Gloomhaven on PC🐓 feels exactly like the board game that inspired it. It’s exciting, overwhelming, confusing, and immersive all at once. It also has the advantage of not requiring you to separate all the different card types and begin a tirade of four-letter words amongst your friends before it’s even out of the box.
It's a fantasy focused turn-based strategy game that sees one to four players adventure in and around the titular town. It centres around an ongoing narrative about a band of mercenaries, each with their own individual goals to pursue, and the outcome of prior events influences future ones. Everything you do matters, and this keeps you invested in the story as you and your friends progress.
During solo play, you can control up to four characters at once. If you move into co-op multiplayer, each person in the group controls their own. The game’s dungeon 𒁃difficulty is also adjusted to match the number of people playing. The more characters involved in the adventure, the harder it gets.
While Gloomhaven’s basics are relatively easy to grasp, several quirks make mastering it very difficult. The game mode you play also hugely affects the difficulty curve with the campaign feeling like nightmare diffi𝔉culty, even when set to easy. Take it from me, regardless of your familiarity with Gloomhaven as a tabletop game you will probably want to start off with the tutorial. You can either play through it sepa☂rately in parts, or there’s a skippable version folded into Guildmaster mode.
In simple terms, each character has a deck of class-specific ability cards with two options per card. During each round, you must choose two cards. If you use the top action on your first card, then you must use the bottom action on the other card, or vice versa. This means that you constantly have to think ahead. Not only can you accidentally stop yourself from being able to make a move you’d planned on, but you can end up scဣuppering your next round as well. Unless you know the game well, you’ll inevitably do this many times when starting out.
Forward planning is essential in Gloomhaven and you’ll need to quickly learn how abilities work together as you must carefully balance your party, especially when playing alone. Each character has different strengths, with the typical RPG staples like DPS, healing, tanking, and spellcasting being on offer. Combining them yields more options, but can also get very overwhelming, very quickly. The system is further complicated by the fact that you will regularly lose 🦹cards - both temporarily and permanently - as you progress through the dungeon.
If this 🌼all sounds very familiar to you, that’s likely because you’ve played the tabletop game. Gloomhaven’s digital counterpart plays exactly the same way and is the most faithful digital adaptation of a board game I’ve ever seen. It now incorporates all 17 playable characters, 47 enemy types, and 95 scenarios from the original tabletop experience. There are also digital exclusive characters, enemies, bosses, environments, and stories in the game’s Guildmaster mode. The level of content is astonishing, and the adaptation faithful, but the harsh difficulty curve in the campai🌱gn makes some elements less enjoyable than others.
Guildmaster is a unique way to play that uses all the existing Gloomhaven characters - both mercenaries and enemies - and puts them into new scenarios, adding extra content to keep things fresh, even for tabletop veterans. Meanwhile, the campaign mode does what it says on the tin and contains the full legacy campaign from the board game. This adds hundreds of stories to explore and quests to go on, while the addition of a sandbox mode and level editor ꦰadds loads more permutations to delve into, many of which you can create yourself.
Sandbox mode is an especially nice touch as it unlocks all the player characters from the start, making it handy to experiment with and master specific ♐classes. This mode’s dungeons also appear to be procedurally generated, offering a different challenge each time you play.
Campaign mode follows the boardgame campaign but in a difficulty mode that made me wonder how I ever completed any quests in Gloomhaven’s tabletop counterpart. Even on the easiest difficulty, you must create the perfect combination of characters to adventure with and use some serious strategic thinking. One wrong move and everything falls apart. You aren’t thinking a move ahead here, you better be ready to think six moves ahead, as there’s no coming back from a mistake. While Guildmaster allows a little flexibility, Campജaign won’t tolerate it.
I found this incredibly frustrating and spent hours trying to g🌞et past the very first challenge. If you want to play tabletop Dark Soul🧔s, then Campaign is for you - otherwise, the more balanced and well-rounded Guildmaster is the one to play.
For both the Campaign and Guildmaster modes, you m𝄹ust form a guild for your characters. However, guilds and characters aren’t transferable acr🌺oss different modes. This means you can’t gear up a party in Guildmaster and take them to dominate over in Campaign, which is particularly frustrating given the latter’s difficulty appears to be set to ‘make me want to throw my PC through a window’.
You’ll soon develop a love-hate relationship with the game’s unique mechanics as fortunes can be changed in an instant. My lowest moment was in a dungeon where I had almost cleared the final room, after several failed attempts. Half my team were exhausted and it was down to me and two enemies. Close to the end of my deck, I chose my cards carefully. I n💧eeded to heal and attack, since I couldn’t take out both enemies in one turn due to range. Except, I couldn’t attack. I was supposed to use the less powerful heal on the other card and now all I could do was heal again - when I didn’t need it - or move two spaces. While I put some distance between my character and his foes it wasn’t enough and I went down, hard.
While these moments are incredibly frustrating, they do make your victories taste a little sweeter. The times when you manage to pull o✤ff a combo of moves that take out four mobs at once, thanks to a lucky boost, or the close fights where you clear the final room with a sliver of health and no backup. These are the times that keep you going, along with the immersive backdrop.
Gloomhaven has a striking fantasy aesthetic that roots it firmly in the dungeon crawler genre. The level of detail is astonishing and everything is pixel perfect. Each character has a unique look, from capes that look like fur, to ethereal skin details. Even each brick in the dungeon has individual markings on it. Each dungeon is also marked out with hexes, to match the game board, yet they blend seamlessly into the design. The tabletop game art is all present and turned up to 11, featuring the perfect mix of playable dungeons and cutscenes to help develop the storyline. The gloomy ambience of the origi🅘nal grows even gloomier in Gloomhaven on PC, wi🍌th a soundtrack that perfectly complements the action.
For die-hard Gloomhaven fans who want to play alone, it’s especially good. It allows you to dive straight into a gam💦e with no setup and leaves you completely disconnected from worrying about the monsters and setup, allowing you to focus purely on the coming journey. T🎃he multiplayer option also allows you to connect with friends from all over the world.
I should note that I was playing a beta version of Gloomhaven’s campaign mode as the finished product is only due to be released now, as the game leaves early access. Changes were still being made over the last week, so there may be some welcome adjustments in the final version. In particular, I hope they address the campaign difficulty as it’s currently virtually inaccessible for me. Regardless, I'll still be playing Guildmaster.
Gloomhaven is a solid version of the classic tabletop experience that offers turn-based combat, unique classes a🍌nd abilities, an🐭d detailed quests.
Gloomhaven is out now for PC. The Mac OS v💟ersion will also be leaving early access in the ne♊xt few weeks.
Score 4 out of 5
A PC code was provided by the publisher.
Gloomhaven adapts the🙈 popular tabletop RPG for PC, with console versions planned. You take on the role of a mercenary, who must seek battle and🐟 fortune in a series of dungeons.