Demon's Souls and Dark souls are two of my favourite games of the last ten-ish years of computer game releases. You trudge through a miserable husk of a world ravaged by monsters allowed to run amok after years of systemic abuse by the monarchies who claim to be in charge. Levels are often designed with devious traps (both terrain and often very funny enemy placements) and an oppressive tone no matter if the architecture is Medieval or Gothic styled. Almost every one of the scant humans willing to talk to you are grifters, liars or extremists. All punctuate their often cryptic conversations with unsettling laughs. Whether you're playing as a pragmatic ranged archer/spellcaster, a damage tanking warrior wielding a heavy weapon or abusing the invulnerability frames on a lightweight roll, there's plenty of room to find your own voice in the combat.
I've been in a game of Gloomhaven for a few months now. It's a grid-based tabletop RPG with a map that slowly fills with information as you complete combat instances. There's a miserable tone to all the flavour text and a sense that you're trying to make as many material gains in the fight as you can before you're out of your scant resources. I'm sure to plenty of people who enjoy From Software's various Souls games, Bloodborne and so on there's a lot to love in both games and they take to Gloomhaven with ease.
I do not care for Gloomhaven.
As a competitor and event organiser for digital fighting games, I have come to love how rarely an umpire is needed. Most of the tedious details of officiating a sport are handled by a computer. If something's legal, the game allows it. If not, you usually can't do it.When in the fight I just need to think about my positioning, my timing, my strategies, my emotions. When I tap roll while buffering a chug of the estus flask or taking a step backwards before swinging to avoid a traded blow, I don't need to spend five minutes checking a rule book index. When I cast a spell I can observe the effects and the resource cost immediately without arguing about the meaning of "for five minutes" in a specific context.
Gloomhaven is a computer game made analogue. Invisible background processes are brought to the foreground. The cold, calculated mechanics are the main form of expression. That's not what I enjoy about tabletop roleplaying. For me it's about the music between the notes. The silly voices and bad acting. The times when half an hour is dedicated to processing and venting about trauma from elsewhere in life. The improvised riffing that leads to locking an enchanted chest with an irritated groan as the password. Manipulating a paladin to spending precious energy casting "Detect Good & Evil" on their fast food meal. In Gloomhaven the only characterisation you're allowed are one or two binary choices to determine whether you receive material benefits or penalties at the next combat instance.
The marketing of Dark Souls spruiked the game's cruelty and difficulty. While it can certainly be a challenging game, it's still one built to be overcome by players with some patience, reflection and an eye for attention to the world they're navigating. Gloomhaven builds its cruelty and difficulty around entropy. You begin with a hand of cards and must play two every turn, selecting one action from each. When they're empty, you must spend a turn recovering them and placing one into a "lost" pile where it cannot be used for the rest of the game session with certain exceptions. The idea is to force players to pursue mission completion over slowly farming every potential resource point. In practice it means that while I have yet to run out of cards, two players in my group do almost every mission. That means an hour or so where people in the group have lost their only means of interaction with the game. In a souls game when you die you lose any "Souls" (currency and EXP combined) but you ca nalways gain more. You just step away from the bonfire and return to the action. In Gloomhaven you're stuck to being that guy in the group who plays music or funny videos from their phone.
I love action computer games but find combat in tabletops to be tedious. Different media have different strengths and Gloomhaven feels like it's playing to weaknesses instead. I'll keep playing because it's time with friends but it's steadily reigniting my passion for my dumb DND game where I once made the party reenact Pac-Man.
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