Darkest Dungeon

Darkest Dungeon essentially adds one more layer to the familiar RPG dungeon crawling experience: stress. Thematically dark and inspired by Lovecraftian horror, the game will have players juggling not only the traditional health and mana, but also the mental well-being of party members. In a setting full of eldritch horrors, the fear of descending into the dark depths and never coming back is real in the minds of our digital fodder adventurers. Darkest Dungeon is aesthetically solid and builds around this stress mechanic, but it's a mechanic that fails to carry the game through to a satisfactory experience.

none of your heroes have eyes

The premise of the game is simple: there's a dungeon, it's pretty dark, it's full of crazy stuff, you gotta go clear it out. The story is mostly revealed through journal scraps that you'll find while exploring dungeons and, to be honest, isn't all that compelling. To that end, the meat of the gameplay centers around building a party of four from a handful of different classes and then running them through a gauntlet of trial and error to figure out what works. The game also takes pride in its difficulty as perma-death is the norm and the game comes out frankly and tells the player that Darkest Dungeon isn't so much about winning as it is about damage control and minimizing loss.

So what does that mean exactly? Well, if you enter Darkest Dungeon seeking perfection, you're in for a rude awakening. Whereas other RPGs might see the accumulation of resources and wealth that never gets used, every little bit counts when you're trying to pass an encounter in Darkest Dungeon and oftentimes this comes down to a form of damage control. The element of uncertainty gives even mundane actions a sense of tension, more so manifesting in disbelief. Sometimes there will be a crucial 97% success that simply fails and hey, that's just how the dice rolls sometimes. It's up to the player to really cover all the bases and consider everything that can go wrong and it's simply better to just assume that everything will go wrong.

And believe me, things will go wrong. It's important not to get too attached to any single character because you never really know when an unexpected enemy ability will wipe out your party. What results is a filtering effect: you'll start out with a giant roster and bit by bit that list will shrink as characters die, go insane, become incapacitated by disease, etc. You can pay to remove negative effects or lock in positive ones, but the price of treatment will increase dramatically as the party member becomes more and more powerful. With this, the game places players into a balancing act: do I cough up the gold to treat a lightly injured hero and risk him straight-up dying in the next delve or do I invest that money in another promising hero?

The game features your standard fare turn based combat but there is one aspect I really want to emphasize: the lighting mechanic. Give-and-take is the theme of Darkest Dungeon—it's rare to come across a scenario where you only stand to benefit. In line with this, there is a lighting mechanic during dungeon delves. Torches are consumed from the supplies inventory to light the way for your party, staving off stress and helping gain the initiative on the dark dwelling monsters. As torches run low and the light diminishes, stress buildup can lead to mental breaks in party members and monsters will be more powerful. However, all of the negative effects come with a savvy increase in loot. In some instances, it's advantageous to let the light flicker, keeping your party members at just the edge of madness. The light mechanic is an aspect of difficulty control within the confines of an already set difficulty that gives players a chance to seek greater rewards without having to completely change the difficulty setting. It's a good way to give players a temporary challenge that they don't need to totally commit to if they feel they can't pass.

Your hard earned loot then funnels back into building up your party to confront the namesake final dungeon. Darkest Dungeon boasts fifteen hero classes, each with seven combat skills, upgradeable equipment, and unique stat modifying trinkets. Each hero also come with specialized camping skills that allow for buffs and bonuses during moments of respite in the dungeons.

I think Darkest Dungeon has a strong presentation and it had me hooked for a good number of hours, but that was before I began to really see the bones underneath the mechanics. For every one hero that makes it to the maximum level, you may need to go through three or four, maybe even six fodder heroes to reach that stage. All that time, you'll be investing and losing, only to try again with the next poor sap who comes along. With this, the game becomes repetitive, grindy, and loses a lot of its agency. It's fun to theorycraft strategies and lineups but it won't take long for you to realize that the variety that 15 classes offers is mostly superficial.

Again, the underlying philosophy with Darkest Dungeon isn't for the players to optimize for success, but to have them prepare to stem the losses. The RNG elements of the game sometimes makes encounters feel more cheap than challenging as a single miss can quickly cascade into a catastrophic defeat. Tactics rely on maximizing probabilities, but there are scenarios where you can make all the best possible moves and still lose. It's frustrating and those moments reveal the shallow mechanics underneath the game.

Although there wasn't much to keep me coming back to Darkest Dungeon, the game itself was wonderfully presented with a great deal of initial theorycrafting and unexpected outcomes. The game plays like a smaller, more punishing version of XCOM with less tactical decisions available overall. Nevertheless, Darkest Dungeon is a fairly solid game, one worth looking into if you're curious about the game's artistic presentation and its employment of mental health management in an RPG.