speaking of hard games, dang
okay you go to the little burg near your spooky ancestral home and you can hire adventurers of various classes (cool ones too: grave robber, arbalist, hellion, etc) and take up to four at a time on fairly conventional dungeon crawls
but you are kinda set up to fail/lose from time to time, through two major mechanics:
1. for the most part, you can only heal during battle. period.
2. stress management. the longer your toons spend in the shit (and the wack-er things they see) they will accumulate stress. sometimes this can lead them to develop negative character quirks, such as masochism, paranoia, loot greed, etc that can aggravate other party members' stress. there are a few ways to reduce stress, but for the most part you have to either a) finish what you're doing before the crazy overtakes your party, or b) abandon the mission and retreat back to town. once you get back to town there are ways to reduce members' stress, but it'll take them out of the game for a mission or two so you'll have to swap in other members.
it's 2D, which means there's really only one axis to worry about in fights. each class has a "preferred" place in the order, so basic RPG logic will help you out here - crusaders, hellions, and men-at-arms in front to soak up melee damage, squishies in the back. some moves only work on certain enemy positions, and some moves only work FROM certain team positions (your crusader can't do shit in the back since all he has is melee). graphics are very well done and gritty in their stylization. available on steam for windows or mac, and on PS4 i guess
here's a screencap i found online:
heroes
4. vestal, one of only two classes with decent heals
3. grave robber, agile mix of melee and range
2. highwayman, lots of bleed effects on melee and a gun for rear-guard artillery
1. i think this is a leper? i haven't managed to find one yet, but definitely some kind of tank
monsters
1. melee
2. high-hp melee
3. caster (these are nasty, they have a weak attack that causes a shitload of stress)
4. crossbow dickwad, they usually go after the squishies in back.
top of screen is the torch meter - as you consume torches to keep everything bright, you are safer and suffer less stress (and can sometimes surprise enemies allowing first strike). as the light dwindles, you suffer more stress and there's more danger (but loot is better - some players do "dark runs" to get the best loot).
bottom left shows the selected character's available actions and gear. bottom right can toggle between inventory and map.
i'm only a half dozen missions into the game. i won one, had to retreat from the second, won the next three, and then all my guys died of heart attacks from too much stress lol
idk what the PS4 price is but with a moderate steam sale i got it for under 12 bucks. recommended, brinstar seal of approval.