Listen to the Rain

You would think that Darkest Dungeon would be the perfect game for me. And it is--this isn't a bad review, so don't think I'm tipping my hand early--but while I leaped on the kickstarter the instant I learned about it, I withdrew my pledge when they added in a backer-exclusive class. I'm fine with kickstarter-exclusive cosmetics or silly, non-gameplay-affecting content, but the idea of a mechanical benefit to kickstarter supports sat badly enough with me that I was willing to forgo playing the game entirely. Then I played other games, and it faded from my consciousness.

Until 2016, when ping816 suddenly bought it as a present for me. And then I learned that the kickstarter had suffered from unclear communication and the backer class was the Musketeer, a cosmetic skin over the top of the Arbalest with all the same mechanics, so I needn't have been so suspicious in the first place. Well, live and learn.

And then I was playing Baldur's Gate II and the Legend of Zelda games, but last November, now that I was finally all the way up to Breath of the Wild, I loaded it up. The screen went black, and then I was greeted with the opening cinematic:

Ruin has come to our family.

You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial, gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the moor. I lived all my years in that ancient rumor shadowed manor, fattened by decadence and luxury, and yet I began to tire of... conventional extravagance...

Hell. Yes.


The basis of Darkest Dungeon is crushed hopes.

You play the Heir, a relative of the Ancestor from the introduction who answers his letter and comes to the squalid hamlet near the manor to assemble a team of women and men to delve into the various locations nearby, seeking the remnants of the Ancestor's folly and building up their strength to assault the manor itself. The base game has four areas, each with a separate theme and aesthetics. The Ruin, haunted by the walking dead and guarded by the Necromancer and the Prophet. The Warrens, filled with mutated swine and terrible hybrids and guarded by the Swine-Prince and the Flesh. The Weald, crawling with fungal beasts from the black heart of the forest and guarded by the Hag and the Brigand Cannon. And the Cove, the abode of fishmen and squamous beasts of the depths, guarded by the Siren and the Pirate Crew. A successful delve in a particular area levels it up, unlocking harder or longer missions and more powerful boss variants, whereas an unsuccessful delve leads to madness and death.

One thing to remember when playing is that the delvers are meat for the grindstone. They will die, often and horribly, and that's part of the game. There's no way to avoid it, and even when naming every delver after a friend and becoming fond of them, it's important to keep in mind that they are expendible, playing pieces of the chessboard, and some must be sacrificed if all are to succeed. Darkest Dungeon is a roguelike, and it's possible for a breezy delve to go south in an instant as a crit followed by poison or blight kills a delver, or the delvers run into a miniboss like the Collector or the Thing from the Stars or the Shambler.

My only wipe was caused by the Shambler, while walking down a dark hallway into what I thought would be a simple random encounter.

There is one bright spot among all this, though. In a game about resource gathering and management, of never having enough and always having to make choices, new delvers are plentiful. They cost nothing to hire and every in-game week, more of them arrive, so even if you have a string of bad luck and every one of your precious delvers dies, there will be more grist for the mill. Darkest Dungeon isn't so merciful as to give you a reason to say all is lost and give up.


The heart of Darkest Dungeon are the delves, where four delvers venture into the wilds to fight their way through beasts, cultists, and more terrible things in the hope of finding fortune and glory, but often finding madness and death. Delve maps are randomized, with a bunch of rooms connected by a series of corridors, and most delves are either "explore 90% of rooms" or "complete 100% of room battles," though there's occasionally another mission goal like destroying profane altars or finding lost holy relics. Mechanically, all of that is just clicking on something, though, and the meat of each delve is the combat.

It's turn-based, each class has unique abilities, none of that is surprising. Darkest Dungeon's unique spin on its combat is the importance of movement and positioning. While each class has unique skills, only four (of seven) can be selected at a time, and certain skills can only be used from certain positions and also only target certain positions. The hellion skill Iron Swan, for example, is hard-hitting with a high crit chance, but the hellion can only use it from the front row and it only targets an enemy in the back row. The grave digger can throw her daggers as long as she's not in the front row and hit anyone who isn't in the front row. What's more, several skills involve movement or shuffling. The abomination skill Slam always moves him one slot forward, and the bounty hunter skill Uppercut both stuns an enemy and knocks them back one slot. Perfectly tuning a party for a specific order can result in chaos when an enemy uses a skill that shoves your main damage dealer to the back row where none of their skills work, or pulls a healer to the front where they can no longer heal.

