Secondhand Opinions: Darkest Dungeon

Dive into the darkest depths of madness in Red Hook Studios' Darkest Dungeon.

If playing Bloodborne and its expansion The Old Hunters last year taught me anything it's that a part of me really likes brutal, challenging games when they are done well. It also made me realize how much I love Gothic and Lovecraftian horror. I'm also a huge fan of the base management elements of turn based tactics game like XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The goal of Darkest Dungeon, the debut title of Red Hook Studios, was to take the aesthetic elements of Gothic horror, the psychological madness of Lovecraftian horror, and the turn based combat and base management of games like XCOM and mix them all together into a wonderful mash of Gothic horror, role playing, base management delight. The game main selling point besides it general difficulty is the unique Affliction System that would saddle playable hero characters with negative psychological quirks if they get to stress while adventuring and facing off against enemies.  For example, a hero might adopt a fear of spiders after getting damaged by spider enemies one to many times. On paper this sounds like a really good game and preliminary buzz from media covering the game confirmed that it was a good game, but things seemed to get a bit rocky during the development of the game.

If a Hero's Stress Meter is filled their Resolve is tested and if they fail they will be inflicted with a Negative Quirk that heavily affects their performance when dungeon crawling.

Darkest Dungeon had been in Early Access on Steam for almost a year and only recently left it to be sold as a finished product. While for the most part, the development of Darkest Dungeon while it was in Early Access has been praised as the proper way to use the platform, it was still a bit turbulent. Apparently several fans of the game accused the game of being far too easy and wanted it to be harder. So Red Hook Studios added several new mechanics to make the game more challenging. They added corpses that got in the way of attacks and needed to be removed from the field to properly use certain abilities, heart attacks that could instantly kill your heroes if their stress meter gets too high, and greatly increases the defense and critical hit rate of enemies. Several players felt that these changes were far too extreme and alienated new players while others felt that the changes were exactly what the game need. Red Hook Studios did it best to try and please everyone by making some of the more extreme mechanics optional, but still it shook the faith many people had in the game. Did it survive its time in Early Access or did it come out an overly difficult mess.

Your Estate and The Hamlet built around it is your base of operations. Where you hire new heroes, buy equipment, and treat stress and afflictions.

Thankfully, Darkest Dungeon was able to endure the nagging of people desperately wanting them to make the game they way they want it and find a nice balance suits both the players and the developers. The game is still tough as nails, but newcomers at the very least have shot of getting sucked into the game and striving to get better to see more of it. The game has gone on to get critical acclaim from most major gaming news outlets such as IGN and Game Informer as well as independent game journalists like Jim Sterling. The game is set have some new content added post launch like a new hero class known as The Merchant. I plan to pick up this game as soon as I have some disposable income available. Until then I must be contented with Twitch Streams and Let's Plays. Darkest Dungeon is currently available for PC and OS X and will be coming to PS4 later this year.