There are a hundred things that could go wrong, from not having enough ranged damage in your party to running out of torches (which gives the monsters a bonus, but also increases your potential to earn loot) to your characters getting stressed out and dying of actual heart attacks.Ībove: Gameplay in the Ruins dungeon.Once you find a team that works well together, it can be tempting to try to maintain an “A team” of synergized heroes who you can send on the most dangerous missions, but Darkest Dungeon does everything it can to discourage that behavior by making it inconvenient. Add to that the task of managing your home base hamlet, which involves such tasks as upgrading your ability to upgrade your heroes’ skills and weapons and armor, and treating them for persistent afflictions like debilitating diseases (syphilis is a nasty one) and harshly negative quirks, then provisioning each expedition with enough food, torches, bandages, anti-venom, keys, shovels, and other equipment beforehand, and it can easily become overwhelming. Keeping track of them all – your stable can hold up to 25 of them at once – is a big task. “Then there are quirks, which can positively or negatively impact a hero’s effectiveness in certain dungeons, or against certain enemies, or cause them to independently perform actions, including stealing any money you see in the case of Kleptomania, and each hero can have up to five positive and five negative traits. Each class’s ability set is flexible enough that most characters can serve multiple roles, which adds a lot of diversity to possible builds. This forces you to specialize characters for specific roles, such as front-line melee or back-row support, or to spread your abilities thinly across the positional slots. You can only have four equipped at a time, and unlocking and upgrading each skill individually represents a considerable investment of resources. The first complex thing you have to consider is that each character has seven skills, such as the Highwayman’s bleed-inflicting Open Vein or the Grave Robber’s blight-loaded Poison Dart. It’s impressive how many different factors you have to consider when putting together a four-member team from the 14 distinctly different classes that not only has complementary abilities, but also taking care that no member is affected by weaknesses that might make them vulnerable to the perils of a particular dungeon run. A Deep Hole of ComplexitySo it’s all about maximizing your odds of survival in these unforgiving places, though that’s easier said than done. Like in poker, knowing when to fold a bad hand and retreat is as important as knowing how to play a good one. It would be unforgivable for a game to put us in no-win situations with catastrophic consequences that can wipe away hours of progress, but Darkest Dungeon sidesteps that problem by giving us an eject button that allows you to bail out of a run that’s going south at nearly any time (it does have a chance to fail, like everything else), even in combat, and save your surviving characters at the cost of forfeiting your mission rewards. “It might feel unfair at times - because it is - but that’s where the tension comes from. The grotesque bosses are especially noteworthy for their unique and powerful abilities, which include a transforming lump of flesh and a Siren that temporarily seduces one of your party to her side. Battle is fought against a wide variety of bandits, skeleton warriors, fish men, filthy pig monsters, Eldritch horrors, and all manner of creatively designed monstrosities in between. Using just a few frames of animation and some parallax movement, Darkest Dungeon conveys action and excitement, and the monster designs are varied and often creative. Mostly when beginning boss-level dungeons, he’ll give some background on how each unholy horror came to be and what role they played in his own mad quest, and it’s all fantastically grim and delivered with great gravitas. The deep-voiced speaker, who portrays an ancestor of yours who first unearthed the dungeons before recognizing his folly, also doles out bits of loose, Lovecraftian story more as flavor than a meaningful plot. “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat are intensified by outstanding narration that frequently interjects with grim warnings and exclamations in response to events like critical hits or discovering potentially dangerous loot.
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