Darkest Dungeon II – Review
Many dungeon crawlers can be experienced as ego boosts. Even if your hero (or band of heroes) doesn’t have godlike invulnerability, you should be able to easily slice through large groups of monsters so long as you haven’t chosen the most challenging difficulty setting. Refer to Diablo 3. A related work is Pillars of Eternity.
You won’t find this kind of adrenaline rush in Darkest Dungeon. In reality, the nightmare journey beneath the streets of Red Hook Studio feels gloriously retro. Here is a game that requires you to invest in a group of characters, monitor their stress levels and inventory, and keep in mind that they could all perish if they take a bad turn and encounter the wrong enemy. For a change, it’s entertaining to lead a group of “heroes” that look completely out of their depth right away.
At the start of Darkest Dungeon, the player is thrown straight into a nightmare. Darkest Dungeon’s visceral mood is equal parts hopelessness and dread, thanks to the combination of its deep, scary soundscape, dark, craggy visual aesthetic, and admittedly great voice acting. It’s been a while since a collection of animated stills sent shivers up our spines.
The plot consists mostly on a group of adventurers being sent into a dungeon beneath an old home, where the former owner unleashed hell in an effort to satisfy their carnal needs. The game is, at its heart, a turn-based role-playing experience in which the protagonist must brave the perils of a dungeon in search of wealth.
You can stack characters in the most effective order to enhance your odds of getting them back from the dungeon in one piece; the adventurers are all class-based, with various powers and attacks, and you are encouraged to experiment with different combinations.
Character development and decision-making raise their own set of challenges. Players must ensure they have the proper set up for each dungeon they enter. If your party doesn’t include a healer or anyone with ranged attack skills, they may not last very long. Oh, and if you’re travelling without torches and encounter a monster, the monster automatically gains an attack boost.
Darkest Dungeon’s Stress system is the main feature that sets it apart from similar games. The horrors the explorers encounter as they descend deeper into the mansion wear on their psyche. As the group encounters more and more terrifying monsters in the corridors, the Stress gauges fill up for each member of the party. When it’s full, the person’s character breaks, and things might go downhill quickly.
Those who are too far gone to pull themselves out of their trauma will start pulling others down with them. Characters can become masochistic and intentionally hurt themselves or refuse life-saving healing spells, mumble incoherently, pray aloud for death, start flinging abuse at each other, and more. The remainder of their party will feel the effects of this, and they will rush towards their breaking point much more rapidly. There’s not much keeping the adventurers together; it’s like trying to keep a house of cards from collapsing if you remove just one card.
Because of this, Darkest Dungeon requires a great deal of micromanagement on the side of the player as they monitor the Stress levels of their party members. Going into the surrounding village, visiting the local pub, church or brothel can help alleviate Stress in their characters. These pursuits, however, need gold, which, as you might have guessed, can only be obtained by returning to the dungeon and braving its terrors once more.
In addition to the Lovecraftian levels of Stress you’ll encounter in the dungeon, you should also be aware that death is permanent in Darkest Dungeon. There are no redos if someone in your party—or everyone in your party—meets their end. This means that you can spend a great deal of time strengthening their characters, just to have them and all of their abilities and equipment annihilated at the end of the game.
With the possibility of losing your entire cast to a particularly formidable boss, you may have to restart the game from the beginning. Losing your crew to the forces of darkness isn’t as much of a chore as it could be because the game’s action is varied and there’s a lot to appreciate.
However, it’s always a jab in the gut to see a monster reduce the heroes you’ve spent so much effort building up to nothing but paint.
If you don’t mind the risk, Darkest Dungeon is an interesting pit to sink your teeth into. While Darkest Dungeon isn’t for everyone, it’s well worth your time if you don’t mind the possibility of crushing defeat, insanity, and nail-biting tension.
