Dawn of Madness: Discussion

0:09 some viewers may find the following video disturbing viewer discretion is advised hey everyone welcome back to Bard games unlocked and today I'm doing a discussion over Dawn Of Madness this game has been a long time coming if you watch any of my anticipated games of like for the next year uh this was on it forever and I think I took it off last year because it just I was like well I have no idea when it's coming out but it is finally here at least the core game and okay buckle up because I have a lot of thoughts here and I've been trying to uh categorize it all in my head just of the sheer amount of stuff that is in in this game um overall I think this game is great like I want to get that out of the way I really really like this game um but at the same time this game is absolutely not for everyone like I feel like this has is going to have a niche group or a niche following just because of the route that they took uh for the design of this game which has a lot of uniqueness this game has a lot of really really cool ideas inspirations from stuff that I absolutely love um and the the amount of work that went into this cannot be understated but that same amount of work

1:42 almost feels like a prideful arrogance on the designer's part and and I I hope to explain what I mean by that but overall I want to get out of the way I do think this game is great so Dawn Of Madness is kind of a really good example example of a long game that is not a campaign game but has slight campaign elements so the biggest Crux of what I mean by this why this isn't going to be for a lot of people is because this game is so [ __ ] long it is and it will always be long the there are four Wanderers is what they're called four playable characters in the game and each of them has four endings and this is a this is great at the same time but it's also kind of like it's kind of like a double-edged sword so the game each Wonder has four different endings and each of those endings so first of all there are two stages when you're playing again there's The Wanderer stage which is the Crux of the game like it's going to be the the 75% 80 85% of your game but if you don't succeed in The Wanderer stage you don't get to go to the second stage which is the finale uh because you have conditions you need to make and each Wanderer has different rules for how The Wanderer stage goes so if you don't meet those criteria you don't get to do the finale therefore you technically lose um and so you don't get an ending

3:16 but again each Wonder has four different endings each ending from what I've been seeing online and from my own personal experience takes on average 5 hours and that is just like five 5 to 6 hours and this is after multiple playthroughs of this game of understanding the rules and the great thing about this game is it's not that rules heavy I think they actually did a really good job of streamlining it for the most part this looks like a lot of stuff mainly it's just like fluff for artwork which is immaculate by the way grotesque and if you're not into horror games then I mean you're not you're probably not going to like the art um but each one of the each one of the the sessions you're playing is at least 5 hours long if you if you win it might be shorter of course if you just outright lose uh but so here's the thing one of the characters is the priest and his name is lonus so normally you have 10 rounds to complete like killing a a boss and getting a certain number of story points uh to dictate your ending you have 10 rounds to do that one way you you lose is if all the wanders are dead or if by the 10th round you haven't killed the Abomination or you haven't gotten enough story points um so but luses was seven it's seven fixed rounds and so even if you kill the

4:46 Abomination uh you still have to finish out the seven rounds Because by the end of that that kind of dictates uh your ending and again his the reason why his seven fix rounds is still really cool but man I haven't played a game that's not a campaign game like I've done sessions I mean anyone who watches my channel knows I do series for it and I'll sit down and play all day of a campaign but that's multiple different videos this is one game and it's like okay boom like we're done we finally finished it that's one ending which is awesome but at the same time potentially not awesome because there's a double-edged sword to the length so there is there is no save system which is I think an absolute flaw in this because whenever there are whenever the game is going so long and it's like oh we didn't expect it to be this long well how can we pack everything up so we can play come back and pick up the wanderer stage again oh you can't not inherently yeah you can come with your own home brew way and take pictures and all that and try and organize it but there's just so much to try to keep track of at least in my opinion it would be very annoying to actually try and Implement your own safe system because they just didn't make one they I and I think that's a huge problem

