A gritty and twisted roguelike journey to cleanse the estate of the darkness infesting it, sacrificing many a hero’s life along the way.

As I near the dungeon's completion, my hero's stress begins to be pushed to the edge. Some heroes have a full bar, while others have just begun filling the bar a second time. Having never filled the bar twice, I knew not what was in store for us, though I have been told that once it has been filled twice all the way that the hero suffers a heart attack. And besides, if my heroes have only filled the bar once, they must only be halfway to a doubly filled bar, right? That leaves me with plenty of time. Our health is high, and I, new to the game and confident in our success, continued forth into the next battle. Ambush! We fight! The fight starts strong, with a series of dodges keeping our health full. Suddenly my archer shoots it's ally in a fit of paranoia. Stress among the party rises from 100% to 150%. HEART ATTACK. One of my hero's falls. Already? His stress was only at 150%. No problem, I'll retreat. RETREAT FAILED. The archer refuses to leave. As soon as it falls on my turn again, HEART ATTACK. Two of my four heroes have fallen I try again to retreat. RETREAT FAILED. HEART ATTACK. I'm down to one, the traitorous archer that ignited  this unfortunate series of events. The heart attack victims are still alive, surely I can still save them. They have not received a death blow. I attempt to retreat one last time. SUCCESS!! Finally! Now, with my four heroes all on the brink of death, I can abandon the quest and return home alive. Right? Nope! HEART ATTACK HEART ATTACK HEART ATTACK all three heart attack victims die after the successful retreat. Quest failed. Party decimated, with only the traitorous archer remaining.

Concept Overview

Darkest Dungeon is a roguelike side-scrolling adventure game with turn based combat set in a dark and twisted game world. Your heroes will not only fight against vicious enemies, they will also battle the stress and mental decay that results from the dungeon crawling experience. Light your torch and keep it lit, or the darkness will reach you and slowly break you. Recruit and train heroes to send forth into these dungeons, and upgrade the buildings in your hamelet to provide better skills, armor, and stress relievers for your team. Be prepared to abandon quests and sacrifice heroes on your way to cleansing the land from the evils that have plagued it.

Dungeons are randomly generated to provide varied experiences. As you walk through the dungeon, you will encounter chests and other containers that may contain loot or traps, obstacles that must be removed, shines and books that affect your hero’s traits, and different combinations of enemies. Before you set off into a dungeon you must purchase supplies, including food, torches, and other consumables.

Other than the typical variables one expects in a turn-based combat system, heroes also have traits that either positively or negatively affect their stats and actions. The Affliction System will give new (often negative) traits to heroes if their stress level gets too high, adding a need to manage stress as well as health and resources when in a dungeon.

Between dungeon run you’ll be de-stressing you heroes, upgrading their skills and armor, or recruiting new one to replace the ones that likely died in the last run.

Artstyle & Sound | Flawless Tone Delivery

The artstyle of the game immediately drew my attention. The entire game is drawn in a beautifully grim illustrated style. The characters, especially all of the enemies, look awesome and terrifying, and the corpses that they leave behind are equally disgusting and gruesome. Both the character and environment design is flawless in its contribution to the game’s atmosphere and overall feel, providing an incredibly convincing dark tone.

The sound design adds to the game's atmosphere, with top quality sound effects and mood setting atmospheric background music. Also very important is that the contact of a blade with a body sounds absolutely nasty, adding weight behind every attack. Sound effects were clearly chosen very carefully, as every action from making a menu selection to opening a backpack sounds great. Playing this game with the sound off is doing yourself a serious disservice.

The game's narrator is a treat, with a great voice and written with great voice lines. His commentary is surprisingly important to the dark storybook tone that the game is going for. His inclusion is vital to the game’s feel.

Playability | Inevitable Frustration

Chances are you'll be a bit overwhelmed at the start of the game, but you should be used to it an hour in or so. The different buildings are introduced slowly to prevent you from being too overloaded, but regardless there is a lot of text to be read at the start. Once you are used to the different character types and building types, it will be smooth sailing from there.

Like many other turn based combat systems, rolling a bad roll can be very frustrating. Having a hero miss at a critical time, or have some affliction randomly impair their ability to act is certain to leave you cursing the RNG gods for smiting you. With the very high number of variables and factors that play into both combat and your hero's status, it can sometimes feel like things are simply out of your hands, and misfortune commands that you fail this quest. You'll get used to this, and this kind of frustration is an important part of the game. As your heroes get stronger, they’ll be less likely to fall to stress and unfortunate failure will be less frequent. Be prepared for waves of bad rolls quickly turning the tide from a sure victory to a crushing defeat.

