Darkest Dungeon is a strange game. I was expecting a roguelike Wizardry, but what I ended up playing was more like Lovecraftian X-Com without the tactical maps. I played 4 ½ hours the day I started it. I thought it be one of the best kickstarter games I ever played. At 10 hours I mistakenly erased the only save game slot I was allowed. Most other games I'd have quit, but I'd made so many mistakes, that I was actually much better off after playing my new game for 5 hours. By then though I had not only recognized that Darkest Dungeon is an extremely charming and original squad based dungeon crawler, but also a totally unbalanced and deeply flawed game.

Atmosphere and Insanity

Darkest Dungeon borrows heavily from H.C. Lovecraft's classic horror stories like The Call of Cthulu and A Shadow Over Innsmoth. Lovecraft's stories always focused on otherworldly horrors, which were so terrible to witness, that they could shatter a normal person's sanity and send them into madness. The monsters of Darkest Dungeon fit perfectly into this setting. There are insane cultists, undead monstrosities, alien fungus, ancient fish men, and diseased piglike humanoids. These monstrosities have invaded your ancestoral lands after your power hungry elder, set free an ancient evil beneath the family manor house. Coming to battle this dark force, are a cast of anti-heros that fit perfectly into this dark horror setting: a grave robber, a plague doctor, a leper, a bounty hunter, an occultist, and a highwayman just to name a few. Darkest dungeon sports one of the best game narrators ever. Your ancestor comments on your successes and failures brilliantly. The characters are also beautifully done, looking like they came alive out of a comic book inspired by medieval wood cuts. The characters also comment on the events of combat, and dungeons events, based on their class, and these are also done with an unusual charm and wit.

Each character class comments on game events differently

Like in X-Com, Darkest Dungeon encourages you to put together multiple parties of characters. While proceeding with caution makes character deaths very rare, most runs into a dungeon result in stress. Low levels of stress are not very problematic, but high levels can lead to an affliction, which results more often than not in erratic and unwanted behavior in combat (which also stresses the rest of the party) and can even results in a heart attack at high levels (though none of my characters ever had one). Also stress can lead to unwanted quirks. Quirks can be removed at a cost at the sanitorium, and stress can be cured at the tavern or the monstrary. This results in downtime for a character, and this downtime can only be performed if someone else does a dungeon run. For that reason, its usually good to keep a roster as deep as a professional basketball team, because you never know if you'll want to give a character one or two rest sessions to recover and be cured. The quirks (There are also positive ones), the insanity, and the stress are some of Darkest Dungeon's most original mechanics and fits perfectly into the atmosphere

Dungeon Crawling

Though Darkest Dungeon is theoretically a dungeon crawler, it is very bare bones in most of the areas in which a dungeon crawler shines. Level advancement, for example is very simple. Characters start with 4 of their classes's 7 combat skills, chosen at random. The others can be unlocked in your hamlet, at a guild building at a cost. Armour, weapons, and skills can be upgraded, which increases their effectiveness, but not their variety. Loot, which is plentiful in most dungeon crawlers, is relatively limited in Darkest Dungeon, which is probably why the game relies on five currency systems (crests, portraits, statue busts, deeds, and gold). You need gold to upgrade skills and equipment, and to cure your characters, but to actually develop the buildings necessary to do this you need the other 4 kinds of currency. Other than these there are talismans. Each character can equip a meagre two, and most of them aren't really worth equipping since they give a disadvantage that cancels out its advantage.

Other than combat you can run across obstacles, traps, secret doors and various containers in the dungeons. Various equipment which you can buy in town can help you deal with these, though you can just ignore them if you wish. Once you've played through each of the starting 4 dungeons once or twice, you realize which containers or places you should leave alone, and which ones are worth opening or visiting. This is an interesting characteristic of Darkest Dungeon. There is a right way and a wrong way to do most things. If you do things the wrong way, you will be punished, if you do them the right way, you will be rewarded. Unlike in a lot of games, there aren't multiple solutions, with different, but equally rewarding outcomes. Part of the fun of Darkest Dungeon is figuring this stuff out, but the probem with it is that once you have done so, such things lose their interest, because you almost automatically click on things you should open, and ignore things you shouldn't. There really isn't a good risk/reward mechanic.

