Darkest Dungeon: Making The Best of a Bad Situation
Darkest Dungeon is arguably one of the hardest games on the market. Not in the sense of strategic difficulty, though it definitely has that. Darkest Dungeon randomly generates its characters and puts them under different jobs or classes.
In Darkest Dungeon, you are completely alone with no other players to help you, with the exception of looking up tutorials on YouTube. Your characters are their own people who will act on however they feel and will refuse to follow your orders on occasion. You are not going into the dungeon yourself, only commanding the people sent there to scavenge. While playing the game, whether in the home base of the Hamlet or while combing through decrepit ruins, each character will say a variety of dialogue lines that are sometimes quite sad. The dialogue is almost always in relation to the characters' poor mental state and general failings in life. This is reinforced through the stress system, which is significantly more dangerous than any physical harm. For example, on my first playthrough, one character became obsessed with eldritch horrors and speaking in tongues, stressing out the healer of the party, who became afflicted (an effect of becoming too stressed) and became selfish, refusing to heal anybody in the party other than herself, so when one of my heroes started having a heart attack from the stress, my healer refused to heal them.
All wounds sustained during a quest are healed once you return to camp. The only things that stay are stress and quirks. Quirks are certain aspects of a character’s personality that impact how they play and act. There are both positive and negative quirks, some being better or worse than others. My least favorite negative quirk is the “Slow” quirk due to the character just taking their turn after every monster has attacked them on the opposing side for half their health. And the best positive quirk is the quirk “Quick Reflexes” because my character often goes first, so that’s a plus. Stress is still an issue, and the last thing you need is a healer who is so stressed out that they refuse to heal anyone around, as I mentioned earlier.
To heal stress, you can send characters to the Tavern, to drink at the bar, wager at the gambling hall, or visit the brothel for… let’s not talk about that one. Each of these is still a bad option, though, as characters can come out of the bar hungover and unable to aim, lose valuable items through gambling, or contract diseases from the Brothel. The other option for stress relief is the Abbey. It is slightly better, with a more religious and spiritual theme. The Abbey’s method of healing stress consists of organized prayer, meditation, and getting whipped repeatedly to atone for your sins to give penance to your god. I don’t use the last one much, for bleeding and feeling immense pain in the name of your god doesn’t sit well with me and tilts on edge. If a character dies, they are dead forever. I’ve never seen them return from the dead either though it can rarely happen.
The psychological effects of sending my already broken men and women to fight horrific creatures are astoundingly negative. If you have a soul and care about the people, you are responsible for, this game gets harder as you try so hard to keep your characters in good mental health as they act on their own whims and do exactly what you tell them not to. I’m not in control of their minds, merely their employer. These themes of depression and mental stress aren’t often seen in games, and the mere idea that being a hero in a game or an adventurer is a mentally damaging profession is astounding. You can play Darkest Dungeon as a cruel and heartless boss who fires those who are broken, with nothing but your conscience to stop you, which truly says something about how the real world works. It is costly to keep effective, properly equipped, and mentally stable workers are costly.
The difficulty in Darkest Dungeon doesn’t just come from the combat decisions or managing available resources, but from the moral decisions you make and pushing through setbacks and character deaths. Making the best of a bad situation makes Darkest Dungeon challenging and fun.