When it comes to horror the concept of inheriting a relative’s spooky estate is a tried and tested cliché. It is one that works most of the time though and Darkest Dungeon is yet again proof of that. Your uncle was greedy and determined to find wealth on his land. What he found instead were portals to another dimension. He retreated, rather than trying to take responsibility, and took his life. Now it is up to you to try and cleanse the area of monsters whilst managing a team of adventurers through numerous dungeons.
The adventurers aren’t all the same though, there are various classes and each of them has their own quirks and abilities. Some may refuse to explore with another class, meaning you’ll have to juggle things about to what you believe will be the best group. There’s plenty there to experiment with and sometimes things won’t go well. In fact, most the time they probably won’t. On top of trying to keep your team alive, as the game will see them killed off permanently if they die, you also have to manage their mental state. If they become too stressed, their behaviour can become erratic, sometimes refusing to do what you tell them, or acting on their own accord. It can be very frustrating at times, especially when you’re doing well in a boss dungeon, but it does help add variety to each time you play.
The bosses in the game require different tactics than the standard enemies you encounter. It means that sometimes the team you have gone in to the dungeon with will just not be able to overcome this new enemy type. It’s at these moments that you have to make some of the most difficult decisions in the game. The whole point of a boss dungeon is to defeat the boss, but if you’re failing then at what point do you accept defeat?
If you’re anything like me you’ll probably try and keep going until it’s too late to escape and lose all four members of your team. Earlier on in the game this is fine, but later on, when you’ve spent time and money levelling up characters, it is an understandably agonising moment. Especially if you’ve also spent your entire budget on resources and levelling your team up to go in to the dungeon.
It’s important to try and manage your budget well. In between expeditions you will end up at the Hamlet, where you can hire new adventurers, distress existing ones, buy new equipment and much more. You will want to be spending enough money here to make sure your team is prepared for the next expedition, whilst leaving you enough to actually buy resources for the dungeon trek. If you don’t have much money left over from the Hamlet you may go for a short dungeon to get some more funds, whilst healing up some of your more important characters and levelling up some fresh team members.
The constant rotation of team members due to roster expansions or deaths means there’s nearly always someone new to level up. You’ll no doubt find the team pairings you want to stick with for your main runs against bosses or longer dungeons, but it’s fun to experiment and the constant fresh faces make it so that’s possible. The team experimentation adds some longevity to the game, but the bulk of it comes from the massive amount of quests available for you to complete, and there really is loads to do.
There are some odd quirks in the game, but it seems to run at a steady framerate, and the 2D art style looks lovely. The quirks include your characters always walking from left to right in the dungeon even if they’re walking a different direction according to the map. The map also has a habit of annoyingly zooming in, but it’s easy enough to zoom back out. Negative personality traits are shown as red text, but for some reason this is shown on a red background, thus making it pointlessly difficult to read. The awkward reading text doubles up with some confusing UI moments at times, with it being a bit awkward to figure out what does what. Apart from those things though everything else seemed pretty great and the port in general is a huge success. The voice-over work is strong, the gameplay is for the most part solid and it has a very addictive “one more time” feel to it.
Darkest Dungeon is a wonderful experience if you have the stomach for its dark setting and the fact it’s Cross-Buy and Cross-Save for the Vita is great value for money. The difficulty can seem daunting at times, but it is rare that I had an experience that I felt the death of my characters was harsh. Greed is a dangerous thing in strategy games and dungeon crawlers and Darkest Dungeon plays on it well. It’s always dangling a carrot in front of you, encouraging you to go further despite the fact that further may mean your demise. If you’re a fan of strategy games and classic horror settings then Darkest Dungeon is a no brainer.
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You can watch me play an hour of Darkest Dungeon on PS4 below.