I have expressed my love for Darkest Dungeon numerous times now, but with every single recommendation I also had to add a disclaimer: only grab it if you're willing to endure some truly painful grinding. Unless you're an expert that has previously beat then game there is simply no way you're going to crawl through the whole campaign without losing a fair share of your best followers, all of which will then need to be replaced through an annoyingly tedious process of leveling and stat-fiddling.

Thankfully, the most recent update has finally fixed this issue by adding a brand new game mode - Radiant Mode. In the most basic terms, Radiant Mode offers exactly the same challenging gameplay as the vanilla Darkest Dungeon, but with a couple of alterations to reduce mid and late game grind. You're still going to lose followers left and right, that's simply the nature of Darkest Dungeon, but there will be multiple ways to quickly get experienced recruits outfitted and ready to go.

If you're interested in all of the details you'll find the full patch notes over at Steam, but if you're just interested in the new Radiant Mode and freshly reworked New Game+ you can find all of the details down below:

RADIANT MODE:

• Never Again changed: heroes are now allowed to return to the Darkest Dungeon. However, they will undergo significant stress upon doing so, and are more likely to become afflicted instead of virtuous when in the Darkest Dungeon.

• More Power Leveling flexibility: Heroes of up to Level 4 may enter Novice dungeons. Any hero may enter a Veteran or Champion dungeon.

• Stage Coach can now be upgraded to allow the appearance of new recruits starting at up to Level 4. Increased chance of upgraded recruits appearing.

• Reduced cost of Upgraded Recruits upgrades.

• Accelerated hero XP progression

• Hero upgrade and treatment cost scaling by level reduced

• Returned provisions now give slightly more money back

• Tweaks to Stagecoach:

- Added another upgrade tier to Experienced Recruits (Lvl 4 Characters will now appear)

- Changed Experienced Recruit requirements. (Lvl 1 now only requires Lvl 1 Blacksmith and Guild)

- New Stage Coach population option to use a Deck based system. (This can be used on all modes). New Stagecoach generation method that gives a more even long-term distribution and also favors healers more, since they are the backbone of most parties. This can be toggled off in the Options menu if you wish to still ride the bittersweet wave of total RNG. 

• Higher Light conditions confer slightly more to party DEF bonuses.

• Accelerated Region Progression

• Town Events trigger more frequently to compensate for shorter playtime

STYGIAN MODE:

• Renamed NG+ to Stygian

• Stygian can now be selected when starting a new campaign, instead of requiring completion of Darkest mode first.

• More stress, higher darkness penalties, more light loss per step, higher trap diff, enemy HP bump from 15% (prev) to 20%, slightly higher monster crits...overall slightly more deadly[/b]

• Time limit reduced to 86 weeks and hero death limit dropped to 12

• You can now continue playing after the time limit on your Stygian mode game after successfully completing the game

And finally, if you would like to grab Darkest Dungeon in order to try all of these new features, you can find it at a 50% discount on Steam. The promotion will run for only two more days, so don't slack around for too long or you might just miss your chance. Have fun!