The Darkest Estate, the hamlet that you return to in between sorties has all the usual establishments you’d expect to find in this type of game, a guild for upgrading your skills, a blacksmith for strengthening weapons and armour, and a stage coach from which to hire new meat for the grinder. On one occasion, one of my party, Medley, a journeyman suffering from hopelessness, started refusing to take his turn, reducing the opportunities I had to attack the enemy, he also repeatedly stabbed himself and then refused healing, throwing my plans off balance at every opportunity and feeding into what makes Darkest Dungeon so special: you can never be in complete control. Afflicted characters increase the stress levels of your entire party and cause disruption through all manner of alarming behaviour. When a stress meter is maxed out that character becomes afflicted, a state which manifests itself in the form of random behaviours and stat changes.

As you progress through dungeons, each of the four heroes that make up your party will surely and steadily fill up their stress meters, be it through straightforward battle, the spells of an eldritch occultist, or simply walking through corridor after stinking corridor in total darkness. It’s ever-present, constantly building, battering your expanding roster of adventurers with a plethora of debilitating mental maladies.

What effect does the endless terror and violence involved in a life of adventuring have on the men, women and abominations who take up the challenge?Ī roguelike dungeon crawler from indie developer Red Hook Studios, Darkest Dungeon reinvigorates the genre by forcing players to deal not just with the regular busywork of commanding bands of heroes, maintaining supplies, health, upgrading armour, weapons, and skills, but also the effects all of this violence has on the minds of the characters you plunge into the darkness below your ancestral home.ĭarkest Dungeon’s central hook is stress. And if it is to cost these people their lives, their sanity? So be it. How many men have I lost? How many have I watched lose their minds entirely? But I must press on, there is a terrible wrong to be put right, I must restore honour to my family name. For many months now I have sent them into the unholy dirt beneath my ancestral home, an endless tide of filth and evil marching ceaselessly towards them from the deepest, darkest reaches of hell.

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