REVIEW

Darkest Dungeon Review

by Sam Foxall, January 21st, 2016

Gothic horror had quite the calendar year in 2015 with Bloodborne, Sunless Sea and the Order 1886 all taking elements from that particular genre of horror to make their game worlds seem that little bit more uncomfortable. Among the Gothic crowd was an Early Access title called Darkest Dungeon, a devilishly hard dungeon crawler that took heavy inspiration from the work of Lovecraft to show just how arduous the experience of delving into the depths would be on the mind. Having finally come out of Early Access and been through a myriad of both positive and negative changes during that development period, has Darkest Dungeon emerged as an ascendant being that glimmers in the pale moonlight, or is it a festering husk that should return to the depths from whence it came?

My personal opinion on Darkest Dungeon has been all over the shop during its development. When it was initially released, I thought it was at the mercy of an RNG system which was heavily against the player. It needed some in-depth balance changes in order to stabilise the game to place it in that nice area of being punishing but fair. As a result, the balances went too far the other way, with certain heroes and party compositions becoming unstoppable and making difficult dungeons a breeze to run through. After that, the balance swung back to the unfair end of the spectrum. The addition of Heart Attacks, which instakilled overstressed adventurers, and corpses, which blocked enemy on the backlines, made late game encounters a micromanagement nightmare. So many variables had to be balanced in order to ensure successful combat encounters, that most dungeon crawls would either result in squad wipes or retreating parties coming back utterly debilitated. Luckily, the difficulty has been fixed for the most part and Darkest Dungeon is now inhabiting that difficulty Goldilocks zone, which makes each dungeon crawl a struggle but never an absolute slog.

This is key as making Darkest Dungeon too easy would destroy much of the atmosphere and sadistic charm which surrounds Red Hook’s dungeon crawler. As the title screen states when you start each session, heroes will die and you will fail at times so striking that careful difficulty balance was crucial in enveloping players within the cursed lands of the Hamlet. So, enough about difficulty, let’s talk about what you actually do in Darkest Dungeon. After your family’s estate falls into disrepute due to vice, sin and experiments with eldritch abominations, you are called in as the inheritor of the estate to come and clean up the Hamlet. You must purge the surrounding areas of any vile corruption and eventually work your way up to delving into the Darkest Dungeon itself to cleanse it of whatever horrors caused this curse upon your house. The set up does feel suitably Lovecraftian, falling somewhere between the Fall of the House of Usher and At the Mountains of Madness, with the game’s grim opening cinematic keying you into the hopeless environment which now exists thanks to the Dungeon. The narrator helps massively in establishing tone, with his grave voice selling you on the setting and providing just the right amount of narration during battles and gameplay to keep you immersed in the grim events which you are fighting through.

Darkest Dungeon is split between two gameplay phases, the Hamlet phase and the Excursion phase. The Hamlet is where you try and rebuild your estate, managing your roster of adventurers and building up your base of operations as it were, so you can make grander assaults on the surrounding areas. Everything in the Hamlet is a potential resource to be utilised or wasted, especially during the early stages of a campaign. Upgrading elements of the Hamlet like your Blacksmith to get better weaponry, your Sanitarium to cure Diseases and negative Quirks your adventurers have picked up during their sorties, the Church to soothe the soul etc. requires you to collect either Deeds, Portraits, Busts and Crests from dungeons in order to improve elements of your home. This means you need to target certain areas as they give out one of these specific resources but that area may only have Level 3 quests available, meaning that you either have to forgo that area until your party has levelled up or risk your most powerful heroes in order to get the components needed to upgrade your Guild so you can enhance your battle skills.

You’ll be spending a lot of time weighing up important decisions back at the Hamlet.

Every single resource-driven decision in Darkest Dungeon is a risk and this makes almost every interaction meaningful, as you are constantly weighing up the pros and cons of any upgrade or purchase. Should I buy this new armour when I’m sure this character won’t survive? Shall I allow this hero to pray their stress away, which will make free them up for the next mission, but will put me dangerously close to bankruptcy and jeopardize my current goal? Red Hook makes you care about every choice and thus, unlike other strategy RPGs or dungeon crawlers, you become attached to your dungeoneers as they are your most valuable resource and you rely on them to succeed. Also, without the crutch of hard resets or revives, losing a powerful party member will really hurt your progress and just reinforces how fragile you really are as a player if you don’t prepare.

