Darkest Dungeon Review

It's also the deepest, most punishing, and tense dungeon.

Dan Stapleton Avatar

Updated: Jan 10, 2020 11:45pm UTC

Update: Darkest Dungeon has been nominated for IGN's 2016 Game of the Year.

Like most fiendish things, Darkest Dungeon appears much simpler and more benign than it is. Its grim but expressive hand-drawn art style, combined with how you only ever see your party of four mismatched adventurers trudge from left to right as the backgrounds scroll by like a demented Hannah Barbera cartoon, might give you the idea there’s not much to it. But once you’ve explored a few of these randomized dungeons and almost certainly seen several of your fragile characters brutally killed or driven insane, it’s revealed as an intimidatingly deep, tense, and intentionally opaque turn-based tactical game that’s dripping with character.

What strikes me most is how the rampant and merciless randomness always keeps me off balance, struggling to stay alive. It comes in both the usual accuracy percentages for various attacks and dodges, but also unexpected and unusual places - even the turn order is mixed up by behind-the-scenes dice rolls. So you’re never quite sure, for example, if your Vestal healer will be able to patch up your Crusader tank before the enemy can deal a killing blow, permanently removing that character and all his progress from your roster. By robbing you of the certainty and predictability you usually see in a turn-based tactics game of this nature, Darkest Dungeon creates tense and terrifying battles where you’re never sure what’ll happen next.

An Atmosphere of Doom

It’s all fantastically grim and delivered with great gravitas."

The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat are intensified by outstanding narration that frequently interjects with grim warnings and exclamations in response to events like critical hits or discovering potentially dangerous loot. The deep-voiced speaker, who portrays an ancestor of yours who first unearthed the dungeons before recognizing his folly, also doles out bits of loose, Lovecraftian story more as flavor than a meaningful plot. Mostly when beginning boss-level dungeons, he’ll give some background on how each unholy horror came to be and what role they played in his own mad quest, and it’s all fantastically grim and delivered with great gravitas.

Battles are great to watch, too. Using just a few frames of animation and some parallax movement, Darkest Dungeon conveys action and excitement, and the monster designs are varied and often creative. Battle is fought against a wide variety of bandits, skeleton warriors, fish men, filthy pig monsters, Eldritch horrors, and all manner of creatively designed monstrosities in between. The grotesque bosses are especially noteworthy for their unique and powerful abilities, which include a transforming lump of flesh and a Siren that temporarily seduces one of your party to her side.

Knowing when to fold a bad hand and retreat is as important as knowing how to play a good one."

It might feel unfair at times - because it is - but that’s where the tension comes from. It would be unforgivable for a game to put us in no-win situations with catastrophic consequences that can wipe away hours of progress, but Darkest Dungeon sidesteps that problem by giving us an eject button that allows you to bail out of a run that’s going south at nearly any time (it does have a chance to fail, like everything else), even in combat, and save your surviving characters at the cost of forfeiting your mission rewards. Like in poker, knowing when to fold a bad hand and retreat is as important as knowing how to play a good one.

A Deep Hole of Complexity

So it’s all about maximizing your odds of survival in these unforgiving places, though that’s easier said than done. It’s impressive how many different factors you have to consider when putting together a four-member team from the 14 distinctly different classes that not only has complementary abilities, but also taking care that no member is affected by weaknesses that might make them vulnerable to the perils of a particular dungeon run.

The first complex thing you have to consider is that each character has seven skills, such as the Highwayman’s bleed-inflicting Open Vein or the Grave Robber’s blight-loaded Poison Dart. You can only have four equipped at a time, and unlocking and upgrading each skill individually represents a considerable investment of resources. This forces you to specialize characters for specific roles, such as front-line melee or back-row support, or to spread your abilities thinly across the positional slots. Each class’s ability set is flexible enough that most characters can serve multiple roles, which adds a lot of diversity to possible builds.

Above: gameplay in the Weald dungeon.

But wait, there’s more: each character’s placement in the four-character lineup affects which skills can be used. For instance, Poison Dart can only be used if the Grave Robber is in slots three or four, Open Vein can only be used from slots one, two or three, but only against enemies in slots one or two. That not only necessitates careful arrangement of your party, but it means that an enemy can cast an ability that can knock you out of position and disable some of your most potent abilities, forcing you to spend turns shuffling back where you need to be. And of course, you can do the same to them, which can define entire strategies against certain enemies.

Certain items can definitely inspire me to rebuild a character around a certain skill."

On top of that you have to worry about equipping loot to boost character stats. It’s a little bland, in that items are rarely potent enough to grant new spins on existing abilities, but certain items can definitely inspire me to rebuild a character around a certain skill, such as a shield that granted my normally forward-facing Man-at-Arms major defensive bonuses, but only if he sat in position four, where he couldn’t use any of his offensive skills but could buff his teammates considerably, and even take hits for them.

Keeping track of all your characters is a big task."

Then there are quirks, which can positively or negatively impact a hero’s effectiveness in certain dungeons, or against certain enemies, or cause them to independently perform actions, including stealing any money you see in the case of Kleptomania, and each hero can have up to five positive and five negative traits. Keeping track of them all – your stable can hold up to 25 of them at once – is a big task.