6:16 like it feels like they wanted players to just really get immersed into the game and you absolutely can do that this game makes it so easy to get into this type of setting uh through their writing the depictions of the cards the actions um that's I mean that's pretty much it so like you easily can get immersed and the time does fly by like whenever I was done finally doing one of these uh like finales I was like oh that was about 6 hours it felt longer but like it still kind of flew by um but yeah not having a safe system I think is is really will hurt this game um kind of hurts it for me and I mean I love Campaign games anyone who watches my top 10 or top 100 or anticipated whatever all my lists uh knows that's it's like hey it's another narrative driven campaign game and this is a narrative driven game but at the same time the campaign The Narrative driven Campaign games are an hour hour and a half 2 hours it's like okay boom we're done with this we can pack it up save it pick it up at a later date you can't do that here if you're going to play this you're kind of in it for the 5 hours so the length is great and the replayability is great because again you're you're not guaranteed an ending but therein lies another problem

7:46 so I have played this game both on their regular uh like the regular Straight Out of the Box rules and then they later came out with kind of a story mode an easy mode so it's like okay you don't want the survival aspect you just want to read and get into the story so here's like a uh a easier challenge um so both of those modes like the the normal mode is brutal like you are constantly swarmed by enemies your ways of dealing damage to those enemies are are based kind of on Randomness you have tons of ways to mitigate um and you have ways to actually kill them and and it's it's not super hard but you still have a lot to manage there's a lot of them that are always going to go before you so it's about managing your your time and your domains and stuff and I'll and I'll talk about all that but like not only that do you have regular enemies you have Abominations you have if you die you come back with malformations which are basically more enemies and some finales that you're going up against are even more brutal so it's it's like your chances of survival are very very slim so then it's like okay well I don't want to keep reading the same stuff over and over and over because we can't win so then you play story mode and story mode is definitely a lot easier like one example is one of the opening uh things

9:19 that spawn monsters was it was like hey bring out this monster and then like this the regular mode was bring out this monster and spawn two random ones so you had three enemies that same instance in story mode was just bring out the named monster so it is a lot easier and I'm sure like players can come up with better ways probably just cheating and I mean I I always say for games like this do whatever it takes to make it fun like if it's like okay we lost and hey we're right back exactly where we started let's continue we're fully healed do whatever you want like it's a board game you are allowed to do that uh if it's a video game you're kind of so you just get good I guess um cuz you can't forcibly I guess you can mod the game but yeah so so the difficulty is also insanely High I think and they even have modes in the rules for for a longer game it's like what what do you mean a longer game and that kind of leads into my segue of they did a lot of writing for the game obviously and the writing is good to a point like I I think the the the writing is is good and it's immersive but at the same time it's kind of for me I got like an air of I don't know just hey I put so much effort into writing this so I want to make sure that you read it do you do you you like it do you want to read do you want to keep reading please read I've written books

10:50 before please read my book please read my like and it's like I I want to play the game and the the writing and and storytelling should should complement that not have everything pulled into that cuz there's a lot of times where if you're playing this one or two players like the game I just played was lioness's story um in the in fire cleanse this is the one that I just did and it's like you have his stories and then you have the other player stories that are kind of like so he's a part of this church of the Sacred fire and then you have the other people who are kind of initiates in that so to progress before it because there's rules where it's like you have to resolve these tokens uh otherwise you just outright lose so he has to do one token the other players have to do two so there are times where you're going back and forth where it's like and it's long it's not like paragraphs it's like some of them are half a page like this text is Tiny uh and there's a lot of it like I said it is good writing but whenever you're sitting there and it's like okay one person's reading I'm the strongest reader here so I guess I'll be the one doing it uh all right let me read this page this half a page thing for me and we'll do the stuff that it says to do for game wise okay your turn oh okay back into the book time to read another half page that is from your point of view and it is exciting but his story in particular kind of got a

