Darkest Dungeon Review: The Party Is the Horror

The estate comes with a dungeon, and the dungeon comes with a bill. In Darkest Dungeon, Red Hook Studios’ 2016 roguelike RPG, you inherit a gothic manor from an Ancestor who dug beneath it and let something terrible out. Your job is to hire flawed adventurers, send them down, and keep them sane long enough to matter. Most of them will not stay sane.

Trailer, via Red Hook Studios.

The Hamlet and the roster

Darkest Dungeon is turn-based and tactical, played from a side view. Before each run you work out of the Hamlet, the hub town near the mansion, where you recruit heroes, buy items, upgrade stats, and pay to reduce stress. Each hero belongs to one of twenty character classes with their own skills and statistics. You pick four and enter a procedurally generated dungeon. Death is permanent; a lost hero is lost for good.

That structure is familiar. What Red Hook does with it is not. The Affliction system tracks each hero’s stress, and stress climbs from things that have nothing to do with the enemy’s damage output: adventuring without food or light, watching a party member get wounded or killed, blights cast by monsters. Let it run and the hero stops taking orders. They cower. They act against your direction. Push one to the extreme and they suffer a heart attack, which puts them at the edge of death unless you tend to them at once.

Camping, and the cure for a bad night

Stress drops through camping at set locations inside a dungeon, through restorative items, and back in town. That loop — descend, break down, recover, descend again — is the whole game, and it is a better horror engine than any jump scare. The thing hunting your party is not the creature in the next room. It is the cleric who has stopped listening to you.

The art direction carries it. The Stress Symbol, a crescent with five inward-facing spikes, sits in the logo and doubles as the game’s thesis: this is a game about the mind giving out. The Ancestor’s memoirs surface as you go deeper, recounting what he did chasing knowledge and power.

The Darkest Dungeon itself

The path ends at the Darkest Dungeon, the source of the corruption. There you meet the Ancestor’s disembodied spirit, now an Avatar of the Crawling Chaos. Beat him and the party faces the Heart of Darkness, which the Ancestor says is the heart of the planet. You can win that fight. It costs you. Then the Ancestor explains that you have only delayed the awakening, that this is a cycle running through your bloodline, and that you will end as he did. He closes with his first line from the opening of the game: “Ruin has come to our family.”

That is a real ending, not a sequel hook dressed as one. It also tells you what kind of game you have been playing.

What holds up and what grinds

Ranked, the parts that matter most:

1. The Affliction system, which turns party management into the actual combat.
2. Permanent death, which gives every decision weight the genre usually fakes.
3. The Hamlet loop, which makes recovery as tense as the dungeon.
4. The art and the Stress Symbol, which do more storytelling than the script.
5. The grind, which is real and occasionally dull.

Darkest Dungeon released first for Microsoft Windows and OS X in January 2016 after a year in early access, then came to PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and Linux that year, iOS in 2017, and Nintendo Switch and Xbox One by 2018. It sold over two million copies and drew several award nominations. A sequel, Darkest Dungeon II, followed in May 2023, and a board game adaptation is in development.

The stress system is the reason this one lasted. Plenty of roguelikes punish you with numbers; Darkest Dungeon punishes you with behavior, and the punishment arrives from your own side of the screen. The grind is the cost of that design, and it is a real cost. But the game understands something most dungeon crawlers miss: the party is the horror. Your heroes are not tools that break. They are people who stop trusting you, and you keep sending them down anyway.

Darkest Dungeon · game review · Red Hook Studios · roguelike · stress system · turn-based RPG