Darkest Dungeon (

2016

) ½

Every gamer has their own, individual line in the sand, beyond which a difficult game turns from a fun challenge into complete bullshit. That fucking jet-ski level in Battle Toads [1991], World 6 of Super Meat Boy [2010], the Belfry Gargoyles in Dark Souls [2011], and The Road to Nowhere level in Crash Bandicoot [1996] are all examples of this, at least to some players. Obviously, this is all personal and relative, based on an individual's own natural talents, patience, and tendency towards masochism. The professional gamers who wrestled with the first level of Doom [2016] and the tutorial of Cuphead [2017], for instance, would probably be way quicker to denounce a game as too difficult than the dedicated amateurs who beat Dark Souls [2011] without taking a single hit.

I start this review with this preamble because today's game is one that is perched right on the cusp of my own personal frustration line. When I read steam reviews that call Darkest Dungeon “Needlessly brutal” or “Unfair” or “Sadistic” or “Gay”, I understand where these people are coming from. Darkest Dungeon had me raging and swearing at my computer to a frankly embarrassing degree. Normally hard games don't leave me so flustered, because normally the consequences for failure are either trivial (like respawning at the last bonfire in Dark Souls [2011]) or non-existent (like immediately getting a chance to try again like in Super Meat Boy [2010]). The worst thing a game is likely to do to me for failing is making me sit through the same damn cut-scene again (and most of the time you can skip those). Darkest Dungeon, even though it lacks a true Game Over screen (unless you are playing on Stygian mode), will make every defeat you suffer 100% permanent, by killing off your characters with no possibility (save a very rare random event) of resurrecting them. The progression system in Darkest Dungeon is slow and costly (in in-game currency anyway, no micro-transactions here), so the death of a high-level character is always a significant blow. What's worse, because the game is a turn-based system, you will often know well in advance when your character is in danger and how close he is to death. Don't think you can game the system with save scumming either, the auto-save in Darkest Dungeon is damn near perfect and any attempt to cheat will probably result in you having to watch your hero die again; how's that for punishment?

It makes for a play style that is uniquely stressful and intense, knowing that at all times death is lurking just out of sight, waiting to spring the trap at a moment's carelessness. I've had elite parties positively wrecked by low-level enemies like those goddamn spiders, which is both as funny and as humiliating as you would probably imagine. Indeed, when you're first starting out and getting the hang of the various environments and the various enemy types and hazards that they contain, you can expect to suffer more than a few setbacks and disasters. Even successful missions carry a cost with them, as any surviving heroes will develop personality quirks which will degrade their effectiveness, either in or outside of combat. My personal favorite are the compulsive personality quirks that will cause heroes to spontaneously examine objects in the dungeon, heedless of any danger to themselves. It really drives home the point that you are no so much playing as these characters, as trying desperately to keep them under control. More frustrating, and more disruptive to combat are the Afflictions that occur when a hero is suffering from so much stress that they succumb to temporary insanity. The type of madness is randomly generated, but all are a pain in the ass to deal with; nobody wants a Crusader afflicted with cowardice who runs away from the front rank, nor a Vestal suffering from masochism who spends her turn whipping herself rather than healing her allies.

It's not all gloom and doom though, for every negative thing that can happen to your heroes in Darkest Dungeon there is usually a positive corollary. Send a hero down into the weld multiple times, and sure maybe he'll go mad but he may also develop positive personality quirks that make him better at fighting in those conditions. Whenever your hero suffers from an affliction, there is a chance that rather than lapse into madness they will instead rebound from the stress, stronger and more courageous than before. Everything is determined by the game's random number generation, that seems like absolute bullshit at first glance until you realize that there are countless ways you can manipulate that RNG and bend it to your will. Indeed, that forms the main challenge of Darkest Dungeon. Most of your time playing will be spent building teams resilient against all the various misfortunes that can befall you, organizing their equipment, and buying upgrades to give these poor bastards you're sending into the maw of hell a better chance of survival. When a team falls apart, it's crushing but when you discover a combination that works effectively it is nothing short of exhilarating! What's more, with four slots open per party, and fifteen different classes (seventeen including the DLC), there are literally hundreds of possible combinations. Not all of them will work well (a team of four antiquarians is basically a suicide mission), but that is part of the fun and part of the challenge.

