Originally published July 2015

Sweat crawls across the top of his hand. The drops rally and collect like a herd of beasts crossing the ravaged mountains of his knuckles, while the stragglers fall back down his sleeve. Once the herd reaches a size too daunting to hold together, they evacuate to the stone below. The drips echo in the dark under his feet as stone meets steel, steel meets sweat. Droplets glisten and radiate from his skin under the dim torch light. Twas not the heat from the sconce's glow that fuels his perspiration, however. He fights his trembling hands as he grasps the gate's handle. He steadies his breath. He prays that his companions do not hear the rattling of his mail just the confidence in this breath. For tonight, they cannot be so foolish as to cry out in terror, shame, and horror. Tonight they must stick together and forge a will stronger than the armor they bear. Tonight, they enter, the Darkest Dungeon.

It's rare for me to be willing to partake in an early-access game on Steam for a number of different reasons. The main one is that I don't really want to play an unfinished game. I do that enough with the bad games that are somehow released, like Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth for example. I prefer to play a finished game so I know what the developers intended, what was actually achieved, and the quality of the product. I wouldn't want to read an unfinished book filled with grammar errors or whole chapters missing, so I certainly wouldn't want to experience a video game that is selling itself in an unfinished state, unless it was laughably bad like a B horror movie.

Thankfully, by the time I tried Darkest Dungeon, it already had a reputation for being a rather finished product, despite being an early-access game on Steam. Having spent a fair amount of time with it now, I can say that it is a much more finished product than you might expect, but still far from complete. As new patches come in and further updates are made to the game, new character types are still being added and new high-level dungeons have yet to be released. Nonetheless, Darkest Dungeon shows a fair amount of competence in its design and ends up being quite fun, despite the hiccups.

Premise

As the player, you have just inherited the condemned estate from your distant relative who foolishly uncovered a gateway to another dimension, filled with the nightmarish horrors of a Lovecraft novel--you can see why I was drawn to this game. Your relative, unable to live with shame for the insanity he's released, kills himself and leaves the responsibility of cleansing the land of its ethereal corruption to you. The player's character doesn't appear in any physical form, but instead, the task of removing the monsters and cleaning up the place is handled by using hired hands and vagrants of a wild variety.

From religious knights, to plague doctors, to bounty hunters, to highwaymen, there are almost a dozen different types of characters you can recruit to eliminate the horrors from the land. Once recruited, all that is required is to take the warriors into the dungeons, kill the monsters, and find the treasures necessary to continue funding your estate and your quest. Keeping your soldiers alive as they traverse the dungeons, however, is a different story.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Darkest Dungeon is complex and simple at the same time. In terms of control, the game would make an easy transition to a touchscreen interface. Nothing requires a keyboard, while the use of it is certainly no issue. You can use the mouse to select the items, the warriors, and the dungeons you need, as well as have your warriors move throughout the dungeon itself. I would not be the least bit surprised if the game eventually gets ported to phones and tablets once it's complete. When that will happen, is anyone's guess, though.

The more complex side of the gameplay is where I get hooked on Darkest Dungeon. At its core, Darkest Dungeon is a turn-based strategy game with some significant RPG elements included. Much like XCOM: Enemy Unknown, there is a strategy game on the battlefield and a meta-strategy game at the home base.

At Home

Though not quite the same as XCOM, the general idea is still the same. While at the estate, it's all about divvying up your funds and resources to the appropriate facilities so that you can recruit more soldiers, equip them with better gear, and make sure that they stay sane in the face of horror.

Several facilities on your estate, namely the tavern and the church exist for the sole purpose of providing restitution to your stressed comrades. I'll get into the importance of this in a moment, but for now, I'll just say that these are the places that are used the most simply because you want to make sure that your warriors are not entering any battlefields with high-stress levels. Other facilities include a blacksmith, a training guild, and a sanitarium to better equip your warriors with the tools and the skills they'll need to survive.

In order to utilize these facilities properly, however, you'll need to find heirlooms stashed about your estate in the dungeons. The cost of these heirlooms is pretty steep too. You will have to dig through multiple dungeons before you'll even be able to upgrade your warriors’ weapons at all. This is compounded by the fact that the other facilities require the same materials. So across your whole estate, you have to distribute your materials and money accordingly. Gaining the necessary materials and keeping your warriors alive will take up the majority of your time and effort.

