Darkest Dungeon gives a light for the dungeon crawling genre

A friend of mine sent me a link the other day for a game's demo at PAX East 2014.  Titled "Darkest Dungeon", my interest was immediately piqued since I'd recently done a post on another game - "Dungeons II".  A cookie for you if you can see the connection there.

"Darkest Dungeon" looks like it may actually live up to its slightly grandiose name with a unique twist on the classic dungeon crawling RPG genre.  You control the standard four person party, fighting monsters in turn-based combat and collecting loot - but staying alive is only half the battle.  As you venture deeper into the catacombs, the real question becomes: can you keep your party from not only being devoured by monsters, but also sane enough that they don't kill themselves?

Red Hook Studios' upcoming game takes a decidedly human perspective on the genre.  Your heroes are not going to cut through hordes of zombies unfazed.  As gamers, we consider undead enemies - zombies, skeletons, wraiths and the like - to be the cannon fodder of the armies of darkness; nothing to be afraid of.  But what if we met them in real life - how would we react?

None of us would have a great reaction to skeletons...

Think about that for a moment.

The party members are going to react more like normal people, so the act of fighting actual walking corpses, and worse, is certainly going to affect them.  Now factor in the knowledge that anyone who knowingly descends into haunted catacombs beneath a cursed manor can't be totally normal to begin with.

Where most games leave it at "because they're heroic", "Darkest Dungeon" acknowledges that each member will be packing plenty of emotional baggage for the journey from the start.  All of this makes the psychological prognosis of our heroes look pretty grim.

Mental health (or lack thereof) translates clearly into the game through various strengths and weaknesses.  Some are fairly straight forward - such as an increase or decrease to stats, or a damage bonus against a certain type of enemy.  Others have more insidious effects, including refusing healing due to paranoia or refusing to take orders in a drunken rage.

Characters can just as easily triumph over...

Or fall to their inner demons.

Sometimes adding brand new mechanics to a tried and true genre can backfire by adding a needless layer of complexity to the game rather than greater depth.  This usually happens when said mechanics haven't been properly built into the game and added on more as an afterthought.  Happily, in the case of "Darkest Dungeons" the "affliction" (the general term for your party's mental health) mechanic can be managed most easily from the the Respite points, where you can heal, allocate skill points or give a little talk therapy.  What I really like about its execution though, is that it isn't simply a menu screen.  The adventurers are gathered around a camp fire, but it feels just as much a part of the game as the battles in that the player goes through each character in turn and takes an action based on their class.  The Grave Robber (rogue) may reveal a new item that she "borrowed" from town, the Hellion (essentially a barbarian) will sharpen her blade and boost her attack, or the Occultist (mage/support) may attempt to treat a companions wound and heal them.

The Vestal helps a party member get a grip.

The darkness, or rather the fear of it, is as much an enemy as whatever lurks within it.  How much you keep it at bay is represented by the constant torch bar at the top of the screen, signifying how much light surrounds the heroes as you descend deeper into the dungeon.  The smaller it gets, the more unsettled the party becomes, making it harder to fight against what waits below.  

Note the diminished torch bar - as the light dims, the heroes begin to panic.

It's fitting that a video game dealing with the human mind, often called "the black box" for how little we know about it, be set in the darkest of dungeons filled with all manner of who knows what.  Can't get much blacker than that.  

After reading this, the characters of this game may come across as a little weak, both mentally and physically.  Being too easily scared and some of them almost certainly neurotic, they would certainly pale in comparison to the heroes of Diablo or Torchlight.  While it's true the cast of "Darkest Dungeon" aren't exactly the heroic types (one of them is a grave robber for crying out loud), I believe this game will demonstrate an oft-forgotten truth: True courage isn't the absence of fear, but overcoming it.  For me, that's enough to make this rag-tag group worth following into the catacombs.