12:23 little I don't know it it came off a little pretentious and that could just be the over the the the feeling they were trying to evoke because it's from this cult or Church of the Sacred fire same thing um but just understand that the story aspects are going to take up a majority of it there's a lot of times where it's like hey we're going to be sitting here for 10 minutes while one person reads to us and if you don't have anyone in your group that doesn't like to read then or you don't have players who like to listen to reading don't never come near this game ever like like literally avoid it like the plague because you cannot avoid it um so yeah there's a lot of times where it's like okay oh that was a lot did everyone enjoy that did they do a good job voice acting yeah I know my throat yeah I'm bleeding yeah my throat hurts it's bleeding I'm coughing up blood uh but all right let's play okay I'm going to move right here like I'm going to go right here and I'm going to activate that token oh good thank you thank you so much oh man where where you at okay cool mhm it's a long one cool and that and that's there for 5 hours so uh so yeah it's not like there's a lot of reading up front then you play the game it's interspersed in it so again it I I feel like I'm [ __ ] on the writing or the storytelling and I'm not it's it is really good

13:56 um and but it is a lot so and my my biggest thing that I could say about that is I wish I wish I wish I wish with all my heart that they [ __ ] paid for audio narration like maybe they can I don't know like this company Dimension games is I know they're not like the the biggest company in the world and I'm sure for teller is expensive to do um I wish they had for teller or something like cuz o sworn doesn't have for teller they had their own thing like if they're working on that please let me know that would make me so happy because one it allows you it allows for Ambiance it allows someone else to do the reading so someone else so what a player isn't doing it um and reading for as long as I do it just kills my throat uh but I also am not one to like people reading for me so I'm kind of like well I guess I'll be the one to do it so yeah I wish there was audio narration uh cuz this game like drips with theme like when I'm reading stuff I'm thinking this could be a video game like I like the the the graphical design that they could take with this stuff it's so it's so descriptive that it's like boom yeah I'm thinking Dead Space I'm thinking Evil Within I'm thinking bloodborne like

15:26 seeing it in a in a video game setting or movie setting would be would be Immaculate so you could have ambiance you could have sound like sound and noises and and you know Stellar WR uh not writing Stellar voice acting of for multiple characters that would just it with background music that would just really enhance this so it's kind of like yeah it it it it's a lot so with that being said what's the actual gamepl like and it's it's so good this game does a really really cool job of blending again narration with mechanisms and strategy because a lot of times it's kind of like oh the narration is the heaviest part so we really didn't put a lot of gameplay behind it but no there are many many times that it becomes a strategy on how you're going to deal with the enemies and the enemies you can tell exactly what they're going to do they utilize the this uh uh mentality track which I've seen in other games uh where it's kind of like actions take a certain amount of time in this case it's your mental state but so where it's like okay I want to do this really big move that's going to put me four down the track so I'm below everyone so as if people do multiple short actions they're going to keep going until it's my turn again same exact thing here you you manage like all your actions that pretty

16:59 much cost uh a certain amount of mental capacity and you're balancing that with other players as well as the Abomination and as well as the Terrors so if you do an action that brings you down in the same spot as the Terrors well they're going to go before you get to go so you're constantly looking at what they're going to do what the Abomination is going to do and being like wow I really don't want that to go off um so can I try can we try to kill it before it gets a chance to go and I love that I love being able to see what they're going to do because if you don't have ways to stop it it's going to happen um the only thing that you don't quite know is the Abominations have a deck of cards um that you still know it you the card the cards face up so you know how to damage it and you know how to you know what it's going to do on its turn uh but the only Randomness is like okay if I do damage it the next card comes out face up a little a little bit similar to the oor where it's like well there's not really anything I can do about that except damage it and discard the card but then a new one's going to come out that we have to deal with so it is still it's like Kind of Perfect knowledge uh which again I really really enjoy because like I said the game is not easy you knowing what the enemies are going to do and how much time or mental capacity it's going to cost them really doesn't help you except maybe run

