The Indie Video Game Report: Darkest Dungeon
Ted Hentschke
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The Indie Video Game Report is a series where we take the time to delve the crags and crevices of the indie game market to bring you the down low on the most promising/disastrous indie titles.
Kickstarter is like your stoner friend. Sometimes the shit he gives you is shit, and sometimes he doesn’t even bring the shit at all. Hes always talking about all the connections he has and shit he can make happen, and he more often than not makes a complete dick of himself. Still, every once in a while, he pulls through, so you still stop by from time to time just to see what he’s peddled this month.
My newest romp with a Kickstarter alumni comes from Darkest Dungeon, and similar to the stoner friend of yester paragraph, it too has kept me up for several nights much to the detriment of my health. From Red Hook studios comes your latest reason to skip meals. Darkest Dungeon mixes quick and satisfying gameplay with long term base building and team management, adding more than a dash of roguelike randomization. Easily consumed in small chunks or large sittings, every run is another step towards the eventual endgame. As an amalgam of successful mechanics, it succeeds, but as a macabre and deeply atmospheric world, it thrives.
You play as a faceless and nameless protagonist, assumed to be some kind of inheritor to a once great estate that has fallen into ruin through a series of demonic deals and occult rituals. A letter from the previous lord before his suicide beckons the player to these lands, and in tow a slew of heroes that will harrow the darkest dungeons to slay foes and reclaim the relics and glory of the town. To this end, the player creates parties of 4 heroes from 10 different classes to try to survive 1 of 5 different objectives. Boss fights are unlocked by repeated completions, and high level heroes are required for more brutal tasks.
The end of each dungeon run is not where your ordeals end. Characters take sanity damage while in the dungeon, which must be healed by participating in leisure activities in the town. Leveling up the town with the relics you find will increase the effectiveness and capacity of your buildings, as well as providing better gear and skills for your leveled up heroes. Different leisure activities also have the risk of inflicting different “quirks”, debuffs that can only be removed in the sanitorium. Nothing is ever truly safe in Darkest Dungeon, with even the most innocent of activities proving perilous.
The element of randomness permeates the entire experience, with an overarching philosophy best described as a give-and-take. Every trap, monster, interactive object, and even item has both positive and negative outcomes. Inspecting a stack of books can either yield a permanent buff or debuff (quirks), with supplies such as holy water sometimes ensuring a positive outcome. Critical strikes hit for greatly inflated damage, giving the combat a similar degree of randomness. Positive and negative quirks are doled out in a semi-random fashion, I.E. you will never get syphilis from reading a book, but in equal measure might gain insight into the warrens or unhealthy occult fascination.
You would think that the randomness would lead to some hair pulling moments, as was the case in Gods Will Be Watching, but you have enough control over the situation that it never feels totally random. You aren’t forced to interact with any of the random chance objects (unless you have a specific quirk that makes your hero sometimes interact with it without your input), and a low health state called “Death’s Door” makes the random crits never unfairly brutal. When a character is reduced to zero life, they are at Death’s Door, and each hit from then on has a random chance of being a “Deathblow,” which is self explanatory. Any healing while in this state will restore the hero to outside of Deaths’ Door, so as long as you are careful and your party well built, you usually can make it through with minimal casualties.
What is unique about dungeon runs in Darkest Dungeon is the battle against attrition. Healing is scarce, with most healing spells either healing for a wildly random amount or very little. It is common for healing spells to only hit for 2, with hero life being somewhere between 22 and 34. Food can be consumed to heal between 1 and 2 life, but is also required at random intervals to feed your party. For long adventures, players can make camp, using various campfire skills to buff and heal party members. If you play cautiously, it is possible to stay mostly topped off, but there are no health potions to stock up on to make the run easier. Runs can be abandoned at any time, but you sacrifice the rewards you would get for winning.