But is it Fun? | Yes

The combination of detailed combat system and almost Oregon Trail style dungeon venturing is very enjoyable. The survival aspects of managing you party and supplies adds a great deal of strategy and thought into the turn-based combat style game. Darkest Dungeon revolves around a few gameplay loops that seem simple on a surface level: manage your party in town, enter a dungeon and fight, and then repeat. The greatness of this game has come from the depth and detail put into the systems involved in these loops.

Combat System is an evolution on the typical turn-based battle system. Most notably, Darkest Dungeon adds positions to effect no only which abilities the hero can use, but what enemy abilities can reach this hero. Each ability, for both heroes and enemies, have a requirement for which positions the user must be in in order to use the ability. Each ability also can only targets in certain positions. For example, a hero with a melee swing ability may need to be placed in one of the first two closest slots (out of four slots) to the enemy, allowing them use this ability, but also allowing them to be hit by enemy melee melee that can only hit the first two slots. In addition, each hero and enemy has many variables that factor into combat, including the typical variables of health, attack, speed, dodge, protection and resistances to status effects, but also have different positive or negative traits that can affect both stats and behaviors.

The enemies you will encounter in a dungeon run varies depending on which zone you are in. The variety of enemies is fairly high, and players will need to adapt their strategy each fight to combat the different enemies before them. The different positionings of the enemies will force you to get creative in targeting the more dangerous enemies that may be hiding at the back.

Each enemy has its own move-set, and as you progress through the game, you will figure out which enemies you should prioritize and how to best deal with different types of opponents. Bosses are unique, and will often have special mechanics or attacks that vary greatly from the norm. I enjoy these boss fights no only for the boss’ amazing visual design, but for the difficulty and stress fighting them brings. You’re up against a true challenge, and have no choice but to go all out.

The base game contains 12 different types of heroes, each with 8 moves, of which you can pick 4. Customize your heroes’ abilities, equipment, and items that grant bonus stats. Skills and equipment can be upgraded through buildings in your Hamlet, depending on how upgraded those buildings themselves are. This system is overwhelming at the start when all of your heroes are low level and equally weak, but as you find a few favorites, improving them becomes a priority and optimizing their effectiveness becomes key to clearing dungeons.

Dungeon Generation is fairly simple and could probably use a bit of variety. Each dungeon has a certain small set of randomly placed lootables or obstacles, as well as the layout of the dungeon being random. This can make each dungeon run feel almost the same, which definitely starts to blend together. It would be nice to see larger scale rare events happen randomly during dungeons to make each run, or at least some runs, feel special. Later as you push through the game you may encounter rare enemies, which does a lot to making the run feel special.

One of the things I love most about this game is the survival aspect of wandering the dungeons. Preparing supplies beforehand and maintaining good health, food, stress, and torchlight makes dungeon adventuring feel more like a creepy journey rather than simply a backdrop behind your party slashing through enemies. In longer dungeons, you can set camp to restore health and lower stress. I love the feel that this gives off; the feeling of being set out on a quest in a dark and forsaken place, huddled around the light for comfort.

I love Darkest Dungeon’s different systems and the effort they put into making these very simple mechanics feel in-depth and re-playable. I hope that as further updates and dlc are released that they add more to the traversing of dungeons and better quests to break from the repetitiveness of walking forward and clicking on things to loot.

Replay Value | High

The entire game is hinged on the replay value of traversing dungeons. While the core gameplay can become boring after hours of concurrent play, I always feel willing to go back to it after a break. Playing again from scratch is fun as well, building your group of heroes from the ground up and grinding heirlooms to upgrade your buildings. For a single player game, this game has a very high replay value, mostly due to the randomly generating nature of the game mechanics.

Conclusion | Try it

Darkest Dungeon adds its own unique twist on the roguelike dungeon crawler, and is more than worth picking up. This game great to start up whenever you have a bit of time to quickly run a dungeon. Every dungeon quest provides difficulty and excitement, and you’ll be on the edge of your seat hoping your heroes survive another turn. Pick this game up for a truly heart-racing and twisted adventure!