18:31 away but then like that's kind of a waste of action when you have other goals you have to deal with so I love the the um the the mental capacity track it's so good so simple because eventually everyone's going to get down to zero and that ends around and the there's basically three phases the event phase where you read a story entry that kind of sets it's kind of like a setup of that round the action phase you do your actions still have one hit zero and then the cleanup phase um so that's really cool and what's also really neat in a two or thre player game you're given these support cards and these support cards have all the actions on them in different combinations this one has encounter or domain this one has uh move and search and a two-player game basically you can use these uh not in a row but to do that action on the card without it spending mental capacity so it's essentially a free action it's to compensate for the fact that there's not two wonders I think that works pretty damn well in the finale not as much it felt like the finale that the one that we just did it was like we kind of need other players cuz these cards are not doing it and so it was very very difficult um but those cards do work really well for the Wanderer stage a lot when it's like cool cuz what you're trying to do

20:03 is um every character has these uh existance cards which are kind of like special abilities that uh when you get tokens which is like a currency you can get from story events or killing enemies uh you can spend those on uh upgrades for your character there's not a lot uh that you start out with but um the ones that are there are really good I think it definitely went quality over quantity uh like CU for example Emily has a card urgent needs you may perform a move Action for free on your Activation so like if you really need to move like you can use that to move for free so then you can do one of your support cards that's for an encounter action or domain action or whatever it might be so the cool thing about the game is you're strategizing and creating kind of a build that Mak makes the mental capacity track uh like a lot more efficient where it's like hey now I don't have to spend you know two of my mental capacity to move two spaces I can just move for free now and so you constantly stay above the enemies meaning you're get getting more banged for your buck because the more actions you can do before they get a chance to go the better off you're going to be and I really like that there's a lot of opportunities to do that uh and not only that do the characters have existence cards there's this stack of domain cards which are these uh

21:33 basically items that are in every every game like you have a revolver you have this magnifying glass a flaring torch first aid kit it's just like oh it's an action to search draw the top card and these are multi-use cards uh for either an action on it or for the tokens that it provides so you can also only have a certain amount of those on you but but they can become extremely helpful like one card I got in this last game was a meat hook that increased one of my stats but also if there was a monster adjacent to me I could spend two mental capacity to basically pull it into my spot and then attack it for free so just things like that where it's like hey now I don't have to move into your spot now I don't have to spend the mental capacity to attack you uh it's just everything like card wise is like there's not a lot like you're not sitting here in eldrich like eldrich with a stack of items that's like well all these suck um all of them are good like so it's like it behooves you to search but that's another mental capacity that's another action to do to search uh so that is really cool the best thing that this game provides and I have never seen it in any other game um so to me it is completely unique and it is the idea of these

23:05 domain I don't want to like spill everything but these domains and the domain tokens so there are five domains don't remember what they're called but basically it's hands eyes skull brain and sphere is what I I've been calling them this is the Crux of the game I think this is like your own resource management and this is the most complex part of the game although once you get a game in you know once five once you're 5 hours in you know into one game uh it'll it'll make sense but there is still a lot because not only do each of these domains do something the tokens within them also do something and you also have to manage your stats so they provide you with these uh uh tear off sheets uh that you ride on and I think this is the best way to do it like I was like why don't they do dials or something I think it would have been a lot more annoying it's just easy because you're constantly adjusting these every time you get a kod a codex no a Koda card or an item it's like oh plus one to Red oh okay oh my red was one now it's two oh I spent that card so now it's back to one it's just easier to keep this nearby than constantly [ __ ] with dials but essentially what all of these tokens do and these various um domains that they're in manipulate the dice and

24:36 this is such an awesome way to use Dice and how it's just so cool so basically you have five stats uh red purple blue green and yellow and whenever you're told to make a check or to test or to do something you just look at that number in your sheet and it's like oh my yellow is five I am rolling five dice and it told me to test for hands okay so I'm rolling five dice uh one two three four five I need three hands in this okay well I rolled one hand but I have a yellow token in my hands domain and what that means is the hands ability let you roll any number of matching color dice so that means I could spend my yellow domain to roll yellow dice so that's kind of how they work like the domains it's just it matters what the colors are in those sections so it's like okay cool I'm going to reroll these four because I need hands okay I didn't get any but I did get a sphere and the sphere is kind of a wild if you have that matching color in your sphere domain so if I had a yellow sphere I could spend that and turn that that sphere result into a hand that I need so that's essentially how kind of that works the yellows let you reroll spars let you turn things into Wilds or turn Wilds into the things you need the brain and this quick reference it's made