It's possible to build a party that specifically takes advantage of this. One of my favorite party compositions near the end was vestal, jester, shieldbreaker, and highwayman. The shieldbreaker would start at the front and use Impale, which hit all enemies and inflicted blight, moving her back one. Now that the highwayman was in front, he would use Point Blank Shot, which did enormous damage with a high crit chance and moved him back one. The jester would buff them both with Battle Ballad and the vestal would provide heals and the occasional stun. It was extremely effective most of the time, though not an unstoppable juggernaut--I had serious trouble when I took this comp to fight the Drowned Crew. There's no one party composition to rule them all, and often it's worth running and trying again with a different group if a battle seems to be going poorly.

The tide can turn very quickly in Darkest Dungeon.



There is one way that Darkest Dungeon is favorable to the player, and that's how it deals with death. While it's possible for a massive crit to kill an enemy in a single blow, delvers are protected against that. They can never be reduced below zero hit points in a single blow. Rather, a powerful hit will drop them to zero hit points and put them on Death's Door.

A delver on Death's Door has serious penalties to their damage, speed, and crit rate, and any further damage can kill them. I say "can," because there's a chance to resist each further attack, which leaves the delver on Death's Door and lets them fight on. In one battle, a single delver lived through five attacks on Death's Door before the next attack killed them. Using trinkets, it's even possible to optimize a character for being on Death's Door, and there's class called the flagellant that receives significant buffs for fighting on Death's Door. A single heal removes the Death's Door status and provides the protection of hit points again, so sometimes a battle becomes a frantic dance of trying to keep delvers at some kind of positive hit points level and kill the enemies before disaster strikes.

But because it's Darkest Dungeon, enemy death is a disadvantage. Rather than enemies vanishing when they die, they leave behind corpses that take up rank slots and preserve enemy marching order. That makes skills to move enemies extremely valuable, since scything through the front ranks to reach the back ranks takes longer than simply looking at enemy hit points would indicate, and since enemies in the back ranks tend to be more dangerous than those in the front. I also quickly learned that enemies that die due to bleeding or blight attacks don't leave corpses, and neither do enemies who die to critical hits, so I often built parties around debuffs and damage over time in order to maximize corpse removal. That party I listed above rarely left any corpses behind.

I could have built parties around skills that clear all corpses, or around pulling enemies in the back ranks forward, or simply around attacking the back ranks. There's whole strategies that I didn't use but that would still have worked, and I was able to make my own strategies work even in difficult situations, all of which is the mark of tactical depth. There's no one true way other than the inevitable path to the grave.


Between delves, the delvers return to the Hamlet where they can drink or pray their cares away or be hauled into the sanitarium for treatment of the issues that accumulate over successive delvings into the blasphemous monstrosities of the surrounding lands. The Heir can order them to improve their equipment or skills, recruit more delvers, buy trinkets from a traveling merchant, or visit the graveyard to remember the fallen.

While delvers come and go, usually horribly and at the worst possibly moment, the buildings in the hamlet are permanent. Darkest Dungeon takes the modern roguelike approach of characters being expendable along with an overarching progression system that persists between characters. During delves, in addition to money and trinkets, delvers can find various heirlooms of the Ancestor and bring them back to the hamlet, where they are stockpiled and used to upgrade the buildings. Generally, this is about providing higher-level services or reducing their costs: the upgrade to the stagecoach means more delvers show up each week and there's a chance for higher-level delvers to arrive, the blacksmith upgrades make it possible to buy higher-level weapons and armor and reduce the cost of doing so, and the abbey upgrades let multiple delvers be treated at the same time and makes treatment more effective. The Crimson Court DLC also adds "Districts" with a high cost in gold and heirlooms that provide a permanent bonus, usually a buff to delvers.

All of these heirlooms take up bag space, so while the moment-to-moment gameplay of a delve is about battle tactics and light levels, there's also the tradeoff of how many bag slots to leave empty and what to throw away to make room for other things. More food, since food is needed for camping on longer delves, can be eaten to heal, and sometimes delvers get hungry and need to eat? More antivenom or medicinal herbs or bandages to cure debuffs? More shovels in case there's a blockage? It's a constant struggle, and I was short of money for most of the game because I prioritized heirlooms and never bothered to pick up raw gold unless I was bringing an antiquarian, a support class whose main benefit is increasing the amount of loot the delvers find. That was the choice I made and I had to live with it, which is really the main theme of Darkest Dungeon.


