Darkest Dungeon has been making grown men cry for the better part of two years now. This nail-bitingly hard turn-based RPG has a lotto offer its passionate, patient, and sometimes lucky players. Released on PC back in 2016, on the 19th January, Darkest Dungeon has seen a lot of passion and praise follow it, but the question is, is all of it warranted? Read on to find out just how good or frustratingly bad this RPG truly is!
Story
Set in gothic fantasy, the player is sent a letter from a relative of theirs, claiming that they have inherited every single inch of their estate. The letter details how their distant relative has unearthed true horrors from beneath the estate, unwittingly allowing them safe passage into our world. As the new owner of the estate, it is now tasked with you to protect your estate and the rest of the world, while attempting to claim fame and fortune for your family’s name, before all hell really does break loose.
Gameplay
The gameplay in Darkest Dungeon comes in two-fold:dungeon exploration and preparations. Starting with the more intriguing of the two, you must build a team of 4 different individuals, each one with their own class, strengths, and weaknesses. As you take them out to the dungeon to explore, you are bound to come across a few nasties that want nothing more than to decimate your entire party. Once combat begins, you must take it in turns to choose each individual attacks and use them to defend yourself. By failing to take proper care of your party, they will either succumb to death or even worse– insanity. A character will simply die once their health is no longer existent, but all characters have a secondary meter, known as stress. Once that reaches 100, they will become insane, no longer listening to your commands, and making actions that might endanger the entire party. Balancing these two out while exploring is key, because as soon as someone dies, that is it, they are gone forever and are considered permanently dead.
Outside of exploring dungeons, you’ll need to recruit new adventurers, upgrade their weapons and armour, purchase provisions for the next dungeon, and even assign specific adventurers to different tasks. At the end of each exploration, any stress damage that was done remains, so you’re going to have to pay to bring it back down again. Depending on how lucky or unlucky a certain adventurer is, they might acquire a positive or negative trait, at which point you may have to make the decision to send them packing or spend a high amount of gold to remove a trait from your favourite character. From start to finish, this game is all about making tough decisions that you don’t want to make and that’s where a lot of its charm comes in.
Graphics
DarkestDungeon has a very striking, dark and gothic style to its visuals and makes fora very unique visual experience overall. Every single enemy and class have their own unique look to them, and nothing in the game looks out of place in the slightest. To be fair, the dungeons do become somewhat monotonous, as not much changes in the background, but that’s sort of what you’d expect from a dark, dank dungeon.
Pros and Cons
Starting with the pros: the game maybe incredibly difficult, but it makes succeeding with your favourite team incredibly satisfying every single time that you feel out of your depth. The visuals as well are incredibly striking and are completely unique to the game – seeing any art for this game will instantly make you think of Darkest Dungeon and the artists for this game have really outdone themselves in this regard. The variety of classes and enemies makes playing the game for hours on end really fun, without making things become too stale.
Moving onto the cons: the game is designed to be hard, but at times, that difficulty can feel as if it’s weighing the game down with just how frustrating it can become. As with many RPG’s, there’s an element of luck to the experience, but with Darkest Dungeon, that luck can really feel as if it’s out to get you at times and can make the game feel unfair. Obviously, the developers want you to mitigate that unfortunateness as best as possible, but that unfair nature of the game can make it feel as if it’s out to get you, meaning that you don’t actually want to play it.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Darkest Dungeon is an incredible turn-based RPG that takes an incredibly brave stance on being pretty darn hard throughout the entirety of the game. Depending on how you feel about difficulty in games, Darkest Dungeon’s gameplay might not be for you, but if you can look past that difficulty and enjoy it for what it is, then you’ve got a great RPG that took a lot of risks to get to where it is and deserves it as a result. As such, this game makes for a great recommendation for those of you out there that want a truly challenging turn-based RPG that at no point is going to pull any punches!
Get Darkest Dungeon now on:
PlayStation 4
Xbox One
Nintendo Switch
Steam
