Swords to Rust - Hearts to Dust
There is unique sadism in the way Darkest Dungeon tries on the one hand to make you care about its heroes and yet at the same time does everything in its power to mercilessly slaughter them. You can rename them, tweak their abilities and the process of developing them is fun and rewarding. It has all the things that help you get attached and yet all it takes for everything to come crashing down around you can be a simple game of luck. God may not use dice, but the devil sure does in Red Hook’s delightfully grim turn-based dungeon crawler.
Narratively the setup is relatively simple; you are called to visit the ruined estate of an ancestor, tasked with discovering and destroying the evil that befell him and his once prosperous land. In order to achieve this you must recruit heroes to fight for you and work towards developing the small hamlet that acts as a gateway to the various quests that must be undertaken in order to drive back the creeping malevolence. In order to do this you’ll need money and recovered heirlooms which can only be found through exploring the corrupted and twisted remains of the estate. So you pick your party of 4 heroes from a pool of unique classes, provision them with food, torches and other items for the task ahead, then set off in search of loot and glory through a series of increasingly tough turn-based encounters.
Darkest Dungeon takes the classic tale of taking turns to run up and slap each other and tweaks it in some very interesting ways. Aside from the usual health bar, each hero has a stress damage meter where once filled they are subject to a resolve test from which failure imposes an affliction on them that can have truly terminal implications for your party. They can become abusive or paranoid, refuse to attack or create more stress for your other members, and so if you had a plan that relied on them doing what they are told, then you can kiss that idea goodbye and in a lot of cases will struggle to get very far, especially in the later quests where the price of any weakness can be far more severe. On top of this, should the stress meter fill twice, then you character suffers a heart attack, and once more the devil rolls to see if chance demands another corpse.
However if a hero passes the resolve test they are granted a virtue and affect the other party members in a much more positive manner, reducing stress and turning a potentially bad situation right around. In fact it’s almost uncanny how this affliction/virtue system mirrors ones own attitude towards the game when things are going badly. ‘Fearful’ at the prospect of losing, ‘hopeless’ in the face of the seemingly insurmountable challenge, ‘paranoid’ at the game for having it in for you, or in the case of virtues ‘focused’ and ‘stalwart’ where you understand that focus and calm thought will see you alive back to the hamlet.
That’s not to say that there aren’t more exquisite tortures to be found. Aside from loss of health or through stress, hunger also plays a part. The more you travel, the more you need to eat and should you run out of food when tummies grumble, then health is lost and stress is gained, and unless you abandon the quest of find more food, only death awaits. Then there are diseases you can contract, and quirks you can gain, affecting all sorts of things from effectiveness against certain enemies, changes to stats and resistances, even the means by which stress can be potentially reduced. That’s not to mention the traps, obstacles and many other interactive objects that can help or hinder progress.
But mercifully so long as a hero has not died upon return from a quest, they can be redeemed, albeit at a cost. The hamlet allows you to not only upgrade a hero’s skills and gear, but also treat any diseases they contract, reduce stress and remove afflictions, as well as removing negative quirks or locking in positive ones. The cost however is gold, and the higher level the hero in question, the higher the cost, so it’s important to ensure you have a steady quest income to manage the various physical and emotional scars of conflict.
As a result of all of this the experience ends up toeing the line between RNG hell and brutal strategy, and it’s easy to feel that it sometimes lurches to the former if you don’t have a working knowledge of all the minutiae that can alter the outcome of battles. Various actions can be combined for devastating effect and there are lots of small changes one can make to greatly increase damage output and survivability. Your choice of party composition, skills, and items all need to be fully exploited to stand any real chance of completing the game, and taking the time to learn and manipulate these elements cannot be overstated. Darkest Dungeon demands deep dedication, determination and other alliterative properties so as to dodge desperate damning despair.
In fact Red Hook seems to take almost fetishistic pleasure in making you care about and invest in your heroes so as to maximise the trauma of losing them. It’s all in the subtle details that make this happen. Aside from the customisation options you get these wonderful little speech bubble quotes from your heroes throughout the game which are often amusing and endearing, which provide an extra dimension of charm and personality to the otherwise bleak atmosphere. You also have to spend many hours removing quirks, diseases and upgrading them, so when all that time and effort ends in their doom, it can be rather frustrating, to put it mildly. The issue of recovering from these losses is perhaps the largest criticism of Darkest Dungeon. The process of developing your heroes takes many hours, and the need to constantly rebuild your roster after deaths could well drain one’s enthusiasm to continue. Although there are ways to recruit higher level heroes as part of one of the hamlet upgrades, the spectre of having to grind nevertheless remains.
Another line the game straddles, although more comfortably, is that between risk and reward. The light level of your torch affects various elements where the darkness brings more vicious enemies, but also yields better loot, and the question of whether to push on or call it quits in a quest that isn’t going so well is often not so simple. That said, far too many grievous miscalculations on my part now suggest that discretion is indeed, and always is, the better part of valour.
One can't finish without mentioning the narration, which is certainly one of the best pieces of audio ever in a game. Even though the writing is excellent, full of eloquent phrasing, it’s the delivery that makes it all so effective, and it’s impressive just how well the lines reflect the action and the emotions tied to them. It also provides many useful tips and snippets of advice that you would do well to heed. Visually the game makes the most of what appears a rather modest budget. The art is suitably dark and gothic, with some fantastic hero and creature designs, and the atmosphere evoked is entirely in keeping with the game’s title and ethos.
And that ethos is pain, both physical and emotional. In a time of overly worthy, albeit well intentioned attempts at tackling various topics in video games, it’s really gratifying to play something that manages to actually make the theme of psychological trauma fun and engaging from a gameplay standpoint. Whilst it’s clearly somewhat limited in its depiction, it nevertheless makes the care and management of it something that meaningfully invests you in the fate of your suffering heroes. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to flagellate myself for a week so as to cure my masochism.