I've gone this far and haven't even mentioned stress yet, which is probably the most famous mechanic in the game. In addition to hit points going down, over the course of a delve, stress goes up. It goes up occasionally as the delvers walk through the corridors of their expeditions, goes up frequently in combat in response to enemy attacks or the shock of a fellow delver suffering a critical hit, and can rarely be reduced by delver skills. Hitting 100 stress triggers an affliction like Fearful or Paranoid, which causes a number of problems. Paranoid delvers move backward to hide and refuse healing or buffs, while Masochistic delvers sometimes use their turn to attack themselves.

Rarely, 100 stress causes a virtue like Courageous rather than an affliction, but that's not something that can be relied on.

While hit points heal on every return to the Hamlet, stress does not. Much of the game is thus about stress management, about having a broad and deep enough pool of delvers that those who are high-stress or afflicted have time to recover in the abbey or the tavern. Going on a delve with high-stress delvers is asking for everything to go wrong, as often afflicted delvers cause stress in their companions, leading to a chain reaction. Critical hits or kills on enemies restore stress, but not much. Generally, the best way to recover stress is skills when camping during a multi-day delve or by going back to the hamlet.

Stress also ties into the dungeon light levels, which is why the game is called Darkest Dungeon. At high light levels the delvers receive large bonuses--they have a better chance of surprising enemies, higher crit and dodge chance, and take less stress. Lower light levels reverse all these bonuses, but also provide progressively more loot. Some skills increase light levels, as do torches, and some skills decrease it. Light is another resource to manage, just like food, stress, bag space, and everything else the delvers have to account for.


This game is amazing.

Part of the reason I waited so long to play Darkest Dungeon is because I heard a lot of the difficulty is grind. Grind up new delvers after a bad crit+bleeding combo kills a max level healer, grind up heirlooms to improve buildings, grind up trinkets to equip delvers, grind grind grind. Radiant reduced the cost of building upgrades and increased the allowable level range for delvers to undertake missions without actually reducing the moment-to-moment gameplay difficulty, and frankly, I have a list of games to play as long as my leg and I don't need a bunch of extra hours put into a game that aren't strictly necessary to beat it. My completionism and extreme caution already drove me to spend more hours than strictly necessary. I put 70 hours into Darkest Dungeon, and I probably could have won in 40.

The mood kept me coming back. Some of that is the narration, done by the incomparable Wayne June, which really sells the arrogance of the Ancestor and the despair of the task ahead. The art style is great too, a kind of sketch that's just cartoony enough to be video gamey while still revealing how terrible the situations the delvers find themselves in. It took me almost until the end of the game to realize that the fungal artillery enemy was a fungal bloom puppeting around a corpse, not some weird mushroom monster. And considering all the awful hybrids in the Warren, I'm glad the art is more cartoony.

I'll probably be quoting this game for years. Lines like a brilliant confluence of skill and purpose, or dazed, reeling, about to break, or anything else I've quoted during this review. I've already started saying them, and pretty soon I'll just have black shadows for eyes and move in straight lines everywhere I go.

There's a lot of mods out there, enough to easily last me hundreds of hours of playthroughs even if I ignore all the waifu ones (there's always waifu mods). And if there's any criticism of Darkest Dungeon I have, it's this--there's basically no reason to replay it without modding it or otherwise shaking things up. A single run takes dozens of hours and exposes you to everything the game has to offer. It's not like Civilization, where there's a new starting scenario each time you play. Every game of Darkest Dungeon is basically the same. The delves change their patterns, but they won't have anything new. But with 70 hours worth in a single game, is that really a problem?


In the annals of roguelikes, Darkest Dungeon deserves to stand at the top. It's punishing enough that every action requires care, with acknowledgement of the likely consequences, but there are enough ways to recover that it's not completely soul-crushing. There's even an event that can return a dead delver back to life, and I ended the game with all the delvers I named after my friends alive even though quite a few of them died on the way. The mood fits the content--of course everything is hopeless and full of despair. This is a roguelike! And of course it's a roguelike, with no way to undo your actions. It takes place in a Lovecraftian world of cosmic horror!

And again, that narrator.

Almost three years after ping816 bought me Darkest Dungeon, I finally beat it. And as usual for when my friends buy me games, I end up wondering why I waited for so long. This game is amazing, well worth all the time I put into it. I sat on it for too long, but now the task is done, and it was worth every long hour. This wasn't like XCom: Long War. It was far better at less than half the time cost. What a wonderful ride.



Also, if you want to hear what I sound like / a bit of RP, I did a Facebook thread where I chronicled my progress through this game, and I recorded the last update from the Heir after I beat the game. I'm pretty proud of how it turned out.