That being said, the difficulty curve is a strange one. The game places your party in a tower – the titular Dungeon of Naheulbeuk – and the first couple of fights are manageable and fairly basic. Once the game thinks you have a handle on things it cranks hard on the vice it has your nuts placed in. The old RPG formula applies here: low levels mean your characters have fewer options. This coupled with a combat system that places great importance on accuracy and good positioning (the latter of which you don’t have many tools to ensure yet) means margins for error are small and gameplay is punishing.
This also means that the hardest (but also best!) fight of the entire game will face you very early on, while another early fight sadistically takes you from one fight directly into the next – which can be a very frustrating experience if you survived the first of these two fights by the skin of your teeth and are low on healing potions.
As the game moves on however and your party attains a level around 4, the game becomes more manageable and something approaching a “healthy” difficulty sets in. Then around level 7, things start to become too easy, and the game completes the traditional difficulty curve of an RPG: hard beginning with a fresh party, piss easy final part as you stomp the world with your overpowered gear and abilities.
But here, Dungeon of Naheulbeuk becomes a bit weird. After the initial ease of the later levels, difficulty starts going all over the place. Some fights are very easy, some somewhere in between, and some are almost as hard as the game’s first act (for instance, this is the case for one of the game's last bosses, whose mechanics are more trying and have much better design than the final boss himself). This odd rupture of the difficulty curve isn't a bad experience, though, because unlike the previous three points on the curve, at least it makes fights more unpredictable.