Darkest Dungeon

Genre: Turn-Based RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Darkest Dungeon is an RPG that prides itself on its darkness. Everything from the game’s grimy artwork and subdued music, its dour narration, its tough and unforgiving difficulty and even its expendable heroes just as prone to being driven insane with fear as they are bleeding out from mortal wounds… well, the game is nothing if not consistent.

Players take the role of a man who is organizing expeditions into a cursed manor’s depths in search of fortune and maybe even expunging the evil that lies within. To do so, you’ll hire various heroes to trek into the dungeon, gradually growing stronger or getting picked off as misfortune befalls them.

You’re primed to treat these heroes as resources just as much as the gold and valuables they find. You’re tempted to place them in danger’s way for the sake of achieving your own goals, and the game measures their struggles via multiple statistics, and keeping track of each adventurer’s mental health becomes just as important as tracking their physical health, as their adventuring may be bringing them farther into madness that could affect how effective they are in completing their goals.

Suffice it to say, if you like your games dark, there aren’t many RPGs darker than this.

Beyond the depressing themes present in the presentation, the graphics are not especially noteworthy, nor is there anything memorable in the sound department, with the sole exception of the excellent narration throughout the game and even in battles.

However, my biggest issue with this game is with how it opts to organize the menus and the game’s controls. If you’re playing this game in handheld mode, it works well enough, with the touchscreen an ideal way to instantly check any stat or menu item. But if you’re playing the game in docked mode, Darkest Dungeon is frankly a mess, with countless odd choices in control layouts, numerous sub-menus to try to remember how to access, and even the use of important commands like the command to begin a mission mapped to odd places like pressing in the right thumb stick.

Darkest Dungeon is a niche RPG already, with its excessively depressing themes and trappings, but the bizarre choices made in how the game actually controls really make it a hard game to love even if that’s your cup of tea. Of course, if you tend to use your Switch on the go, that’s less of an issue, so if you’re looking for a thematically dark RPG for play on the go, Darkest Dungeon might just be right up your alley.

tl;dr – Darkest Dungeon is an RPG where the game’s visuals, sound, themes, and gameplay are, as the name indicates, pretty dark, where insanity abounds and heroes are expendable. Just be warned that the game’s slew of stats and menus are a nightmare to try to sort through in docked mode – if you’re playing this game, you should be playing it using the touchscreen.

Grade: C-

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