on if the relationship is positive or negative. The game is tuned to heavily favour negative relationships. In my second play-through, literally every member of the team hated everyone else and the game broke, becoming ludicrously impossible to play. The relationships are largely outside of your control, with party members sniping at each other even while they're traveling together overland (outside of combat), pushing them inevitably toward that tantrum that guarantees ruining their relationships with everyone else. It's a horrible mechanic that leaves you, the player, feeling helpless and frustrated, with little or no influence over the train wreck you can see coming just over the horizon. It's the kind of game mechanic that makes me say, "Fuck this game."
• Quirks are usually negative and annoying, inflicted constantly, and very difficult to remove, making this another nice little bit of suffering in the misery porn that is DD2.

THE UGLY:

• DD1 had a very intuitive user interface, which makes it all the more perplexing that they messed up this badly in DD2. The game is downright confusing. It took me at least 8 hours before I had any sense I understood what on earth was going on. I could tell when a fight was happening, but everything else was a mystery.
• DD1 used coloured words to describe the game attributes (like orange "burn" damage or green "blight" damage). This was easy and intuitive. DD2 instead replaces the word with a symbol, which is a huge no-no from a user interface design perspective. It takes a lot of time to learn all the symbols and requires frequent mouse-overs and looking at the reference guide. And there is often no mouse-over or explanation at all for a particular symbol.
• The equipment is, in many cases, very obscurely described. It's really difficult to equip your team because it's so hard to understand what the items are doing.