26:07 of paper which is kind of ass but the content on the quick reference is is very very good because it just oh domain special effects um the uh the brain basically lets you perform actions without having to spend mental capacity that's another way to subvert the uh like to get free action so it's like if you have a green in the brain domain that's a move and you can move up to three spaces you can attack with red you can do or do confrontation there is a difference attacking is for regular enemies confrontation is the Abomination um the blue lets you do a domain or search action domain is basically each of these cards these World sphere cards are have like a icon at the top left of three colors and that basically means you roll those colors and whatever the results are you take those tokens and put them into your spots um so that's ways for you to get more tokens not guaranteed tokens in certain spots but more tokens are always just going to be good yellow lets you do an encounter or a component action component actions like other games or cards on your that you have that say action and encounter actions are what you do to read from the book and then if you have a purple in your brain that lets you do any action so then there's that the skull domain lets you uh lets other wers roll

27:39 extra dice doesn't matter where they're at um which is also really cool because thematically this is like you're a test subject of like this getting to another there's like another realm or another world within the mind so that's why you you have other people kind of pulled into your own subconscious so it's like oh I have um a green I have two greens in my skull thing oh you need to roll uh green a green check okay well I'll spend these and you can add two green dice to your to your pool and then last but not least is the eye domain which is how you which is observation I think and that prevents damage so whenever you're being attacked it's like hey you're taking purple damage okay my purple is three so I'm going to roll and try to get eyes out of out of my result oh I didn't get any okay I have two purples in my eye domain I'm going spend those to prevent two damage and you can also spend other tokens and stuff for that but I went into all of that I went to like to explain how [ __ ] cool this domain section is I think it's brilliant I will say it's still a lot to manage because not only do you have you want certain colors and certain tokens and certain sections um you're also still at the whim of the tokens do nothing for you unless you can unless your stats kind of can do that because they all kind of

29:09 manipulate dice if your red stat is zero not really the hand section doesn't do anything for you because you can't roll which you can't roll uh you can't turn Wilds in anything you can't roll so there the domain spots are only good if you have the initial stat to accompany it or vice versa um and that could be super brutal because there's a lot of times you come across checks that are like hey you need uh test your red and you need five hands okay well I have three in Red so I literally cannot get five hands so I guess I autof fail so a lot of times in in the reading you can just have checks that's like nope I fail I fail like I can't do it I can't like I can't even and like try to compete against that and it does seem like they they have written stuff in the sense that's like they want you to replay the game clearly they want you to replay the game uh with the four different endings but it's like I don't have the time to replay your game because it's 5 hours long at least but yeah the domain thing is just so cool and what's what's even better is whenever you're doing checks um like one if you're doing if you're attacking the Abomination you can turn these codak cards so it's like cuz to attack the Abomination um you need to have like it

30:40 it'll have a card on it and it'll be like hey to do damage to this like so they're so far away but basically the cards will have icons at the top that you need of a certain color like it'll be like purple yellow and green so you take uh all your colors so it's like a for um my girlfriend's uh stats for purple yellow and green she had five in yellow four in purple and and two in and two in green so she would roll 11 dice uh total and looking for specific symbols of those colors if you meet that then at the bottom right of the card it's how much damage you deal to it so it's not like oh I need a certain number of results it's if I get these icons that's what this card does and it actually discards the card so that's how you can cycle through it and avoid abom ation attacks which is really neat but uh creatures when they spawn um whatever World Shard they jump on uh you roll those di so if this creature if this rabid Mongrel uh showed up randomly on the lighthouse it's three purple I roll those three and you find in my case I actually don't have the tokens to put on it the rift tokens um my copy didn't come with any so I've been using dice but it's like oh it's a purple eye a purple skull and a blue uh a blue bra or a purple brain and those are how you try to damage them so it's like when you attack them you pick one of those three

