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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Friday, March 29, 2024

Madness manifest: 'Darkest Dungeon' is a riveting study in horror

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Heroes battle fiends in "Darkest Dungeon."

After a long metamorphosis on Steam early access, the Lovecraftian horrors of this crumbling manor are ready to be unleashed. Ancient entities of darkness have awoken, and countless brave individuals must force them back into the abyss from whence they came. "Darkest Dungeon"(2016) by Red Hook Studios is a game that genuinely wants you to feel the sting of defeat, to make you put your head in your hands when your patiently-leveled team of elite fighters, geared with powerful and expensive trinkets, is defeated by a combination of insanity, starvation and blood loss. Like the very men and women you command, you must learn to walk the fine line between obtaining untold rewards and adding fresh rows to the ever-expanding cemetery. This is a horror game, not in the sense of "Five Nights at Freddy’s" (2014) or "Amnesia: The Dark Descent" (2010)in that there are moments of acute panic, but because of the general sense of dread and foreboding that ebbs and flows with each victory and setback. Speaking of setbacks, expect a lot of those.

Your work begins in your family's ancestral home, or, in the words of the narrator, a “mecca of madness and morbidity,” a ruined country estate now befouled by the presence of ruthless bandits, Eldritch horrors, ravenous beasts and lab experiments gone wrong. You must send teams of desperate mercenaries on expeditions to recover lost heirlooms and artifacts, giving the enemy inhabitants no quarter as you reclaim what’s yours through turn-based battles. As you progress, the demands on your resources grow. For most expeditions it is strongly suggested that you purchase equipment such as torches, bandages and shovels for your team. Though you technically can send your adventurers into the dungeons empty-handed in order to conserve your gold, mounting a harrowing quest while ill-equipped will likely cost them their lives, or at the very least, the stress will take its toll on their sanity. In addition, you must devote some gold to buying new trinkets to boost your characters’ abilities and paying for their recovery in the bar, abbey and sanitorium to restore their deminished sanity. As they journey through the estate they may acquire positive and negative mental traits that can boost or hinder their combat prowess, and if this character is important to you, you must fork over hard-earned coin to remove many of these negative traits before they become a death sentence.

"Darkest Dungeon" is unforgiving and demands your undivided attention. Small mistakes can quickly compound to the point of catastrophe. No deceased adventurer can respawn, revive or reincarnate. You can expect to lose some of them, but you cannot lose hope, as that is a far more precious resource than any amount of gold. Even when your team may be bruised and poisoned with blight, their spirits broken, the narrator maintains his optimism so that you may to the same, telling you to “Regroup! Reassemble! Evil is… timeless after all.” You learn to accept defeat as a natural part of progression, every epitaph a lesson learned.

Since gold is in such high demand, there is a strong incentive to be greedy at the expense of the safety of your team. The first instinct is to kill everything, loot everything and leave no stone unturned, but doing so usually means pushing your characters to their physical and mental limits, and heightening the risk of a complete mission failure. There is an element of randomness involved too, with skills having miss chance, damage rolls and chance to land a critical hit, so you never forget that you are effectively gambling with your character’s lives. Keep in mind that enemy monsters can also land critical hits, suddenly turning what should have been an easy fight into a bloodbath. It's a cruel world out there.

"Darkest Dungeon" is not graphically demanding, with the game's art comprised of two-dimensional drawings and text, but the animations and combat look smooth and the simplistic design philosophy allows for excellent modding opportunities. The grimy, comic panel art style combined with compelling writing add depth to the simple gameplay mechanics to the point where it was easy to get sucked into the seething decay. This, combined with excellent narration from Wayne June, creates an atmosphere of macabre mystery. There’s little to complain about beyond the occasional encounters that are ruined due to unlucky dice rolls or how the game encourages people to grind for resources in order to ensure that their characters can survive the higher difficulties. If you enjoy being kept on your toes by ever-shifting challenges, you have to accept that you can only minimize, not completely eliminate, randomness. If you can accept that, then "Darkest Dungeon" will compel you to see the battle against endless evil to its brutally exhausting conclusion.

Summary A challenging turn-based dungeon-crawler elevated by its Victorian Gothic atmosphere and narration
4.5 Stars