With spooky season upon us, now is a great time to dive into the darkest stories gaming has to offer. While games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill and Project Zero are classics, one game that's embraced horror in an entirely different way is Red Hook's 2016 turn-based survival-horror epic Darkest Dungeon.
In Darkest Dungeon, players come into the possession of a decrepit estate that once belonged to an unnamed ancestor. This becomes a sanctuary for you and the brave heroes that you choose to join your party. Nearby, there's a manor, which has since become a hot-bed of unspeakable horrors to overcome with your trusty band of warriors.
Darkest Dungeon's gameplay is based around exploring procedurally generated dungeons and high-intensity turn-based combat that really puts your brain to the test. It's a potent mix of gameplay styles that keeps players hooked throughout, but perhaps the game's biggest draw is its approach to survival-horror.
While not traditionally scary in terms of horrific imagery and jump-scares, Darkest Dungeon goes down the route that made Dark Souls so successful and downright terrifying. It's the fear of what the next challenge ahead could be and whether or not you and your party are well-equipped -- both physically and mentally -- to topple it.
Narratively, the game is steeped in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, the turn-of-the-century author whose lingering influence can be felt in most horror works being produced today. His stories of unseen horrors, gigantic sea-monster deities and the encroaching madness we all feel in the back of our minds have become legendary for all the right reasons, and Darkest Dungeon is perhaps a perfect distillation of these ideas.
Where most fantasy RPGs and dungeon-crawlers depict the heroes as valiant and unbreakable, Darkest Dungeon's cavalcade of willing warriors are more human by design and can easily be corrupted by the encroaching darkness. Every misstep, misfortune and trap activated causes your heroes to stress and, if they reach a breaking point, they will be completely overcome with despair. This making them potentially abusive, fearful or masochistic, adding further fuel to the flames of anguish that your party is experiencing.
Therein lies the biggest strength of Darkest Dungeon: its emphasis on the psychological toll that such events can take on people. This gives the game a truly unique edge that really ramps up the stakes. Not only do you have to worry about your character's health and status effects, but you must also care and nurture their mental health to ensure that they don't crack under the pressure and become a burden or harm to your party. This addition to what is otherwise a familiar game premise allows players to really connect with and care about their characters, seeing them as real individuals with thoughts and feelings rather than mindless cannon-fodder for Eldritch horrors to feast upon.
Players come back to Darkest Dungeon to see these characters overcome the darkness and triumph over an unseen and omnipresent force that's eating away at their minds every waking moment. The player feels the burden and pressure when a foray into a dungeon begins to turn sour. The game encourages players to emphasize with the characters and do everything possible to keep their morale up in tumultuous times. Coupling this palpable sense of dread with the game's steep learning-curve and terrifying array of monsters to battle against creates one of the most intoxicating and dread-filled RPG experiences available.
It's not for the faint-hearted, but for those who love games with an extra layer of difficulty, Darkest Dungeon is a fiendishly addictive and wholly satisfying experience that scratches that itch, while piling on a new kind of stress. Fans of Lovecraftian horror who have missed it will want to sink their gnarled fangs into every fleshly morsel that Darkest Dungeon has to offer, but whether you've played it before or not (and with a sequel planned to release in early access next year), there's no better time to dive into this thoroughly awful world.