Add to that the task of managing your home base hamlet, which involves such tasks as upgrading your ability to upgrade your heroes’ skills and weapons and armor, and treating them for persistent afflictions like debilitating diseases (syphilis is a nasty one) and harshly negative quirks, then provisioning each expedition with enough food, torches, bandages, anti-venom, keys, shovels, and other equipment beforehand, and it can easily become overwhelming. There are a hundred things that could go wrong, from not having enough ranged damage in your party to running out of torches (which gives the monsters a bonus, but also increases your potential to earn loot) to your characters getting stressed out and dying of actual heart attacks.

Above: Gameplay from the Warrens dungeon.

That’s right: Stress is a major component that’s as important as health, and perhaps even more so because it persists between quests and must be managed both in the field with in-combat skills or camping abilities, and in the hamlet by sending your heroes to pray or drink or gamble their problems away. It’s another layer of management that adds a sense of frailty and human fallibility to characters, especially when their stress meter fills up half way and they face a test of resolve, which usually results in a condition like paranoia or masochism that’ll make them take action independently – such as passing a turn in combat, refusing a heal or a buff, or even hurting themselves. But sometimes they’ll surprise you with a positive outcome that can rally your team to victory, and when they do it’s thrilling.

Teetering on The Brink

It feels as though developer Red Hook might’ve had trouble saying no to cool-sounding feature ideas."

That’s not even all of what’s going on, but you get the idea: it’s an incredible amount. A lesser game might collapse under the weight of so many detailed moving parts, but Darkest Dungeon ties it all together surprisingly well. Even so, in the later missions I found I spent at least as long planning a run as playing it, which is a little lopsided. It feels as though developer Red Hook might’ve had trouble saying no to cool-sounding feature ideas, and even though it pulls off an incredible feat by making it gel into an excellent game, I have to wonder if it might’ve benefitted from a little pruning for the sake of easing the burden of management in the late game.

Above: Gameplay in the Ruins dungeon.

Once you find a team that works well together, it can be tempting to try to maintain an "A team" of synergized heroes who you can send on the most dangerous missions, but Darkest Dungeon does everything it can to discourage that behavior by making it inconvenient. For one thing, it doesn’t allow you to save groups - you have to remember that yourself, and who goes where, every time you send them out. Conditions like stress and disease also encourages you to let a hero rest for longer than his or her comrades, which made me mix up my lineups frequently based on who was available. I don’t necessarily like how Darkest Dungeon pushed me to it, but I do appreciate that variety and experimentation that arose as a result.

My march toward the final dungeon did become an artificially protracted grind, however. After more than 40 hours, I feel like I’m roughly halfway there, due to the requirement that you must individually level up a large group of heroes to complete the final four dungeons. That feels like an arbitrary and grindy inconvenience, especially in a game that thrives on suddenly killing your characters. But on the other hand, a grind is only a bad thing when the act of playing becomes predictable and repetitive, and Darkest Dungeon never does. (Note: it’s rare that I publish a review without having completed a game, but in the interest of getting this out there while Darkest Dungeon is still relatively "new," here we are.)

PlayStation 4 Version - Updated Sptember 26, 2016

The only significant difference to Darkest Dungeon on the PlayStation 4 (which comes with both cross-buy and cross-save for the Vita version enabled) is that the controls take some getting used to. For instance, in order to navigate the inventory you have to hold L1 and use the right stick; holding R1 instead and using the stick goes into the character status screens. It feels like a control layout that, once I’ve internalized it, would let me access everything quickly and easily – but there’s going to be a lot of learning involved before I get to that point. Until then, clicking the left side of the touchpad brings up the controls list when I forget which button does what. That quick-access cheat sheet seems to suggest I’m not the only person struggling to get a grip on them.

PlayStation Vita Version - Updated September 27, 2016

The Vita version of Darkest Dungeon contains all the same content as the PlayStation 4 version, and it handles the many gameplay layers admirably. Like its console counterpart though, its controls are a bit fiddly. Basic functions of combat and movement are easy to grasp, but getting into the guts of the many menus to find specific pieces of information (and Darkest Dungeon has plenty of nuances to explore) takes some getting used to. Especially if you are the kind of person who obsesses over stats, gear, and resistance numbers, the Vita version can be a bit difficult to parse at times.

Nintendo Switch Version - Updated January 19, 2018

The Switch version of Darkest Dungeon plays very similarly to the other console versions, but when played in handheld mode its larger screen (compared to the Vita) makes it much easier to read the small text. Mixing the Joy-con controls with its excellent touchscreen control (a carryover from the iPad port) is a great way to sidestep the awkwardness of navigating menus, which means it's even easier to play that way than when docked.

Verdict

Darkest Dungeon is a grim and merciless tactical strategy game whose great tension comes from its many layers of complexity, unpredictable randomization, and willingness to put our fragile characters in mortal danger if we dare to venture into its depths in search of treasure and glory. Brilliant narration and stiff yet surprisingly expressive animation make it easy to be drawn into its vague but tantalizing world, though the end feels artificially out of reach.