Darkest Dungeon is a challenging gothic roguelike turn-based RPG about the psychological stresses of adventuring. Recruit, train, and lead a team of flawed heroes through twisted forests, forgotten warrens, ruined crypts, and beyond. You'll battle not only unimaginable foes, but stress, famine, disease, and the ever-encroaching dark. Darkest Dungeon Mac Description: Darkest Dungeon is a new game in the strategic and RPG style that was created by 2016 by Red Hook Studios and released for the computer. Finally, after a long wait, the final version of Darkest Dungeon was released. A stressful adventure in a gloomy world, hiring, training, and leading a group of heroes across.

I don't know that any game has ever left me feeling so utterly defeated as Darkest Dungeon.

You may notice that this review is arriving a month after the game's official, 'full' release out of early access. There's a reason for that; unlike with most review games, I simply could not force myself to sit and play Darkest Dungeon for long stretches. At my best, I could last three or four hours. Inevitably I hit a terrible string of bad luck and worse strategic decisions, lost heart in my campaign, and had to step away and build up my spirit again.

This sounds bad and frustrating, and sometimes it is. But it's also key to the thesis of Darkest Dungeon. It takes the fantasy role-playing game mold that's developed from the power fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons, and digs for something deeper and more sinister. It asks: What if those dungeon crawls weren't about getting better loot or higher levels, but about fighting for your very survival and sanity?

In true dungeon crawl style, plot is kept to a minimum in Darkest Dungeon. The game begins with the discovery that you have inherited a manor from a relative who lost his mind and took his own life. You soon realize the reason your predecessor lost his mind: He uncovered unspeakable horrors hidden away in the caves, woods and catacombs surrounding the manor. Now it's left to you to clean up your relative's mess and try to stay sane while doing so.

Darkest Dungeon splits its time between two types of gameplay: turn-based combat and exploration-focused dungeon crawls, and a more strategic city building element. While in your hamlet, you can recruit characters of various classes, and spend money and resources improving the buildings in the surrounding village. The goal of these upgrades is to finance further expeditions into the increasingly dangerous surrounding areas, where the other part of the gameplay takes place.

Stress is the most, well, stressful part of Darkest Dungeon

Combat in Darkest Dungeon blends traditional, turn-based role-playing game mechanics with some original quirks. Dungeons are explored on a 2D plane, and your party of up to four heroes is arranged in a line. Placement in the party determines which abilities are usable, while enemy placement affects which enemies you can hit with certain attacks.

While each character only has four skills available at any given time, the combat scenarios are far from simplistic. In addition to juggling stats like speed, dodge and protection, all of which can be buffed or debuffed, combat forces you to think strategically about positioning at all times. Enemies can use skills to screw up your perfect party order, but you can do the same for them, pulling their powerful back line to the front to wipe out first. It adds a tangible sense of tactics beyond just pushing the buttons that do the most damage.

Darkest Dungeon's fights are made complex by more than just the party lineup element, however. As in any RPG, characters have hit points that you must keep above zero — but you also have to struggle against an ever-increasing stress meter. Get caught in a trap? A character's stress meter will go up. An enemy pulled off a devastating critical hit? The stress meter is going to climb.

Stress proves to be both the most engaging and the most, well, stressful part of Darkest Dungeon. As characters become more stressed, they become less effective fighters. They're more likely to whiff attacks, less likely to dodge blows from enemies. They're also more likely to develop debilitating personality quirks, a key method of differentiating characters from each other.

While characters of the same class generally look identical, they often develop in extremely different ways. For example, one of my first heroes was a Crusader named Reynauld. He came with a great positive quirk, Quickdraw, which grants four bonus speed for the first attack of each combat scenario. But he also quickly became weighed down with negative personality quirks, including Ruminator (which lessens his ability to heal stress by 10 percent) and a devastating trait called The Yips that lowered his armor rating by five. These problems quickly ruined his usefulness as a tank.

All isn't lost when a stressed-out character develops a few highly negative traits, though. Back in the hamlet between dungeon runs, your characters can rest, recovering stress through activities like praying, drinking or visiting a brothel. You can also place characters into a sanitarium for a time to remove unwanted quirks, and to upgrade abilities, armor and weapons. The hamlet presents plenty of options. However, resources are limited, and balancing them is one of the most challenging parts of Darkest Dungeon.