Darkest Dungeon sports five locations, one of which is designed for the end game, which I don't plan to ever see, for reasons I'll detail later one. The other four areas open up in the course of the first five dungeon runs. Each of these dungeons has its own characteristics, its own creatures, and its own look. While each of these is charming and original, you soon realize that you'll have to spend tens of hours in each one if you want to finish the game. While they have random floor plans, you really won't notice much of a difference for the most part, simply because they're aren't enough different elements in the ruins, for example, to make one run much different that another.

Equipping yourself properly for each dungeon run is key to surving and turning a profit.

Home Sweet Home

Outside of your ruined estate, is your village, the hamlet. Here is where the various buildings exist necessary to improve your adventurers and heal their maladies, or to recruit new one. Improving your stage coach, armory, guild hall, tavern, monestary, sanitorium, and other buildings require the resources you can only find in the dungeons, and this process us what really motivates you to dive into the dungeons again and again.

Just like when dungeon crawling there is a better and a worse way to go about building things. Of the four building resources, one is necessary for all buildings, and a second is unique to two or three buildings. For example with land deeds, you can increase the effectiveness of your stage coach. This is necessary to expand your roster. You start with an 8 hero roster, and can expand it by 4, with each upgrade. You also start with the ability to only select from two randomly chosen heroes between each dungeon run, and when they're both members of the same class and that's not what you need, boy is that a bummer. So its good to upgrade that too, at least till you have a good sized roster of effective characters. However, upgrading the stage coach, means not upgrading the armory, and believe me, you'll want to upgrade your weapons and armour before fighting your first boss.

Also when caring for your characters, you have to consider your finances. Healing every bad quirk, or rescuing every 0 level character from extreme stress will drive you into bankruptcy, which means not having the money to improve the weapons, armour, and skills of your healthier characters. Here you have to be hard hearted and cut loose adventurers who can't earn their keep or who are a liability during a dungeon run.

At your hamlet you also get to put together your party. For each dungeon run you can choose four heroes from Darkest Dungeon's whopping 15 classes. Unfortunately not all heroes are created equal. For your second run, you're given 4 characters, which supposedly make up a balanced party, but by trying our their skills, you can quickly figure out who can pull their weight, and who can't. Also trying out each of a class's 7 combat skills will show you which ones are really effective and which one's are best left at home. I can only think of one class where I had difficulty picking out the four best skills, and in most cases, only relied on two or three. While I could go in detail about how imbalanced the classes of Darkest Dungeon are, there is another thread on the RPGWatch by Celerity which goes into this extremely extensively. I personally was able to overlook this, as I've often played other games with less than ideal character compasitions. For example I played Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, and Icewind Dale 1 & 2 with a bard in my party, even though I knew from playing pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons, that they were probably the least effective combat class in the game. So, if you enjoy experimenting with classes and seeing if you can make the best out less than ideal combinations, then there is a lot to try out and have fun with. In that case, I wouldn't read anything in advance about the classes, and try them out for yourself. If, however, you are bothered by a game that sports 15 classes, and where a few are just much better than the others, and a couple are real stinkers, then you probably should think twice about picking up this game.  

Building your town is motivating, but most of the upgrades just improve the skills and equipment you already have

Once you've chosen a party, you have to choose a quest from one of the five dungeons. Quests are extremely generic and mostly involve either exploring 90% of a dungeon (which in most cases is everything but one or two rooms), fight in every battle which takes place in a room (there are also battles in hallways), collect some items, or kill a boss. So much for quest creativity. You also are allowed to buy equipment for your journey. There are things like shovels to clear up rubble, torches (light plays an extremely important role in this game.), food (not having enough to eat is generally bad), antivenom, skeleton keys, bandages, et. This is something I had to experiment around with, but once I'd played about 5 hours, I decided on more or less my standard equipment and purchased this for every subsequent dungeon (scailing it, of course, with the dungeons size).

