![]() Certain attacks can only be used from this-or-that position and can only hit enemies in such-and-such position, so place your heroes carefully. First of all is the positioning system, which although isn’t necessarily unique to Darkest Dungeon, provides a major element of strategy in planning your excursion into whatever dark hell you’re entering for the game week. There’s resistances, status ailments, buffs, targeting, and all that kind of stuff with a couple important twists. I don’t remember anyone ever going to a brothel in Lovecraft because Lovecraft sucks.ĭarkest Dungeon operates on traditional turn-based skill mechanics. This is where the combat takes place, and where your heroes either go home in moderate glory, in a straitjacket, or in a body bag. You’ve got the traditional Ruins, the forested Weald, the plague-infested Warrens, the aquatic Cove, and of course, the eldritch Darkest Dungeon. The game takes place in two main areas: the Hamlet, where you manage your heroes, and the dungeons themselves. Put this in a shaker with a heavy Lovecraftian element, and you’ve got a recipe for something that’s as close to a true “Lovecraft experience” as you’re likely to get, minus the racism of course. The main concept, according to the game’s developers, is inspired by films like Aliens or Band of Brothers, where heroes are inevitably traumatized by the horrors of combat. That’s the thing about Darkest Dungeon, and really what it sells itself on- this is a game where your characters will die. They come to your town looking for fame and fortune, and you send them into battle and indirectly make them go insane, assuming they don’t die first. With a colorful, shadow-heavy aesthetic that feels straight from the pages of Hellboy, or any other Mike Mignola comic, Darkest Dungeon tells the story of, well, you, and how you’re trying to cleanse your family estate from evil by managing a bunch of adventurers. Two LARP groups meet in an unlikely place. That’s the starting point for Red Hook’s roguelike turn-based dungeon-crawling human misery simulator Darkest Dungeon, which is finally out of early access to inflict gibbering madness upon the world at large. Whatever your relatives did, they probably didn’t waste the entire family’s fortune digging beneath their house in search of occult enlightenment, accidentally spring open a vault of impossible eldritch horrors, kill themselves, and then leave the responsibility of cleaning up their heinous blunder entirely in your hands. Maybe Uncle Joe got drunk and knocked over the coffin at great-grandma Betsy’s funeral, sending her spilling head over heels into the church aisle and traumatizing little cousin Billy, or maybe Ann-Marie accidentally baked her Thanksgiving chocolate cake with chocolate laxatives in an infamous event forever remembered as “Turdkey Day ’09.” There will be set areas, but the route will shift with each new voyage.Have you ever had a relative who made a really big mistake? I’m talking about the kind of thing that’s mentioned in hushed tones at every subsequent family gathering since spoken to young’uns as a cautionary tale of familial faux pas. You will die and start over many times over, but each time you set forth your adventure will be unique, building on what came before. The game also adopts a roguelike gameplay loop, with each journey including procedurally generated areas and a mixture of temporary and permanent progress. Find an inn and have characters eat chocolate and drink wine together over some poetry, for instance, and two heroes about to carve each others’ eyes out with spoons might find peace and harmony again. Of course, you can ease tensions as well. Will your party work together or tear each other apart? Most likely a little bit of both. ![]() What could go wrong?Īfter all, being stuck in a stagecoach mile after weary mile tests even the most patient among us. Jealousy, impatience and stress combined with Lovecraftian fantasy horror. And you can game the system, too, nudging characters into various situations to see what will happen. “The more stressed they are, the crummier they are to each other,” says Bourassa. Darkest Dungeon 2 Credit: Red Hook Studios
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