Darkest Dungeon
| Developer: Red Hook Studios | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Red Hook Studios | Sound: |
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| Year: 2016 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Kissing a porcupine’s backside | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
5/10 | |
After Rain World, I’m continuing my “games that hate me” phase…
It’s a paradox I notice often when browsing the Amiga section: my favorite games, the ones I’ve poured the most time into, are often the ones about which I have the least to say. A few superlatives, and that’s it—back to playing! Sometimes I feel a little guilty, and when I decide to rewrite a page several years later, I realise the effort it takes is monumental, requiring days of work (Gods and Hunter are the latest to get dusted off, more than twenty years after they first appeared on the site).
And the reverse is true too: frustrating games make me want to set down my controller and vent about every annoying detail. In the case of Darkest Dungeon, I think it’s the perfect example of what irritates me in today’s video game industry (let’s say since the 2010s).
Full disclosure: I’m a jaded, cranky old fart whose opinion is in the extreme minority—this game enjoyed broad success. Which is also why I felt the need to offer my dissenting take.
Darkest Dungeon revives a genre that was popular in its day, the dungeon crawler, where you’d guide a group of adventurers (usually four or six) through monster-infested underground labyrinths. Your team’s survival depended as much on navigation and responsible ration management as it did on their combat skills.
This one puts a new twist on the formula, trading the typical heroic fantasy setting (inspired by Tolkien) for a horror world straight out of Lovecraft (think 19th-century North America, gothic vibes, supernatural horrors, and madness). The first-person view is also replaced by a side-scrolling setup.
The game is intended as a satire, to dismantle the myth of the iron-willed hero (and their mithril armour suit) who can overcome any adversity, provided they wield a shiny, oversized sword. The creators aimed to highlight the psychological side of things. Your heroes might return from their adventures richer, but they’ll be traumatized (and vulnerable, no matter their gear). It’s an interesting concept, but I wish they’d tied it to a more polished game. Here, that idea boils down to replacing hunger and thirst meters with a stress bar.
The publisher, or at least the distribution platforms, describe this as a Rogue-like, risking the wrath of classification purists. My boundless mercy compels me to call it a Rogue-lite, which seems to fit: characters (mostly) die permanently, punishing difficulty is offset by incremental upgrades that you can buy with resources gathered on successive runs, and it’s immediately clear when visiting randomly generated dungeons that the developers weren’t inclined to “handcraft” any environments.
I watched the development documentary (click on the gift at the bottom left) and I can believe the creators were passionate and executed their vision without compromise, but to me, the result feels like a glorified mobile game. Maybe that’s just inherent to the Rogue-lite concept. Maybe I’m just tired of Rogue-lites…
First impressions aren’t great, sorry. Despite the high-quality art and voice acting, I didn’t feel that celebrated “atmosphere” praised by all the positive reviews. Here I go with my old-school references again: I expected a game similar to Ishar, given the “personality traits” in each character, but it actually reminded me far more of The Lost Patrol and Murder, because of the artificial mechanics. It felt more like a Clue simulation than a Lovecraftian story.
And, by the way, I find the loading times inexplicably long for what the game has to offer: one-dimensional, tiny dungeons that only serve as backdrops for random “events”, without much flavor since they are produced by an algorithm, like a sudoku grid; and devoid of the slightest puzzle, which is especially frustrating for a fan of the genre.
Fun comparison:
The interface, however stylized, has its share of issues too. Part of the difficulty stems from the lack of clarity and information. For instance, I was under the impression for a long time that the shovel was used automatically. Noticing my squad of misfits kept losing health, I tried manually dragging and dropping the shovel into the marked slot, then clicking on the hand icon… Nope, still didn’t work. It’s pretty wild that I actually had to watch a video just to learn how to use a shovel!
Another example: the game shows us camp-exclusive abilities right from the start via character sheets, but never explains when or how to camp. I searched in vain, before the function was introduced, hours later, in larger dungeons. Furthermore, I can’t understand why it doesn’t specify whether a positive effect ability (buff, “chamois” offers my spell checker…) affects the whole group or a single character.
Battles are turn-based. Characters and enemies, instead of being arranged in two rows as usual (armoured tanks up front, ranged attackers in back), stand in a single-file line (four rows of one). Original, sure, but to me, it feels like a step back from genre classics, an artificial constraint to create an illusion of strategy. Example: That idiot crossbowwoman can’t use her primary shooting skill on the enemy in the front row. Why?
Besides, a dead enemy keeps occupying their spot, sometimes requiring you to clear the corpse (killing them a second time) before you can reach their friends … unless they died by critical hit, bleed, or poison effect, because in those cases, as we all know, the body conveniently vanishes without a trace! If I were younger, I’d say this mechanic is seriously busted.
