And it all hinges on managing the stress of your heroes. The adventuring slots nicely into a simple, yet fulfilling town-upgrade system, which itself fits together with a unique take on character advancement. Darkest Dungeon’s aesthetic (including its use of a Bastion-style narrator) is stunning, and it contributes to the spring-like, tense-and-release feeling of the game’s turn based, positional combat. It’s your job to recruit and command a set of heroes, sending them into the decrepit bowels of a ruined estate-and the corrupt environs surrounding it.

You play as the last heir of a fallen noble house. A little lockjaw can wait.ĭarkest Dungeon is a tactical, party-based roguelike with a Lovecraftian flair. If I didn’t, then she could break down at the most inopportune moment. And since I wanted Fitzroy ready to face the dreaded Bone Necromancer, I needed to keep her stress in check. Now just wait a second, hear me out: It turns out that getting tetanus (and combatting the skeletal hordes) is really stressful. There was just tetanus.īut instead of sending her to the hospital (well, “the sanitarium”), where she could get that tetanus treated, I gave her a pouch of coins and sent her to the bar. I did this because I thought there was a chance that there might be some treasure inside it.

Fitzroy wound up with that tetanus because, after spending the last thirty minutes heroically bashing cultists and stitching together the wounds of her allies, I’d ordered her to open up a rusty torture device.

A couple of hours into playing Darkest Dungeon, I started to feel like a real ass: See, I really should’ve sent Fitzroy-a mace wielding, holy word shouting “Vestal”-to the hospital because she had a bad case of tetanus.

Darkest dungeon iron maiden