Spire has top-tier game design. It's especially noticeable if your compare it to other roguelikes like pic related. Darkest Dungeon has lots of really bad design, like snowballing in both directions, free healing incentivizing stalling, and punishment for not following a guide. The Spire devs specifically went out of their way to avoid these problems, which makes them unmatched in the genre.

Marketing DD as the "muh ultra hard dungeon crawler" has to be biggest gaslight of the century. Because it takes away the attention of how fucking repetative, bloated and completely devoided of depth this game is.

The game basically throws everything at you in the first 15-20 hours then just runs out of content. And then it forces you to grind levels on your party like a subhuman golem for the next 60 fucking hours by beating the same content over and over and over and over and over again. All thet just so you can be allowed to fight the final boss.

Every enemy party looks exatly the fucking same.
>1-2 tanks up front dealing stun/bleed, 1-2 crit dealers in the middle, 1-2 stress dealer in the back; randomized
Learn how to deal with it and you beat the game. Congrats. Now do the same thing 300 more times you stupid golem.

>B-b-but at least you get items along the way
Yeah, expeeeeect, every single non-unique item in this game, down to last one, sucks fucking dick. Every single one is a throwaway garbage, unless it spacifically gives you stun chance or accurity. Wowzers, such variety.

Every single battle boils down to who has higher speed. And since stats on items sucks, the devs decided to push allll the speed buffs onto the quirks. So you basically take three characters with speed quirks and auto-win every battle. Because you kill enemies before they can get their turn. Wowzers, such a hardcore gaem.

There are only 4 location in game. But you never even need to beat more then one. You can just endlessly grind the safest one.