MISTOVER

What it is

MISTOVER puts the player in charge of a "Corps" of adventurers venturing into the Pillar of Despair, a shifting, mist-shrouded structure spanning forests, lakes, mountains and cathedrals, in search of a key to humanity's survival. The comparison every reviewer reaches for is Darkest Dungeon, and the resemblance is deliberate and close: attrition-based expeditions, a punishing tone, and squad composition mattering as much as individual character strength. Where MISTOVER diverges is in combat structure — battles play out on a tile-based grid where both sides have a set amount of space to maneuver in, and abilities require different amounts of room to execute, adding a genuine spatial-positioning layer that several reviewers credit as a real improvement over a simpler row-target system. The other major point of divergence is presentation: vividly anime-styled character art and full voice acting, a deliberate contrast to Darkest Dungeon's grim, hand-drawn gothic aesthetic that reviewers are split on liking, but rarely dispute is well executed on its own terms.

MISTOVER released on 9 October 2019, developed and published by KRAFTON, Inc. — the same company behind PUBG, giving this small tactical RPG an unusually large corporate parent for its scale. It's no longer purchasable: a developer notice dated 30 May 2022 confirms Krafton made "the difficult decision to close the service" effective 30 June 2022, pulling the game from Steam, PlayStation 4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and GOG.com simultaneously, while confirming existing owners would retain access to their purchased copies. This review exists for that record and for the substantial existing library of owners, not as a live purchase recommendation.

A rough PC launch, later fixed

The single most-upvoted review in the corpus isn't about the game's core design at all — it's about a launch-day PC oversight that reads as genuinely baffling for a $30 release: MISTOVER shipped with no mouse support whatsoever, forcing players into an awkward keyboard scheme spread across two separate sets of movement keys. The reviewer calls it "inexcusable," and notes the developers' initial response — that mouse support might be considered "after a few months" — as a discouraging signal in itself. That specific gap was real and is independently confirmed by the game's own patch history: "Patch Notes_1.0.8," dated 16 March 2020, is titled plainly "Mouse Support," landing over five months after launch. Reviewers who returned to the game after that point, and after subsequent economy and balance patches, explicitly caveat their assessments: "take reviews from 2019 with a grain of salt," writes one, "the game balance has been tweaked multiple times since then." A later review independently confirms the economy specifically was "fixed since the last reviews," resolving an early problem where players could run out of money and get stuck replacing characters they couldn't afford to reequip.

That arc — a rough, under-adapted PC launch followed by a genuine, sustained year of fixes — is worth taking at face value as a real effort from the developer, even though it means early buyers had a meaningfully worse experience than later ones.

The balance complaints that didn't fully go away

Beyond the mouse-control issue, a specific and recurring tactical complaint persists across reviews spanning different points in the game's lifespan: certain enemy abilities can strike any row of the player's formation — front, middle or back — effectively neutralising the positional planning the tile-based combat system is built around, unless the party specifically includes a character who can taunt enemies into a predictable target. One detailed review frames this as making the game feel "lacking in depth" despite its surface complexity, since it narrows viable team compositions down to whichever builds can answer that specific threat, rather than rewarding varied approaches. A related complaint reports meaningful power gaps between classes, with some substantially outpacing others regardless of the tactical layer surrounding them.

Pacing draws a separate, specific criticism: one reviewer reports that even a nominally "small" dungeon map can take over an hour to clear given how many enemy encounters are packed into it, calling the overall pace "sooooo slow" despite otherwise praising the visuals. That's a real design tension for a roguelike-adjacent structure built around repeated runs — a slow per-run pace works against the genre's usual replay incentive of trying again quickly after a loss.

A striking completion number

The game's own achievement data adds a hard number to the pacing and difficulty complaints running through the review corpus. Across 77 tracked achievements, early-game milestones like first entering town or accepting a quest sit above 90%, as expected for basic tutorial-adjacent steps. But the achievement for completing the full game sits at just 0.4% — meaning fewer than one in two hundred players who own MISTOVER have finished it. That's an unusually steep drop from the genre's typical completion rates even accounting for roguelike-adjacent games generally having low finish rates, and it corroborates the specific complaints above rather directly: a game whose per-dungeon pacing runs long, whose difficulty spikes are real, and where finding a viable team composition against any-row-targeting enemies takes real trial and error, is exactly the kind of game where most players stop partway through rather than seeing the ending.

A brief note on the review-bombing claim

At least one reviewer expresses surprise and concern at "all these chinese / korean negative reviews," speculating that something region-specific was driving down the score without being able to identify what. This review can't independently verify or explain that claim — no localization, pricing, or regional distribution controversy specific to MISTOVER surfaced in the sources checked here — so it's mentioned only because a reader digging through the review corpus themselves will likely notice the same pattern and wonder about it; treat it as an open question this review can't resolve rather than a confirmed incident.

Verdict

MISTOVER is a competently made, visually distinctive tactical RPG that suffered from an avoidable, genuinely bad PC launch before its developer spent roughly a year fixing the control scheme, economy and balance that early reviewers rightly criticised. Its persistent complaints — enemies that can hit any row, uneven class power, slow pacing — kept enough of a shadow over it that even later reviews remain mixed rather than glowing. With Krafton having formally discontinued the game across every platform in 2022, its story is now closed: a solid, occasionally frustrating anime spin on the Darkest Dungeon formula that existing owners can still play, and that nobody else can buy.