32:11 and those are the results you're trying to get so if you were trying to attack this you would be like okay I'm going to try and go for the purple brain with my purple stats so I roll four purple Dice and for each brain result you get or spheres that you can turn into brains that that's how much damage you do to it and then that Rift token goes away meaning it has less uh weaknesses on it so unique so unique but I will say that can kind of dictate how difficult an enemy is if you have if all players have a really low red stat and that's all that's left on an enemy it's not going away until you find ways to actually damage it however like I mentioned these domain cards are Dual Purpose they at the bottom they have these stat that you can just get rid of to add these domain tokens uh to to your thing sorry to add them to a check um and then the coda cards are kind of the same way when you attack an Abomination you can permanently get or ex permanently exhaust the coda card to be able to add the relevant dice to your result so they gave you a ton of ways a ton of ways to mitigate the dice but that doesn't mean that you're not going to be in a situation where if you're asked to roll a certain color and you just don't have those domain tokens in your like if it's like hey I get to roll five yellow dice that's

33:41 amazing but I have zero ways to mitigate that you are still going to be at the whim of a die roll and it's like man okay I need three hands with this I got none so like and that's it so it's still dice at the end of the day but I think that that adds to an ER of strategy in this game because it's not just roll and resolve like you have tons of ways to prep for that but still at the same time you can come across story events that are just like hey test this random color that you would have had no way of ever knowing unless you've played this exact same Wanderer you know 15 times and you know exactly oh hey if if we do if we do this Choice it's going to be red it's going to be a red check but who has the time for that so yeah the domain thing is absolutely fantastic um other than that like the game is relatively straightforward like there's a ton of condition cards depending on your Abomination they might never come up ever like one rage I've had literally did uh um in venomed it just pumped you within Venom things uh the one that I just played actually manuver Ed and manipulated your domain tokens kind of Pop little Bliss babies on the thing and they moved around so and then like whenever they would jump on you they would damage you but then go into your like and manipulate your tokens it's uh it it's it and there's

35:14 quite a few Abominations I do wish there were more there were two families um that they added and there is a sense of Legacy element whether you win or lose um The Wander stage uh if you lose The Wanderer stage then actually you're punished for it which is kind of shitty because they prog the the families of those which is the oh God they're the rage family and the Masquerade family I think are the two families uh they get like permanent Buffs for that so I I don't really like that where it's like hey you lost this game that's a survival horror game um let's make it harder on you that's not necessarily super fun especially again it feels like they just really really wanted you to read their damn writing like they just forced some ways that it's like hey I put a lot of work in this and I I get that to an extent it's like clearly you put a lot of work into that but to force your players to kind of where it's like man I'm doing a lot of reading I'm not really playing your game well I worked really hard on it it's like right but I still want to play the game like it feels like they're making it difficult to kind of get into it at times um but yeah I so I'm not really a huge fan on that now speaking of the Legacy stuff like I mentioned this is

36:44 not a campaign game nor is it a legacy game but it has some slight elements to it so each Wanderer has like a forgotten envelope that as you do certain things in each game um will unlock cards from that and there's a lot of times where when someone's reading a passage it will ask hey if the the central Wanderer um like in this case for example in fire cleansed there were a lot of times a lot of times where it went to hey if lonus has not uh if this card is not in his envelope meaning that it's been unlocked before go to this section otherwise go to this so it has some really cool campaign Legacy elements to it and also you get um if you do complete a finale you get like a finale Legacy that's like a really good buff but you're only going to have one of those so if you get another one you put the previous one back and so but was also really neat is in Linus's thing it was like hey there's ending D but ending D you unlock through special events and I guess slight spoiler here but the the way to unlock ending D is basically by unlocking every other card from his envelope and I'm like what like I thought it like cuz he has these these three decks normally