Similarly, why can’t healers heal outside of battle? Instead, the go-to tactic is to keep the last enemy alive for as long as possible, immobilizing them to draw out the fight and heal a teammate once per round… Talk about banging your head against the wall!
On the other hand, you’re allowed to eat provisions whenever you want to recover a bit of health—until, that is, your hero is “full” and won’t eat another bite. But two steps later, if the game decides “it’s mealtime” and you’re out of rations, your hero will immediately become “starving”, complete with massive health and sanity penalties…
Finally, I’d like to know what reason prevents us from keeping the surplus supplies at the end of an expedition. Let’s assume food goes bad, but what about torches, shovels, keys, and bandages?
You’ll probably tell me these are minor details, but I find it surprising to praise a game for its atmosphere without considering all these absurd decisions.
Let’s get to the main attribute of the game that’s being highlighted: its difficulty, which largely results from random events (the hero misses his sword swing, the enemy responds with a critical hit between the eyes…). Once again, nothing new under the sun. Wizardry (1981) was very difficult, punishing, and even highly repetitive, but the player’s efforts were rewarded by the discovery of treasures and a constant progression of their heroes. It was a kind of deal that Darkest Dungeon broke, due to its satirical vision: the carrot is gone, but the stick remains. I’d be happy to experience a new approach, just give me something to hold on to: a developed story, dialogues, empathy for the characters … or a combat system so fun it would stand on its own. Instead, it feels like the lack of imagination, time, budget, maybe even know-how … is being concealed by throwing numbers at me, which might satisfy my neurosis, if not my expectations as a gamer.
There’s one more notable feature to mention: managing the day-to-day from the village, between expeditions. This time, you control the contractor, the heir to the manor beneath which this haunted dungeon full of nightmarish creatures was discovered. Every week, a cart delivers a batch of fresh recruits. You’re in charge of selecting them, training them, and equipping them, before tossing them in groups of four into the dungeons. Then comes the question of “fixing” those who return because the “heroes” go mad; sometimes, they disobey your orders, steal … sounds interesting on paper. In practice, the “personality traits” or “afflictions” are just randomly assigned labels that are slapped onto their character sheet. You can remove them by ticking a box, for a tidy sum. The original idea comes down to a tax that artificially extends the game’s lifespan.
You’ll soon realise, however, that you lack the resources to heal everyone, and faced with the endless stream of cheap and eager labor, your cheerful adventurer company will turn into the human resources department at Starbucks… Eventually, you’ll release your veterans into the wild, squeezed like lemons and cracked in the head. Much like the combat system, I found this part of the management superficial and mechanical. There’s no attachment to computer-generated characters.
The biggest problem, in my opinion, is the considerable time investment required to compensate for the inevitable bad dice rolls, which mean losing all or part of a group. You’ll have to repeat the same dungeons for hours and hours to train and equip replacements. If only the combat system were well thought out and fun, I wouldn’t even notice! Here, I feel like I’m working. 90% of the time, I’m bored out of my mind and the remaining 10%, I’m throwing my keyboard against a wall.
After spending weeks meticulously developing a stable of adventurers, scouring the side dungeons to optimize their gear, treating their boo-boo at great expense … I suddenly declared that the game had pissed me off enough. I decided to finish it, sending my best elements to assault the Darkest Dungeon, thinking, “Either it works, or I’m out”…
Well, it worked, oh miracle! And then I was out.
I’ll finish with a (poisoned) compliment: Darkest Dungeon is a textbook example of successful marketing, despite a concept as flimsy as roast twine. I said at the beginning that it perfectly illustrates what saddens me about current games: everything in the dressing, and in lieu of content [Subtitles available, watch it. – Ed.], the player is asked to perform repetitive tasks. Instead of designing levels, they let the computer “generate procedurally”. What you end up with is an insipid mess. The difficulty is just a gimmick to cover up the lack of game arguments, just like the illustrations and soundtrack. Would it be too much to ask for a little of that creativity to go into the core concept of the game—i.e., the combat system?
I’ve already mentioned it in my review of Subnautica (you’re rambling!), atmosphere and chance don’t mix. Building a video game around a random number generator is an easy shortcut, just like singing with Auto-Tune or pissing out a script with artificial intelligence. And yet, it works for people…
Last question, purely altruistic: why is the game still (in 2023) sold on the GOG platform in an ancient version, with no option to update it, and, most importantly, without informing the consumer?
Darkest Dungeon 2 was released in 2023.
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