A word of advice, don't feel bad playing through the game of radiant difficulty (the “easy” option), because while radiant is the easy option it doesn't do much to decrease the game's actual difficulty. It does not, for instance, turn off permadeath, or even make the enemies do less damage or attack your party with any less aggression. Hell, on the radiant difficulty you'll still see you party members develop mental disorders at roughly the same pace they would on darkest difficulty (the medium option). Mostly, Radiant just reduces the amount of time you have to spend grinding, turning a 50-hour game into a 30-hour one. Indeed, as I was assembling my teams for the push on the final dungeons in the game, it took so much damn time that I began to wish I'd chickened out and used the lowest difficulty because at this point the standard dungeons were hardly dangerous at all unless I was phenomenally unlucky.

Fortunately, this brief stretch was the closest that Darkest Dungeon came to getting dull, as once I was prepared for the final set of dungeons I found them to be downright ludicrous. Even armed with a guide to the final levels, I still lost half my party on the first level and was forced to retreat (only to discover that retreating from the Darkest Dungeon means one of your surviving heroes might automatically die holding off the hordes of monsters, sigh). Indeed, the final dungeons are the closest the game comes to being unfair. Someone attempting the final dungeons for the first time will probably approach them the same way they've done every challenging dungeon up until this point: namely, assemble a team of high-level heroes with good synergy and set off. The only problem is they will rapidly discover that each one of the final dungeons has unique challenges and mechanics that mean a great number of normally effective party formations will be hopeless. Take the first level of the dungeon, where the player will face off against a shambling horror that has the ability to scramble the party formation each and every round. Some heroes (like the Crusader or the Jester) can be move to any position and remain effective, but others (such as the Leper) are all but useless when placed in some spots. If your party isn't built to handle this, then you'd better just retreat (but retreating means potentially losing a high-level character). The way to handle these dungeons is to send in expendable squads of low-level to get a feel for the unique challenges (and presumably die horribly in the process). But it would have been better if this strategy had been necessary earlier on, during some or all of the low-level boss missions, so it doesn't catch so many players flat-footed in the final missions.

To be fair, Red Hook seems to have realized their mistake as well and offered a slight correction in their Crimson Court DLC. Here the boss missions are larger than any other maps in the game and will take multiple tries to scout through and unlock shortcuts before you could even think about challenging the boss. It's a really neat mechanic, made only slightly obnoxious by the fact that you need to get a special item before attempting the dungeon, which can be a pain-in-the-ass to find, and consequently cannot immediately send in a second group after wrapping up with the first one. Darkest Dungeon, I sunk nearly 100 hours into you between my two playthroughs, trust me the problem is not that your content goes by too fast! You can afford to speed the process up a little bit.

Visually, Darkest Dungeon is nothing short of gorgeous. All the characters, enemies and environments are done in a thickly-inked, hand-drawn style that matches the grim setting perfectly. Of course, the highly detailed models mean that intricate animation is out of the question, so pretty much all actions (attacking, buffing, dodging, getting hit, etc) are depicted with a single frame of animation. To create the illusion of movement the camera zooms in on the action and cants to the side, all in time with the sound effects. It's a nice compromise, as there is no way the minuscule team at Red Hook would have been able to fully animate all the different characters. The simplistic animation style has also been a boon to modders, who are usually working with an even smaller team than the original developers. This means that if, after 50 or so hours, you start to get bored with the vanilla classes and skins for your character you can easily add in some new options.

The voice-acting is also top-notch, though following the logic of games like Bastion [2011] and Transistor [2014] there is only one voice-actor. Rather than hire a cast of 2nd rate amateurs, the developers decided to sink all their limited budget into getting one really great voice-actor and making him the only speaking role. Here it is your ancestor who unearthed the horrors beneath the mansion in the first place and committed suicide shortly after learning what he'd done. Upon challenging a boss, he will give you an extended dump of lore, but for the most part, he only chimes in randomly either celebrating a victory or chiding one of your failures. Like everything else, the voice is determined by RNG, and does not come so often that even after nearly 100 hours of play, it remains a pleasant surprise when it happens.