You take over as the nebulous caretaker of a Hamlet set in a corrupted and infested land. You eventually unlock the normal fantasy town tropes, from an Inn, Blacksmith and even a Sanitarium.
You start on with two heroes(Highwaymen and Crusader), and then start attracting new heroes by stage coach each "turn". There are 10 types of heroes currently, with the final release showing 5-6 more:
It's a very challenging game. You never have enough money to go around. Just venturing into the dungeon requires a few grand in Food, Torches, Shovels. Other gear can be helpful too, but you are usually scraping by as-is.
A different set of missions are available each turn. Mostly either fight based objectives, or explore objectives, or killing a named monster type objectives.
Sometimes a mission will be bigger and longer and require you to bring 1 or more pieces of logs for a campfire. Heroes have camping skills along with fighting skills. Healing, reducing ambush, bonus to scouting, all types of sanity control. etc.
You need a few teams of heroes to rotate on missions. Long missions will leave even the hardiest dude full of new shitty attributes (he suddenly is fascinated with the dead and will disturb every corpse we come across) and have to be cleansed and distracted back into fighting shape.
The art direction and narration is amazing. When things go right or wrong, the narrator lets you know: "HOW QUICKLY THE TIDE TURNS!"
"EXECUTED WITH IMPUNITY!"
When you take a hero out too long, and his sanity breaks, he has a small chance to come through it better off than before. A small chance.... the other times he develops some bad personality trait - like "abusive" and he will berate other members of the party, bringing their sanity up to his crazy level and will do dumb shit, like opens traps, blunders into ambushes, etc.
Edited By Troy on 1423510377