Darkest Dungeon review

I don't know that any game has ever left me feeling so utterly defeated as Darkest Dungeon.

You may notice that this review is arriving a month after the game's official, "full" release out of early access. There's a reason for that; unlike with most review games, I simply could not force myself to sit and play Darkest Dungeon for long stretches. At my best, I could last three or four hours. Inevitably I hit a terrible string of bad luck and worse strategic decisions, lost heart in my campaign, and had to step away and build up my spirit again.

This sounds bad and frustrating, and sometimes it is. But it's also key to the thesis of Darkest Dungeon. It takes the fantasy role-playing game mold that's developed from the power fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons, and digs for something deeper and more sinister. It asks: What if those dungeon crawls weren't about getting better loot or higher levels, but about fighting for your very survival and sanity?

In true dungeon crawl style, plot is kept to a minimum in Darkest Dungeon. The game begins with the discovery that you have inherited a manor from a relative who lost his mind and took his own life. You soon realize the reason your predecessor lost his mind: He uncovered unspeakable horrors hidden away in the caves, woods and catacombs surrounding the manor. Now it's left to you to clean up your relative's mess and try to stay sane while doing so.

Darkest Dungeon splits its time between two types of gameplay: turn-based combat and exploration-focused dungeon crawls, and a more strategic city building element. While in your hamlet, you can recruit characters of various classes, and spend money and resources improving the buildings in the surrounding village. The goal of these upgrades is to finance further expeditions into the increasingly dangerous surrounding areas, where the other part of the gameplay takes place.

Stress proves to be both the most engaging and the most, well, stressful part of Darkest Dungeon. As characters become more stressed, they become less effective fighters. They're more likely to whiff attacks, less likely to dodge blows from enemies. They're also more likely to develop debilitating personality quirks, a key method of differentiating characters from each other.

While characters of the same class generally look identical, they often develop in extremely different ways. For example, one of my first heroes was a Crusader named Reynauld. He came with a great positive quirk, Quickdraw, which grants four bonus speed for the first attack of each combat scenario. But he also quickly became weighed down with negative personality quirks, including Ruminator (which lessens his ability to heal stress by 10 percent) and a devastating trait called The Yips that lowered his armor rating by five. These problems quickly ruined his usefulness as a tank.

All isn't lost when a stressed-out character develops a few highly negative traits, though. Back in the hamlet between dungeon runs, your characters can rest, recovering stress through activities like praying, drinking or visiting a brothel. You can also place characters into a sanitarium for a time to remove unwanted quirks, and to upgrade abilities, armor and weapons. The hamlet presents plenty of options. However, resources are limited, and balancing them is one of the most challenging parts of Darkest Dungeon.

Where the stress of combat left me on edge, I found both comfort and exhaustion in the cycle of slowly upgrading my hamlet. Each individual character you recruit will be dead permanently should they fall in battle, but the hamlet provides a source of consistent growth and movement forward in spite of the often disheartening setbacks. But the need to push for those upgrades was also my sole source of frustration in Darkest Dungeon, primarily due to one major shortcoming in the game.