I love Darkest Dungeon, which is why I decided never to finish it.
It’s the only reasonable response to a game whose gruesome charm fades so drastically overtime. Its cruel world and Lovecraftian savagery rival games like Sunless Sea and Don’t Starve, but stay too long and you’ll eventually see its grizzly nightmare transformed into a middle-manager’st daydream.
The first time I lost someone in Darkest Dungeon was a thing of morbid beauty. Maybe it was a rookie plague doctor who went mad after suffering one-too-many critical hits, or a veteran leper who had been the party’s un-official leader and met his untimely end after too many stab wound bled him dry. The more painful these losses felt, the more sublime Darkest Dungeon became.
“There, but for the grace of god, go I,” is the game’s mantra when you start. No matter how well lit you try to keep your torch, no matter how much extra food you keep on hand for your band of mediocre adventurers, there’s simply no preparing for every potential tragedy that can befall them. Even the best laid plans will eventually turn to shit, if not complete and utter slaughter.
Contrary to the sadism of games like Dark Souls, which is meant to be fought, and eventually mastered, the pain brought by a game like Darkest Dungeon is meant to be invited, respected, and reveled in. Whereas other games have patterns that can be memorized and navigated, the consequences spawned by a random number generator are unpredictable and unforgiving. It was this disdain for my attempts to try and control it that helped me fall in love with Darkest Dungeon in the first place.
While every other game wanted me to keep getting better at it, this one seemed to be saying “Stop fighting it. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, and most of the time there’s nothing you can do about it.” Since the game is constantly saving, there are no do-overs. Fail to leave the dungeon when everyone in your party is on the brink of insanity and there won’t be any second chances to tell them how sorry you were for sending them to their deaths.
But there’s another side to Darkest Dungeon. One that doesn’t begin to surface until much later into the game. If the game starts as a sort of haunted house where the mechanism for exploring its terrors is a turn-based RPG, it ends in a drab cubicle filled with sterile spreadsheets that calculate risk. Everything in Darkest Dungeon costs money, except for people. In its most macabre conceit of all, the game eventually reduces all of its heroes into livestock.
In order to beat the game, you have to assemble not just one but a minimum of four groups of hardened warriors, since after each successful run at the final dungeon sees that band of characters retired from the game forever. As a result, it becomes imperative to grind dungeons with your veterans surrounded by fresh recruits, sacrificing the new blood in order to protect and slowly train up the old. Instead of something to dread, or to avoid, death becomes just another blip in the calculus of how you get from one point to another.
This is the game’s Cookie Clicker end-game, where the excitement of entering each new dungeon and deciding whether explore that last room is replaced by the tedium of simply getting through it so the next level can be gained and a few thousand more gold added to the balance sheet. When it started to feel like each dungeon should have a brute force option, where game’s equation of probabilities could play out on its own with no input from me, that’s when I realised it was time to pack my bags.
The last dungeon itself is perhaps the best example of this, doubling down on the maladies and overpowered creatures that were once employed only sparingly. Like a horror movie that tries to frighten by virtue of bigger and bigger jump-scares, drenched in more and more gallons of fake blood, the result is, above all else, exhaustion. In the end, I didn’t quit Darkest Dungeon out of fear, but because of how endlessly tiresome it eventually became.
Comments
7 responses to “Darkest Dungeon Ruins Its Endgame”
You engaged with the game in a completely different manner than I did. At no point did I get the sense that it didn’t want me to get better at it. Like XCOM and Sunless Sea (both of which also feature a good deal of randomness, especially XCOM) it’s a game that’s fundamentally about risk management. And, like in both those games, bad luck can rob you of short-term gains or inflict a minor setback, but you need to make some seriously terrible choices (often several in a row) to actually suffer a major loss of progress.
I’d view it from completely the other angle – its a robust tactical game with a gorgeous aesthetic draped over it. It’s very much a game about its mechanics. Taking it as being ‘like a haunted house’ or being about exploration doesn’t make sense to me.
I definitely agree it drags on too much, with too much repetition once you’ve effectively already proved your mastery over the systems. But it was mastery over the systems that was important from the very start.
I love the idea of Sunless Sea but once I started playing it I hated it. Too easy to die to random “nothing”. Ran out of fuel, dead. Minding your own business and get attacked, dead. I hate to say it, but I’d like an easy mode where I can explore the cool stuff with less fear of dying in minutes.
Darkest Dungeon has been on my watch list too, but from the sound of this review I think it’ll give me the same sense of frustration as Sunless Sea. 🙁
My first death in Sunless Sea was after over 20 hours of gameplay…
That said, it’s very, very slow to progress in that game. Gets quite tedious in the midgame.
Guess you were either luckier or more patient than I was. I died in less than an hour first game, of well… nothing. I ran out of fuel. Second game was even shorter 🙁
As much as I loved the idea of the game, I just couldn’t find the fun in it.
The extreme resource and risk management is the sad part of this game. It’s self proclaimed a RPG, but in reality it is a strategy/resource management game with a huge grind portion.
Kind off sad.
Wow, I was ready to press the buy button on this one until now. I am one to struggle to finish games if they do not engage over the long term, so maybe this is not for me.
Yeah, I’ve got it in the “waiting for a sale” category.
Keen to try it, but doubtful it will hold my interest long enough to finish it.