This does one thing very well, it strips out most of the fiddliness that usually bogs down cooperative dungeon crawlers, and the insanity mechanic, where your investigator gets stronger and stranger as their sanity drops, gives the whole thing a real identity beyond just being another dice-and-minis romp. Streamlined is the right word, my group got through a full scenario on our first session without the usual first-play stumbling.

Where it loses me is balance. By the midgame of most scenarios, an investigator with the right upgrades can solo an elder god that’s supposed to be an existential threat, and there’s something genuinely funny but also deflating about watching one character with an axe casually finish off Cthulhu himself. It’s not that the theme isn’t there, the production is gorgeous, the sculpts are some of the best I own, it’s that the challenge curve doesn’t hold up across a full campaign the way the opening scenarios promise it will.

The physical footprint is the other real cost here. Between the core box and the expansions that make the enemy variety worth having (the base box alone gets repetitive faster than the theme deserves), this takes up real shelf space, an entire cube on my shelving unit even after I combined boxes down as far as I could. Setup and teardown scale with how much of that you’re pulling out for a given session, which for a “quick dungeon crawl” premise feels like it’s fighting its own pitch.

Three stars. Great minis, a genuinely clever insanity system, but the difficulty curve and the encroaching Kickstarter-scale content bloat keep it from being a game I reach for over tighter options on my shelf.