At the same time, the light is constantly going down, only being raised by some Vestal skills and consumable torches. Lower light means more crits and loot, but also vastly increased sanity damage. If a player runs out of sanity, their resolve will be tested. Sometimes this is a good thing, giving the player a huge buff and healing a large amount of sanity. More often, the character succumbs to a negative buff, which can drastically decrease their effectiveness. Paranoia can cause your party member to not listen to you and refuse all healing. You can heal this afflicted state by returning their sanity to full while in town, but expect your run to be difficult if this happens.
The inventory is broken down into 16 slots, with every item taking up a slot with variable stacks. Gold is stacked up to 1500 a slot, and the relics required to rebuild the town vary in size from 12 per stack to as few as 3. Logs for campfire take up a whole slot, as do quest items, making their use and picking them up a calculated effort. Players provision themselves at the start with food, torches, and a series of useable items for specific situations. The useable items are things like antivenom and shovels, which sometimes have function in removing ailments, but are mostly used to ensure positive outcomes from interaction objects. As the narrator says, “packs laden with treasure are often low on supplies,” so how much you take in and how liberally you use them is a give and take. It can be torturous to ditch your shovels to make room for another stack of gold, only to have the next room contain a wall of rubble you have to dig through.
Overall, the game feels like a slow but steady grind to improvement. Heroes are plentiful, meaning you can punt a dude off of your roster if he acquires too many negative quirks. It can be a bit of a hassle to train up a solid squad, since higher level heroes will not participate in lower level missions. Even so, once you fill out your roster to about 15, you should have plenty of squads ready to do all levels of missions.
What is easily my favorite part of Darkest Dungeon is the variety. Every hero has 7 skills, but only 4 can be slotted at a time, leading to multiple styles of play for each character. A Highwayman can be a good third slot ranged damage dealer, but can also serve equally well as front line massive burst damage with a different loadout. Some heroes lack this variety, such as the Leper, who can only function as a front line, but these heroes usually make up for it with multiple strong options in that slot.
Keeping with the give and take theme, heroes can be equipped with items that always give something and take something. The item that increases your dodge chance and speed also decreases your chance of resisting movement impairing effects. The game asks you to tailor your character to the role you want them playing at the time, rather than just giving you a strongest answer. It might take a bit more planning and forethought than you are used to, but even the most experimental of party loadouts has a chance to succeed.
Presently, there are only 3 dungeons. Each dungeon has a boss, and each boss plays differently. The Necromancer summons a constant stream of skeletons, making the player decide if they wish to try to deal with the skeletons as they come or just burst the boss down. The Swine King consists of 2 enemies, with a giant high health pig monster in the front and “Wilbur” in the back marking enemies. The Hag is the third and hardest boss, who will grab a random party member and throw them into a pot. The person in the pot will take constant damage, but can be knocked out of the pot if the pot takes enough damage. All the fights prove to be unique challenges, and none are pushovers.
While content is currently light, there is a ton of room for expansion. The next dungeon has already been announced, promising eldritch fish monsters. New heroes can also be added with ease, and I am eager to see where this title goes. They have already done a fantastic job with enemy and challenge variety, so it is clear the project is in good hands.
My scant few criticisms come from inconsistent difficulty and the grind. Difficulty is supposedly based on the level and length of mission that you chose, but it is always the case that the Ruins is the easiest and the Warrens is the hardest. Its a minor gripe, but I do get tired of sending my new parties into the Ruins for the millionth time. There is also a substantial grind, with heroes requiring several runs per level to level up. The max level is 6, with more difficult missions becoming available at levels 3 and 5. Since it takes a full run being left in the sanitarium to heal a single quirk, it can take upwards of 30 runs to get a hero healthy and battle ready for a level 5 boss.
Still, Darkest Dungeon is one of the most exciting and well polished indie titles out there. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does its core mechanics satisfyingly enough to create a whole package. The narration is great and atmosphere impeccably macabre, with tension laced to the core in every element. Not for the weak of will or the faint of heart, Darkest Dungeon is a game I will still be playing and looking forward to for months to come.
Categorized:Horror Gaming News