38:15 there you get story points he doesn't do that he has a fire deck he has a c deck and he has a light deck and those those decks will dictate your ending I thought it was like oh you get this ending if you have the most of fire this this ending if you have the most of C this ending if you have the most of light I thought ending D was having an even number of all of them nope it's literally unlock everything for the character which is really cool and provokes a lot of thought and Forward Thinking in the narrative but that is some dedication um yeah and again it's not just a straightforward narrative you do make decisions depending on if you succeed or fail at checks that will take you to another thing like initially these books like this book is 76 pages and I I was like man I thought they was going to be bigger but the text is so tiny that it it is a lot of of writing in there um so yeah the game play is fantastic this domain uh and domain token system is awesome each character plays completely unique each story is completely unique and it's even unique within the same story cuz I've played Li this stuff multiple times and even reading the like yeah the starting is going to be the same but as soon as that starting thing is done it's immediately different and that is super cool I will never ever ever ever play this game with more than two people like four people

39:46 would just be horrendous uh but it works fantastic as a two-player game I think the support cards really do a great job there's not a lot of like management of tokens it's really relatively straightforward um for game as as big you know in scope as it is it's pretty streamlined which is awesome like I that's that's a testament in and of itself is like normally it's like hey we made this uh narrative driven campaign the how to play videos an hour long it's like what like why and that's part one why like I feel like this game is pretty easy to teach but and I mean on top of that like I I should have said this at the very beginning but I completely forgot to if you are looking for a horror game Dawn Of Madness uh man it's it's probably the best horror game out there like not taking personal stuff into like consider like cuz Subterra or weirdly enough uh like Survivor um Escape I think escape from Atlantis or whatever it is those games scare me because it's like the Survivor is like about you know swimming in the ocean and that just horrifies me but Subterra is I mean that's that's a scary game because it's about you know spelunking and being

41:17 trapped in claustrophobic and stuff like that but like in terms of like if you are really into the games I've mentioned Evil Within uh yeah Dead Space dawn of mad or Dawn Of Madness uh bloodborne um like they even have an age restriction warning like hey you should probably be like 16 or higher for this now the really great thing about that is it doesn't get cringe like I've never gotten a sense of like oh you just got runchy for the sake of being runchy like this is what a 13-year-old would think is horror no no no they do touch on um subject matter like it's that there's no like sexual assault or anything real like that like cuz that would have made this like really you're just being a [ __ ] try hard and that's embarrassing um but they touch on of course mental uh you know mental disorders suicide depression things like that I I think in a really really good way um so yeah like honestly like this is I've done my top 10 horror games and this is this beats them all out it's so it's so good I want this as a video game like that's the thing is I want to see their world in in like a movie or video video game setting so yeah I'm trying to think like other

42:48 negatives like that like I've kind of talked on them a little bit I can't really think on anything else besides the fact fact that you could beat a Wanderer stage like and and then lose a finale like that that's some [ __ ] like the funny enough the game that I just played before doing this review was kind of like okay you're at the finale and the finale boss that we were fighting like went before us and it was like oh his first action is he pulls he pulls you towards him and uh if you for any reason if you're ever share the same space with him you just die and the the finale is really cool because they have a ton of different ways they can end but one of those ways they can end it's like hey did the central Wanderer die okay go to this ending so you could play for five six hours get to the finale finally um and then just oh first turn dead card flip dead like that's kind of shitty um I almost feel like a finale I don't know if if I'd like it if the finale was kind of a fresh restart but because it is still a continuation of the same game um funny enough that's really that's your save point is before when you finish the wanderer stage we won boom let's go to the finale tomorrow or next week but that is that can be really annoying you can have games where it's just going on so long and you can just outright just lose