Where the stress of combat left me on edge, I found both comfort and exhaustion in the cycle of slowly upgrading my hamlet. Each individual character you recruit will be dead permanently should they fall in battle, but the hamlet provides a source of consistent growth and movement forward in spite of the often disheartening setbacks. But the need to push for those upgrades was also my sole source of frustration in Darkest Dungeon, primarily due to one major shortcoming in the game.

Characters don't level up in Darkest Dungeon as in a traditional RPG, but they do gain ranks as they go on adventures. Once a character hits rank 3, signifying that they've got a fair bit of experience under their belt, they will refuse to go on lower challenge quests. If you haven't cleared out all the less difficult boss encounters, or want to tackle a low-level mission to get a specific reward, or just suck at the higher-difficulty stuff like me, you need to have a constant rotation of new rank 1 characters coming into your hamlet.

Darkest Dungeon makes it easy to constantly recruit new heroes, but that didn't prevent the feeling that I was entering into a tiring grind every time I wanted to step back to do some previous content but didn't have any lower-rank characters to do so. This strange design choice seems more focused on bloating the amount of time players have to spend to conquer each of the five main areas, rather than adding anything to the otherwise smart and strongly felt theme of despair and madness.

Darkest Dungeon Steam

Wrap Up:

Darkest Dungeon is at its best when the chips are down

In its best moments, Darkest Dungeon makes me feel crazy and hopeless. There's something I can't say for most games: The times when I most felt that I had irrevocably fucked up were also the times when the game was at its strongest. Though some of Darkest Dungeon's more annoying design concessions detract from the overall experience, I'd be foolish not to recommend such a singular experience. There's always a strand of hope, however slender, to pull yourself out of the darkness, and it's worth fighting through it.

Darkest Dungeon was reviewed using a final 'retail' Steam download code provided by Red Hook Studios. You can find additional information about Polygon's ethics policy here.

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Some games avoid losses. They prevent the player from seeing more than a reload screen, requiring them to start over from their previous save. Some allow you to take casualties but keep going, embracing the harrowing experience of sheer attrition while fighting a superior foe, challenging you to find a way to win. These are games like Darkest Dungeon, which personify the struggles, victories and losses of video games better than anything else.Placing a clear emphasis upon methodical combat and RPG elements, these games place a heavy emphasis upon risk management above all else. Almost anything can happen as you strive deeper into the unknown, from injuries slowing your party to even chance encounters parting your heroes from their precious loot. In similar games, any hard won victory can be rapidly turned against you, and it takes a truly careful hand to know when to risk all in the name of power and when to fold 'em and retreat to safety.Such risk-taking is as true of the core combat as it is the very act of travelling. As enemies can arise at almost any turn, and come with no shortage of nasty side-effects, it is entirely down to you as and when you need to engage the local monsters. You might bump into a grovelling minion you can easily crush, only to learn after the fight's over that he's passed on a debilitating curse to your strongest fighter, or that a few of his pals stole from you while he held your attention.While you can rely upon a few of the older strategies RPGs are best known for, the fact other games like Darkest Dungeon sidesteps the usual healer, tank and DPS classes makes life all the more difficult. You can rarely get away with simply breezing through battles on little more than old tricks here. In similar games even basic spells and abilities often make a point of ignoring the obvious options, and instead tweak elements until you're stuck trying to re-learn the game from scratch. While this certainly makes life more difficult, it also ensures that each one is a breath of fresh air when compared with Square Enix's typical RPG tropes.Beyond direct conflict, you have to contend with how to equip, outfit and train your forces, and cope with their own failings. Beyond the typical push to find new weapons, armour and trinkets, some heroes will have been driven mad from the experiences they have seen. Others might be so badly wounded that they need days to recover, or could even succumb to their own personal quirks, such as stealing from the party or starting fights with local vendors. These secondary elements, these occasional chance moments, must be combated and accounted for one step at a time. Similar games certainly make the experience all the more challenging, but this allows games like Darkest Dungeon to cultivate the sense of being a leader. The people you're sending into fights have their own wants, needs and failings, and no matter how often they die they're not simply a mob of faceless peons who obey your every order.If you are looking for a game where your every action risks the ultimate failure; a game where every loss challenges you, and every step backwards is as easy as the one forwards, then take a look below of games similar to Darkest Dungeon.