Brutal though that penance may seem, fool-hardy strategists quickly learn their lesson. Keeping solid party composition by matching classes, skills, specialties, and respective levels of experience is vital, but it's complicated by the fact that everyone needs a break to heal mind and body. And while your cleric is relaxing in the brothel, she obviously can't journey to ancient ruins and fell skeletal armies. Before each expedition, you'll pick out your party, supply them and prepare for a harrowingadventure.īut, these things take time. Diseases too can afflict your warriors, and you have to treat them at the sanitarium or deal with a hefty stat penalty. So you have to commit them to a night of drinking or meditation to keep their mind and body in fighting condition. Successive expeditions are as sure to kill your favorite mercenary as anything else. Stress too, takes its toll on everyone, and there are numerous events that can trigger it, including darkness, the untimely death of a comrade, or an unknowable horror. Looting corpses can net an unwary adventurer a case of rabies. Your team's humanity becomes a persistent and pernicious obstacle of its own. You also need to take great care to keep their minds intact as the game wears on. Here, you can upgrade your mercenaries' weapons and train them in new abilities that can dramatically affect their usefulness in future expeditions. Equipped with medical facilities, an abbey, a tavern, guilds, a blacksmith, and a stagecoach which constantly supplies you with new recruits, the hamlet serves as your headquarters in the war with the demons and devils found in the wilds. There, you can recruit, equip, and ease your legions of dungeon divers. Stress too, takes its toll on everyone, and there are numerous events that can trigger it, including darkness, the untimely death of a comrade, or an unknowable eldritch horror.Īfter each adventure your troupe will return to your burgeoning hamlet. It's a complex system that gives you room to figure out your own ideal methods, but also forces you to manage your estate and the sanity of your band of mercenaries. It's an excellent system that keeps players from ever settling in or feeling completely comfortable. As battles progress, however, your teams can be shuffled, and if anyone dies-on your side or your enemies'-you'll have to form new strategies on the fly to keep up an effective force. Heavily armed warriors sit up front to protect the assortment of healers, occultists, and archers you can employ. Certain character classes are only useful in one or two of the four possible positions. Darkest Dungeon's combat revolves around careful formations. While the death of one of your party members seems bad enough, it gets worse. Darkest Dungeon never looks particularly inviting. That, however, is complicated by the fact that with each subsequent adventure, your soldiers inch closer to stress-induced heart attacks or debilitating diseases, to name a few possible downfalls. Some need big, heavy-hitting brutes, while others require poison to get the job done, and the trick is to balance your adventuring party's classes and tactics appropriately. These areas all have different enemy types and challenges that require specific strategies. Your goal is as much about managing all the resources at your disposal as it is protecting a given warrior from death or disease.Įach week (in the game) you send your quartet of champions out to one of four main areas in order to gather coin, accouterments, and experience required to tackle the eponymous Darkest Dungeon. Darkest Dungeon breaks from that tradition in that it lets you stock an entire roster of heroes, only a handful of which will be at risk on any given mission. Everything here is a little weird, and it'd be easy to pass it off as yet another game inspired by Lovecraftian horror, but Darkest Dungeon's gameplay makes it so much more.ĭarkest Dungeon sits in the roguelike genre-a game type often associated with randomly arranged rooms, permanent death, and the fear of what mysterious challenges lie ahead. That's the kind of moribund humor Darkest Dungeon works with. Knowing that his friends broke down and died because of his monstrosity, the werewolf heads back into town, distraught, to self-flagellate and exchange his grief for blood. She fights back wave after wave of evil abominations far longer than she should. Our cleric, pushed to the brink, finds resolve in faith. He compulsively opens suspicious chests and rifles through dead bodies. The werewolf's transformations startle and stress the psyche of the party. A werewolf, a paladin, a bandit, and a cleric walk into the abyss.
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