Darkest Dungeon. I initially came across this one on Kickstarter back in 2014 via the sites discovery system. Rather taken with the visual style, and with the AUD<>USD exchange being closer to parity than it is now, I pledged money towards it for the game level tier.

Eventually it hit beta status and I received a Steam key for the beta version. Which I never got around to using. Later on it also turned up on GOG. Red Hook were kind enough to grant me a key for GOG too. A week later on a Saturday morning, I finally had time to sit down and play.

In short: I played for longer than I intended to and almost missed getting out to one of the local shops to get some supplies I needed. So there's a "just one more run" feeling to this game where I need to be careful I don't stay up to 3am on a workday!

The most striking thing on the game first off is the visual style. While it has a cartoonish look it makes much use of contrast, shadows, and lines. Most of the game is set in the dark, and the horrors that dwell in there. There is a lot of colour, but it is muted and toned down.

This really helps establish the look and feeling of your inevitable doom in the game. For a few seconds every 20 minutes or so, you may come across feelings of lite and hope. But don't go expecting anything bright and shiny.

The sound design I was a bit mixed on. While the music, effects, and ambient are great, and really help sell the mood of the game. I struggled with the cinematics narrator. I can't quite place what is not working other than the delivery and accent. While you really only need to watch the cinematics once, there is a narration in the level runs. Not too sure if it is the same guy, but I guess he does do a good job at the feeling of despair. It is not too big an issue as most of your attention should be focused on the party, and choosing who to keep alive if it comes to it...

After a short introduction on the downfall of your house, you are thrown into the tutorial. The game immediately shows you what the initial UI elements are, and what quick keys you need to know. It's all rather slick and easy to understand. Pressing 'H' brings up a quick reference of anything on the screen you are seeing in case you get stuck.

My small party of two people walked right. Right into combat. The game then lures you into a false sense of achievement.

The two mooks that show up were easily dispatched. Their attacks my team both avoided without a scratch. haHA! I thought, this is easier that I thought it would be.

After that, you enter in the small hamlet that serves as the game hub. The game quickly shows you how to interact and what you need to do. Early on, only a couple of buildings are accessible. I found this to be a good thing, there's about a dozen places to interact with and they are unlocked during the first couple of runs.

The game is hard. Despite the first battle I encountered at the start of the game. Once I had recruited a party of four I headed off into the first run. Part of the underground excavations of your family home.

The first battle was not that difficult. A couple of skeletons that I dispatched without any problems.

Then came the second lot of enemies. At this point, my parties health was still high, but stress levels had risen. Stress acts as a 'second' health meter in this game, and you need to allow your team to calm down in town or bad things will happen. The warrior guy I recruited in town soon developed kleptomania, and would loot stuff for himself, rather the team. A couple of battles later, and my little party had a variety of conditions between them. And none of them good. Eventually I had to retreat back to town, low red health and high white stress meters indicated that things would go very badly if I were to continue.

While the turn based combat is easy to grasp, this is a rouge-lite dungeon crawler where you need to pay attention to the health of the team. They can die from both physical and mental abuse, and there are precious few times in the dungeon where you can assist them.

But the game lets you know this. The first time you start it up it suggests not to get too attached to the team. Some (nearly all) of them are going to die at some point. Possibly quite horribly. And death is permanent.

With careful exploration, you can keep them alive. For my game, around 50 minutes in I basically set one up as a sacrifice so the others would live. A mental condition (masochism) on another of the whole team prevented retreating, and the archer character was the most expendable. She died from a heart attack, but the other three made it through and were able to get back to town. I'm expecting a lot of this!

I love it. I love the unforgiving brutality of it. While not super hard, Darkest Dungeon does provide a good challenge. One I expect will fill up many afternoons slowly building up a strong team to take on whatever Cthulhu mythos inspired monstrosity lies at the lowest and darkest floor of the dungeon.

Game Acquisition: Kickstarter Backer
Platform Used: GOG
Tweet Thread: 1 - 30 January 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009

Windows: XP / Vista / 7 / 8 / 10
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: Open GL 3.2+ Compliant
Storage: 2 GB available space
Additional Notes: 1080p, 16:9 recommended