My main issue with the economy of the game so far is that everything is really expensive. This wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't for the fact that improving your employees enough, or just getting enough employees to survive the challenges and get the funding necessary to make much progress in the game is really difficult. The challenge is welcome, but the accumulation of resources and money is somewhat imbalanced. So far, I've found that I can very gradually get the heirlooms necessary to upgrade my facilities and my compatriots, but after sending them off to relax, I don't have much money left over to pay for the supplies I need for the next expedition.

So far, in the various versions I've played, it feels like I'm Sisyphus, rolling a bolder uphill endlessly and then occasionally getting my boulder knocked back down when one of my soldiers dies. While the seemingly endless journey up the mountain is pretty satisfying, nonetheless, I feel my progression is arbitrarily stretched out. I would prefer that if the intent is to stretch out the progression at home, then I have to at least get a little further in the dungeons.

In the Field

The majority of your time spent in Darkest Dungeon is in the dungeons themselves. While only 3 are available to play in the game's unfinished state, the maps, objectives, and loot are randomized to ensure that the experience remains relatively fresh. The overall nature of Darkest Dungeon's experience can be rather repetitive, so the unforgiving difficulty forces you to focus more on the wisdom of your decisions and less on how each path and room is the same as the last.

Once you've selected a dungeon to traverse, your desired warriors, and your provisions, you can begin your journey. The various journey quests can range from "Eliminate all the enemies in the rooms" to "Scout 90% of the area," to quests that require you to find certain items. You can leave the dungeon at any point you wish, but if the main objective is not completed, then the journey is seen as a failure and your warriors can come back empty-handed with some heavy stress and negative side-effects as a result.

Retreat is, of course, not desired but often necessary in Darkest Dungeon. Once you lose a member of your party during the mission, that character is permanently dead and the chances of your success significantly diminish. Combat, as I mentioned, is turn-based. So when you encounter enemies as you wander the dungeon, you and the enemies take turns attacking each other. The fastest characters of your party are the first that become available for you to use. Once available, you can select the action for them to perform during this round. What actions they can and cannot perform depend on their placement within the party, as well as the placement of the enemies. If you have a knight whose available skills require him to be in the front two spots, then you'd better make sure he's placed there throughout the match, or he immediately becomes impotent. If at any point your party becomes disorganized, you can use a character's turn to move them around in the order and get things back on track.

Likewise, your enemies, their skills, and their attack order function the same way. It would all feel like a fair fight if it actually were. There are certain advantages the enemies have over your warriors, some of which have been added in recent updates. The main advantage they have is that they don't have to worry about the stress meter.

Your adventurers have two bars to worry about: Health and Stress. The health bar is depleted when damage is inflicted, be it through an enemy's attack, a trap, or a status effect like poison or bleeding. When the health meter is depleted, the character then enters the death's door state. While in this state, any hit that the character receives can kill that warrior. However, there is a possibility that the character will survive the hit until the next round. I've had moments where my guys took more than 6 hits at death's door without dying.

The stress meter is Darkest Dungeon's special dynamic. The stress meter is slowly filling over time and can take significant jumps towards filling due to various situations. If a critical strike is inflicted upon your heroes, or if a special attack focused on increasing your heroes' stress hits, their meters may fill much quicker than normal. When it reaches 50% full, things can go from bad to better, or to far worse.

When the meter reaches half-full, the resolve of that warrior is tested. There is a small chance they can become virtuous, which means that they view the situation as an easy challenge and are buffed for the remainder of the quest. Their accuracy, dodging, and attack skills improve and they can even heal themselves through sheer will. The chances of this happening, however, are extremely slim in comparison to the other possibilities. Most often your warriors will become afflicted, meaning that the stress has gotten to them and they are now behaving in a terribly negative manner. They can become abusive and treat their companions with disdain, and act like Bill Paxton's Sgt. Hudson from Aliens, or irrational and become nearly uncontrollable, among other ailments. Regardless of which affliction your adventurer has, their actions are rarely to your benefit and can cause stress to skyrocket among the rest of the party, leading to even more afflictions and a downward spiral of madness. Sometimes they'll outright refuse any healing spells or items, making them more likely to perish on the battlefield.