Combat

Like in most dungeon crawlers, Darkest Dungeon is primarily about combat. Like many squad based games, in Darkest Dungeon, it is a mistake to give any opponent unnecessary opportunities to attack. It is also a mistake to drag out combat, since reinforcements could arrive. This means that combat is rather fast paced. Killing opponents drops corpses, which can make it difficult to say draw back ranked enemies into melee range. Corpses can be destroyed, but that costs time and gives enemies extra opportunities to attack. I'm not sure if its a good mechanic or not, but its one of the interesting things that Darkest Dungon tries out that makes it stand apart from other games.

One of the quirky things about Darkest Dungeon, is that it is a side scroller, so that whoever is in front is in melee range, while those in back are mostly just vulnerable to ranged attacks. The same goes for your opponents. Each class has skills which can only hit enemies in certain position. For example the arbalest's sniper shot can only hit back ranked opponents, whereas the leper's hew attack hits the first two enemies. Also where your character is in the party order means what skills they can use. A leper or crusader, for example, can only use most of their skills if standing in the front two ranks. Also some characters have skills that can move them forward or backwards in the party order. The jester is the prime example of this, as almost all of his attack skills lauch him forward or backwards in party order. This does mean, to a certain extent, that you have to think of who you want where in your group, and prevents you, for example, of making a party of four crusaders.

Corpses block the path to certain enemies, making combat more difficult

The opponents in Darkest Dungeon are well designed. Some try to push or pull your characters, for example, to disrupt party order. Some focus on damaging the sanity of your heroes or stunning them. Bleeding and poison tend to be far worse for your heroes than your opponents, since these sorts of wounds continue to do damage after battles. Also sanity damage is a problem, because of afflictions, which often lead to your character just sitting around in combat. Sanity damage and diseases are also a pain to heal, because they take time and money. The monsters in Darkest Dungeon have an array of interesting skills, and normally appear in mixed groups, so you have to often decide if killing a monster that damages sanity is a more immediate concern than a damage dealer that can inflict bleeding. I really like the monsters in Darkest Dungeon. They are mechanically and artistically well designed, and fit in well into the atmosphere of the game. That would be all fine and well if Darkest Dungeon was a five hour game. But its not. With the amount of time the game expects you to wander around (I'm guessing about 50 hours, though I decided it was too tedious to play more than 23 hours), there are just obscenely few different types of opponents. This leads to the same problem as with the low number of events. My combat decisions for standard enemies kind of went on autopilot after five hours, and that detracted more and more from my enjoyment of the game as I progressed.

Even though you've seen most standard monsters after five hours, you do get quests to kill boss monsters. These bosses, like the standard monsters, all have their own special attacks, and resistances, and require certain tactics to defeat. Like the standard monsters, they are also well designed. Unfortunately you have to defeat them multiple times as well. This all really gave me the feel that the designers were trying to stretch out the content they had beyond the bearable. There is also a boss which acts as a wandering monster in some dungeons, and another which you can summon.

Light plays a huge role in combat. Be sure to take enough torches!

Conclusion

Darkest Dungeon is certainly creative (both in an artistic and mechanical sense). It also gets high marks for its visuals and atmosphere, and has one of the best voice narrators ever. On the other hand its surprising unbalanced (in terms of skills and classes) for an early access title, and I really wish it did a better job of balancing risk and reward. Even considering these drawbacks, I think Darkest Dungeon could have made an excellent short game. Had the designers packed their quest variety, monsters, and events into a 10 hour long squad based, base building dungeon crawler, they would have at least made a very good 10 hour long game. Instead they tried to stretch out their material into an almost endless roguelike game. And that's really too bad, because all good rogue like games profit from their immensely large amount of content. Unless you have an incredible tolerance for repetition, Darkest Dungeon becomes tedious very quickly. For that reason, its not a „very good" game for me, even though I'll be happy to concede that I had more fun with this game for the first 10 hours than I have had with most other games I gave 3 stars to. I also don't think its a bad buy for the price. Its fun to play around with for a while, to learn to mechanics, and enjoy the creepy atmosphere. My best advice, though, would be not to read any strategy guides or watch any youtube videos, because once you realize what you should and shouldn't do, the game just looses a lot of its enjoyment. I backed this game on Kickstarter, and I'd consider backing another game from Red Hook, because I think they not only came up with some great content, but also tried out some interesting new ideas. Still, I come away from Darkest Dungeon with a mild sense of dissatisfaction, knowing that it could have been a much better game.