Darkest Dungeon (Review/Analysis)

Developer & Publisher: Red Hook Studios & Merge Games

Release Date: February 2015

“You remember our venerable house... opulent and imperial. It is a festering abomination! I beg you, return home, claim your birthright, and deliver our family from the ravenous clutching shadows of… *gunshot* the Darkest Dungeon.” - Narrator.
Darkest Dungeon is a turn-based, RPG, dungeon crawler set in a gothic Lovecraftian countryside. You as the player have received a letter from your ancestor telling you that you must travel to your family manor and destroy the evil that has grown and festered there. Your ancestor dug deep beneath the family manor and uncovered otherworldly horrors which have been unleashed on the world. It is your job to redeem your family name and cleanse your family lands of this evil.
To go over how the game works, you recruit characters that will become available at random every week in your hub area (the Hamlet) from the stage coach. You can have a party of up to four characters go on a quest at once. You can have less but it is usually recommended that you take four. Characters can be of different classes but the first four that you will get to know are the Crusader, the Highway Man, the Plague Doctor and the Vestal. Crusader is a tank, Highway Man is a rogue, Plague Doctor is support and Vestal is healer. Some starting areas include Ruins, Cove, Warrens and the Weald. Each area is unique and has it’s different enemies and dangers. Once you pick your area you need to provision. This takes you to a small shop screen that you can purchase items to take with you on your quest. Usually you want to take food, status healing items and torches but there are other kinds of items you can take as well. Once you’ve done all of this, it’s time to start your quest. The dungeons you explore are room and tile based. Your party will move in a side scrolling manner to navigate between rooms and corridors. Rooms are a single area that can either be an enemy party encounter, a boss, treasure, a combination or nothing at all. Corridors are what link you to other rooms and usually are between four to six tiles in length. In corridors you can also encounter enemies, bosses and treasure but also ‘curios’ which are things you can interact with which can result in loot or positive/negative status effects. Your goal when exploring a dungeon is displayed at the top left and is usually either - explore all rooms, kill all enemies or defeat a boss. When you complete a quest you get a loot reward, usually gold and items used to upgrade your hub area.

Now most of the things listed previously are your pretty standard RPG/dungeon crawler affair but Darkest Dungeon is not your average run of the mill dungeon crawler, it has some very unique mechanics that make it really stand out from the rest. One of these main mechanics is that on top of your usual health bar you also have a stress meter, that’s right, you also need to look after the mental health as well as physical health of your characters in Darkest Dungeon to be successful. If a character’s stress meter fills all the way while on a quest, they will have a “resolve” check which is a roll of the dice on whether the character will react negatively to stress (become afflicted) or thrive under stress (become virtuous). Nine times out of ten the character will react negatively under stress and become afflicted. When a character is afflicted they can become any of the following: fearful, paranoid, selfish, masochistic, abusive, hopeless or irrational. You want to avoid your characters becoming afflicted at all costs because it can mean terrible things for your party and the success of your quest. Essentially, every affliction will have some kind of stats down effect but they also have other traits and quirks that can be really frustrating to deal with. Afflicted characters will say voice lines that majorly stress the other characters in your party out, they will randomly pass their turn, move themselves around in the party composition, attack other characters in your party, refuse healing, refuse retreat, hurt themselves and a lot of other behaviours you will want to avoid. You want to avoid affliction at all costs and a lot of the game is about managing your parties stress levels by doing things like stress healing, killing enemies that cause stress first, keeping your light level high and making sure that characters get stress relief and time off after each quest they go on.