44:18 and that's pretty Bittersweet um so yeah length is a double-edged sword I don't have any outright negatives honestly I mean everything does tie to the length I really really really wish there was audio narration so maybe someone will let me know in the comments being like hey they're actually doing that or maybe I'll see a Gen Con and be like where the [ __ ] where the [ __ ] are why why do you not have someone professional reading this um but yeah like for a game that I don't even remember how much this cost it was not that expensive from when I remember remember and how much passion that they put into it like it's it's awesome and there's two more two more wanders coming um I hope there's more families yeah that's that's kind of a slight negative I don't like that there's just two families but that's easily rectified like that could be just an expansion on its own of of more Abomination families um but those aren't tied to any Wonder so that that gives you even more replayability um boy yeah I I don't have much the art is absolutely stellar and what's really cool is whenever you get these Coda cards uh the art kind of depicts what you were just reading so that kind of helps where you're like oh so that's what I just saw horrifying um yeah it's it's fantastic

45:52 so yeah no how negatives um a lot of things going for this but if anything I said is kind of like nope nope I don't want I don't want anyone reading to me yeah sorry so I think this is for a select group of people even for me this is probably going to be one of those once a year games oh it's October like let's play Dawn Of Madness let's get maybe let's get a few more people instead of just two and really delve into into the world um but that would be probably rare cuz I I I definitely don't have the time to sit down and be like okay let's set this up and again it's not that much to set up but like I was surprised very first time I played this I was like oh I'm already done huh I expect this to be more of a burden storage solution is ass uh each Wonder has its own box and the boxes kind of suck two of mine came broken which I'm I'm sure they would fix if I ask them to but I'm honestly thinking about just bagging them and like yeah it's like it's it's not it's not the greatest they like honestly things could have been vacuum sealed I don't know why they did the individual wander box it's kind of stupid um but yeah like that's pretty much it so on a scale of 1 to 10 um I am going to give Dawn Of Madness a nine like it is so so good even cuz again I had no

47:24 outright negatives it was all like double-edged sword like I love I love the amount of replayability in this game I love the variety I love the writing but there's this I love the length because it can be awesome and immersive and it's an event and you don't get many of those games anymore if it's going to be long it's going to be a massive campaign that's going to take four years to finish like don't me wrong I love an trespass Odyssey I'm not even anywhere close to finishing that and that game alone has enough replayability I could play cycle one over and over and over and still see new things so it's nice that a game like this gives you that same epic feel without having to commit to a campaign and find people to commit to it you just have to commit them for an afternoon or a day and then it's done you don't have to be like oh when are we meeting up again oh no one can meet because we all have lives and we're adults now and it's depressing uh it's like yeah so you can just sit down and play uh a long game of this and get a full experience and honestly like the losing or the difficulty of it it's a board game I own this I can do whatever the [ __ ] I want if I'm not recording for the channel I can do whatever I want even when I'm recording If I Lose I'm just like Anyway let's continue because I want to keep playing and I don't want to waste four hours and just lose through a card flip you have that kind of control just as long as you know the rest of your group is okay with that so yeah n out of 10 I'm really excited to see what they do with this I know deep Madness got a lot

48:57 of uh like a lot of content for it I'm hoping hoping that they they support this more I know there's two more expansions coming I think those are being worked on but I would love to see more Abominations more Terrors uh I mean still more wonders like I think that they they have something special here still um and yeah I do plan on uh I actually kind of do want to cover uh each wonderer on the channel channel so I'm not doing one 5 hour video so what I'm thinking is each Wonder like is an episode like each round is an episode um so probably do that that could be a lot of fun just to Showcase that so uh if I do that plan for a lot of reading uh but yeah yeah nine out of 10 Dawn Of Madness let me know what you think of the game in the comments below other than that like comment share and subscribe and have a wonderful whatever time day is for you hey everyone thank you for watch watching and I really hope that you enjoyed the video if you would like to see more of my content go ahead and click that subscribe button and the bell to be notified whenever I upload any new content if you feel like supporting the channel you can go ahead and click that patreon link to be taken to my patreon and any help is truly appreciated other than that stick around for any any other run throughs or reviews or cool top 10 or whatever I feel like putting on other than that like comment share and subscribe and have a wonderful whatever time of day it is for you