You might be asking, "What happens when the meter fills?" The character dies instantly from a heart attack. While death is not always a certainty in Darkest Dungeon, as there is always a slim chance that your hero will survive at death's door for several rounds, a full stress meter makes death a certainty.

If your heroes survive and accomplish their mission, you return from the dungeon with all the loot they discovered, as well as the treasures promised as a reward for their service. Your heroes can also gain experience points and level up, as well as develop new positive and negative quirks about them to make their journeying easier or harder. Upon returning home, you have the option to relieve their stress levels and upgrade their equipment or skills until the next expedition starts. Rinse. Repeat.

Style

As you can tell from the images, this game has a good amount of flair and style to its look. This is a turn-based strategy game, so animation and involvement are limited. The game makes up for this limited presentation with its distinct and shaded art style. The design of the various characters shows some real creativity splashed with some elements of other inspirational sources, like the crusader's distinct Dark Souls look for example.

The music and the ominous narration are appropriately over the top in their dramatics as well. In most cases, if I heard the same line over and over again from a game's narrator or character, I'd be annoyed. In this case, the narration is so dramatic and intense, it entertains me every time.

Updates

As I said, this game is in early access. It is actually still significantly early in the game's design, but Darkest Dungeon provides an impressive amount of content that could still be the full game, all things considered. How exciting that there is still plenty left to discover and experience! The designers are still adding playable characters, mechanics, and even entire dungeons filled with new enemies. So completion is pretty far out.

As a result, updates to the game and how it functions are constantly flowing in. As new characters are introduced, the game has to be rebalanced for the intended difficulty and gameplay. This is where my experience with Darkest Dungeon takes a dive and why I can't get behind early-access games in general.

Players, like myself, get used to the mechanics. When the mechanics of a game change, the world you've come to know as the player is turned on its head, leading to a disillusioned experience, and you always fear what you don't understand. When I first played Darkest Dungeon, I fell in love with the gameplay, the style, the presentation, and the mechanics. By the time I took apart my computer and rebuilt it again, Darkest Dungeon had been updated to include some new characters and mechanics. As a result, my progression was wiped and I had to start over.

I didn't mind this at first. In fact, I embraced the opportunity to rebuild my estate once more, especially since I hadn't gotten far into the game. Up to this point, I thought the progression of building up your estate and improving your characters was rather slow and methodical, but not impossible. The difficulty was there, but only as a bit of an initial bump. Once you were over it, you could kind of make your way through the game with a level head, except against the bosses perhaps.

Suddenly, the initial hump was a lot steeper and I found myself losing characters much more rapidly than before. The warriors were missing their attacks a lot more, gaining an avalanche of negative character traits at a fast rate, and being struck with critical hits from the most basic of enemies. On top of this house of cards that was increasingly stacked against them, a new "corpse" mechanic was introduced. Prior to the update, when you eliminated an enemy, that unit would disappear from the opposing order of enemies, and all of its teammates would move up to fill the gap, making enemies in the back a lot easier to hit for your close-range warriors. With the "corpse" update, there would be a lump of flesh left over in place of the deceased enemy and the order would remain the same. In order to hit those enemies in the back with your beefed-up close-range combatants, you would have to attack the corpses until their "health" was depleted, and the units would finally move up.

This mechanic didn't make sense to me and still doesn't. It's as arbitrary as it could possibly be for a combat mechanic. While I wonder if I'd care that much about it if I had played the game with corpses enabled from the start, I still think that it serves no purpose other than to make the initial learning curve of the game that much more difficult. I've since gotten used to the mechanic and have been able to form strategies around it, but it just adds to the tedium of some dungeons. As a result, my initial love of the game has since hit a bit of a snag and now it’s more of a passing romance. I'm willing to hang out for a little bit on a frequent basis, but now that I know who you [Darkest Dungeon] are, a little of the dream has died and you're not as cool as I once thought.

Final Thoughts

When the game finally releases for real, I might review it again as a full package. For now, I think it's a solid game with a lot of fun and potential packed into an unfinished package. Hopefully, they'll be able to work out all the kinks and bumps by the time they're ready to call it complete.