In terms of heroes themselves, there is a great variety of classes to choose from when assembling a roster but this overabundance of choice undermines the usefulness of certain classes. This is partially due to the fact that adventurers turn up randomly at your Stage Coach so you have to quickly snag a hero from a specific class before they disappear but also since many classes have hybrid roles, rather than just being part of the Tank, DPS and Healer setup of most RPGs. Some classes will just fall by the wayside and never be used outside of possible challenge runs. Certain heroes like the Hellion and the Man at Arms do the jobs of dealing damage and tanking damage so much better than other classes like the Bounty Hunter or the Leper that you’ll always default to them should the choice ever arise. This is not to say that the classes are badly designed, all are visually interesting and have some interesting specialisation that has some utility should you invest time into it, but many have their utility either fall off in the late game or get outranked by another hero who can do the job better. You also need to factor character synergies into party composition, as certain heroes placed together at certain positions can become absolute monsters. The composition of healer, ranged attacker, tank and DPS usually works well but there is room to experiment. However, be careful because you run the risk of getting a party wipe should you mess around too much and have a party of all ranged attackers who can only attack enemies placed on the back line.

When you do gear up for an venture out into one of the 4 main areas for the Excursion phase, provisioning the correct equipment becomes another set of risky decisions, as you need to balance being prepared with carefully budgeting your money so that you don’t blow 1,000 gold on loads of Holy Water that you won’t end up using. You get a slight refund on items that you don’t end up using once you finish a quest, but you are still wasting inventory space and potentially missing out on that extra bit of gold or those 3 Crests you need to upgrade your Guild by taking superfluous equipment. Some quests have longer dungeons, which require you to take firewood in order to camp, others have you lighting beacons or simply exploring 90% of the rooms in the dungeon. Completing excursions unlocks harder quests and boss encounters which you need to clear in order access the titular Darkest Dungeon. Again, striking the balance between gathering resources, levelling up trainee adventurers and downing bosses is required in order to get the most out of adventuring and not get yourself stuck in a continuous loop of farming low level quests for pittance.

The local Mormon Brothers are very aggressive.

Each area has its own enemies and risks, for example the Weald is filled with monsters that do Blight damage while the Cove has plenty of mobs that deal heavy Bleed damage. This is where careful provisioning comes into play, as not taking bandages to deal with bleeding or not having any skills to clear Blight can result in damage wearing down your heroes, as well as causing stress damage as you wander through the dark. Stress is a meter you have to manage along with health, with stress generally increasing as your heroes become wounded, fall into traps or interact with dangerous objects like cursed statues or infected corpses. Having your stress reach 100 results in a Resolve test, which can cause your hero to have a mental breakdown, meaning they may refuse to fight or be healed. Occasionally, your hero can thrive under pressure and become courageous or super strong, giving them a positive buff for the rest of the dungeon. Gambling on Resolve tests is a viable strategy but you don’t want to let Stress damage get too high, as reaching 200 stress causes your hero to have a heart attack and to go down to 0 health where the slightest bit of damage could mean they die. Stress persists after battle as well, so you can choose to lessen stress by letting your hero pray or go to the pub, or you can continue on with a high stress hero, if you want to gamble with Resolve tests. Certain trinkets (which are equippable items that give bonuses to heroes) can decrease stress damage and increase certain resistances at the cost of other stats, so playing around with trinkets can actually make a stressed hero more powerful.

Each area has a specific boss and you will develop area specific strategies to overcome the pigmen of the Warrens and so on. Like with Resolve tests, heroes develop special Quirks based on their battles which can be positive bonuses or negative diseases which can lower stats or decrease hit chances when in the dark as one example. While it does seem like an absolute overwhelming balancing act at first, you will learn to deal with negative Quirks as you become a seasoned adventurer. You can always remove them for a price at the Sanitarium, should you wish to spend the coin. When you finally reach the Darkest Dungeon, all of these elements come together, as you have to deal with an excursion where you have little to no information about the path ahead, leaving you to use all the knowledge you have learned to conquer this final test. It acts as a great finisher after a long fought campaign but be wary that heroes who make it back alive from the Dungeon can never return, so pick your fighters well.

I’m surprised the RSPCA hasn’t taken that dog away for maltreatment.

This constant sense of dread is aided by the game’s fantastic visual and audio design. As mentioned earlier, the rasping voice of the narrator really sells your successes and failure in battle. The use of shadows in character portraits and animation is fantastic, accentuating faces wracked in pain. The monster design is suitably grotesque too, with mutated priests and giant pigmen with green intestines spilling out across the floor really selling the nightmarish nature of this environment. The only niggle I have is with the soundtrack, which is a little too understated and honestly quite forgettable. You won’t be whistling any of the tracks once you finish a dungeon, I’ll tell you that much.

On just the way it creates a constant sense of peril through making every choice in game a potential risk, as well as its unique take on the human strains of dungeon crawling, Darkest Dungeon is a must buy. Red Hook have put so much effort into balancing their RPG and making almost every decision you make in game one that has proper weight to it, that you actually care about the fate of your adventurers as you try and take back the Hamlet. Its aesthetic is amazingly grotesque, it provides great room for player customisation and experimentation with its battle system and it is probably the best example of how to use Early Access as a launch platform for a game. Even if you aren’t the greatest fan of dungeon crawlers, Darkest Dungeon is a game that deserves your attention.