Another huge mechanic of the game that is in the title: the light source system. Basically whenever you’re out on a quest you have a torch that has a light level from zero to one hundred and the game will get more difficult the lower the light level. You can replenish light level by using the resource “torches” and some characters have abilities to raise the light level in combat but that’s about it. There is a large risk/reward element to this mechanic though as even though the lower the light level the harder the game gets, it also makes your loot drastically better and more plentiful, so sometimes you will actually want to do an entire quest in total darkness to reap better rewards. Some negative effects of playing in darkness can include things like characters getting stressed out much quicker, enemy stats being buffed and probably the worst thing - a higher chance of your party getting “surprised” by enemy encounters. Essentially when you encounter an enemy party, there is a chance that either your hero characters will be “surprised” or the enemy party will. If the enemy party is surprised, your hero characters all get to take their turn first before any of the enemy party. If your hero characters are surprised though, it shuffles your party composition on top of the enemies getting to attack first. This is a nightmare because characters moveset/abilities most of the time can only be used if that character is in a certain position in the party. For example the Crusader character can really only use his abilities if he’s in the front two ranks of the party, so if he gets shuffled or pushed to rank four, you need to spend one or two turns reordering the party correctly, which in that time you’ve probably taken a few attacks from the enemy without being able to retaliate with your own.

Once a character has filled their stress meter or become afflicted, the main ways you’re going to remedy this is once a quest is finished, you can put a character into a stress reducing activity which will remove an affliction if they have one or reduce their stress meter down dramatically even if they are not afflicted. If a character is put into a stress reducing activity though, they will not be able to be used for one week in game time (which works out to be one quest, so essentially you have to sit them out for a quest while they recover). You can also choose to just not take them on a quest and having them take time off in the hub area (the Hamlet) their stress meter will go down over time, but the only way to remove afflictions is by putting a character into the previously mentioned stress reducing activities.

Playing Darkest Dungeon is unlike anything else I’ve played before and I would actually put this down mainly to the aesthetics of the game over the gameplay. Darkest Dungeon has such a rich and believable aesthetic that really just draws you into it’s dark and hopeless setting that always kept me coming back for more. There’s something very interesting about naming all your characters after friends and family and then sending them on a horrific quest and trying to manage their stress meter. I would describe the game as almost a playable visual novel and that is largely thanks to the absolutely incredibly talented narrator of the game - Wayne June. Wayne June has done many audio books and Red Hook studios thought that because of how well he did them that he would fit the games aesthetic perfectly and oh does he steal the show. The game just wouldn’t be the same if Wayne wasn’t constantly chiming in with his deep dark voice, providing commentary on how you are performing in the game that culminates in the feeling of playing a H.P. Lovecraft book where you are the star.

The strongest appeal of Darkest Dungeon is definitely it’s incredible aesthetics and ability to really pull the player into its dark and hopeless world. Playing the game really makes you want to just immerse yourself as much in the world as you can, doing things like naming characters after yourself, friends and family and watching the chaos unfold as your best friend becomes selfish and steals all the loot for himself, or your girlfriend becomes irrational and refuses to heal anyone and of course your character becoming masochistic and damaging themselves, it makes for some great theatre.
A big negative community response to the game was related to the fact that because of a lot of these gameplay mechanics mainly being their to push the aesthetics forward and make the game feel as hopeless and dark as possible, it would mean a lot of the time, success on a quest would come down to random luck. On top of this, the fact that control of your characters can often be completely taken away from you, this in general terms is actually really bad game design and a lot of people don’t like it for that. While yes it can feel a bit silly for you to fail a quest just because you got unlucky and your characters missed all their attacks, become afflicted and then died because of it, it all culminates in strengthening the games main appeal - its dark, foreboding, looming atmosphere where failure could be around any corner and that your characters are not superheroes, they’re just humans, with imperfect human traits that you sometimes can’t control. 
The game overall is brutal, rich in atmosphere and unique in its use of mechanics to strengthen player attachment and care for a character’s physical and mental well-being. There is definitely a method to the madness in this game but I think if you’re going to jump into its world, expect for things to not go your way and for characters to be and act human and respond to stress and hardship the same way humans do, unpredictably.
“Remind yourself that overconfidence is often a slow and insidious killer.” - Narrator.