Or the fraught scouting expedition where each of my warrior-priestesses went mad, in turn, until they started to refuse healing with increasing frequency and had to be pulled screaming through each encounter by a paranoid jester. There was the stalwart knight with a kleptomaniac streak, whose reliability as a front-line combatant meant I overlooked the fact that he'd steal a few thousand gold worth of artifacts on every run. Through a complex interweaving of RPG systems, random dungeon generation and ambient detail, stories emerge. Driving parties of doomed mercenaries deeper and deeper into your horror-haunted family manor, you're tasked with managing their sanity along with their safety. The artwork, music, and writing are all phenomenal-and as Evan notes, they're all cohesive parts of an intricate, punishing whole. Through a complex interweaving of RPG systems, random dungeon generation and ambient detail, stories emerge.Ĭhris Thursten: Darkest Dungeon excels in every area. Getting over that emotional hump, that instinct to love and develop your soldiers, is the most interesting aspect of the game.

Get too attached to a Highwayman or a Hellion, and you'll waste loads of gold curing them of every malady. Every character is a tool that will break (usually mentally), become diseased, or gain some costly predilection. Along with XCOM, it's one of the few games where you can be 40 hours in and then lose a huge chunk of progress if you botch a dungeon run.īut unlike XCOM, Darkest Dungeon pushes you to treat your party members not as handmade, precious heroes that you nurse from recruits to legends, but as disposable napkins that you use to sop up the unearthly horror left behind by your ancestor. Darkest Dungeon is committed to its difficulty: there's a single, intended difficulty setting, and I've heard tales of people dying in the tutorial. Even an unlucky lump of 20 stress from a lowly cultist frustrates you, gets under your skin. Its eldritch enemies are so wonderfully hateable, and all of them can cause trouble.

Darkest Dungeon brings the best parts of Lovecraft into a roguelike RPG, but does so without getting bogged down in cliche. Evan Lahti: Total artistic and creative cohesion.

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