Darkest Dungeon®
Last updated: 2025-05-16
- Challenging, rewarding, and addictive gameplay experience.
- Immersive gothic horror atmosphere enhances the experience.
- Extensive modding support increases replayability greatly.
- Unique stress system adds gameplay depth.
- High difficulty and frustrating RNG elements.
- Repetitive and grindy gameplay can be tedious.
Verdict
Mostly positive
Summary
Positive 85% · Negative 15%. Score: 15 / 100
Positives:
- The game provides a deeply engaging and rewarding experience through its challenging gameplay, strategic combat, and satisfying sense of progression. Players find the game enjoyable and addictive, with a constant stream of choices and mechanics that require careful planning and adaptation. Overcoming the game's difficulties and mastering its systems leads to a strong sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.
- The game features a distinctive and immersive atmosphere, characterized by its gothic horror art style, Lovecraftian themes, and haunting sound design. The visuals, music, and narration work together to create a sense of dread, tension, and psychological discomfort, drawing players into a dark and unsettling world. This unique aesthetic is a major draw for many players.
- The game has extensive modding support through the Steam Workshop, allowing players to customize their experience with new characters, classes, skins, mechanics, and dungeons. The active modding community provides a wealth of content that enhances replayability and addresses potential complaints about the game. This mod support significantly extends the game's lifespan and allows players to tailor the game to their preferences.
- The game features a diverse roster of characters, each with unique skills and abilities, allowing for varied team compositions and strategies. Players enjoy experimenting with different party combinations and discovering synergies between characters. While character death is permanent, the game provides a constant stream of new adventurers, encouraging players to adapt and experiment with different team compositions.
- The game combines roguelike, dungeon crawler, and turn-based elements, with procedural generation ensuring that every run feels fresh. Players manage their town, choose their roster, and venture into dungeons, making tactical decisions and managing resources. The game subverts typical resource management by providing few resources but a constant stream of new adventurers, encouraging a pragmatic approach to character management.
Negatives:
- The game is frequently described as very difficult, unforgiving, and reliant on RNG, leading to frustration, stress, and a steep learning curve. Players report feeling punished for mistakes and struggling with unpredictable outcomes, even with careful planning. This can lead to a sense of unfairness and a feeling that the game is designed to be frustrating.
- Many reviewers found the gameplay loop repetitive and grindy, especially in the late game. Missions, enemy types, and dungeon layouts become predictable, leading to a loss of interest and a feeling that the game is artificially extending playtime. This repetition undermines the sense of progress and purpose.
- Some reviewers found the game's mechanics to be unclear or illogical, particularly regarding turn order and character balance. This lack of transparency can make strategic planning difficult and lead to frustrating situations where enemies act out of turn or seemingly weak characters can quickly wipe out the player's party.
- The stress mechanic is a significant source of frustration, with heroes frequently experiencing mental breakdowns, developing negative traits, and even dying from heart attacks. Critical hits and other negative events can quickly escalate stress levels, leading to a downward spiral that is difficult to recover from.
- The game features permanent character death, which can be frustrating when losing characters that players have invested significant time and resources into. This mechanic discourages attachment to characters and can lead to a sense of loss and discouragement, especially when deaths feel unavoidable due to RNG or unexpected events.
Gameplay:
- The core gameplay loop involves recruiting heroes, forming parties, exploring dungeons, and engaging in turn-based combat. Strategic team composition, positioning, and ability usage are crucial for success. Players also manage resources and upgrade their base to improve their heroes' capabilities.
- The game incorporates significant randomness, requiring players to adapt and make the best of unpredictable situations. Success depends on strategic decision-making, resource management, and mitigating risks. The game also features estate management, where players hire/dismiss mercenaries, manage their stats and equipment, and prepare for expeditions.
- The game features roguelike elements such as permadeath and randomized dungeons. The goal is to conquer the 'Darkest Dungeon', the final dungeon in the game, which requires multiple parties to complete. Unlike typical roguelikes, Darkest Dungeon emphasizes out-of-game progression over in-game growth.
- Players gather loot and heirlooms to upgrade town services and enhance efficiency. Limited inventory space forces players to make tough choices about which items to keep. Managing resources like torches, food, and shovels is crucial for survival and success.
- Characters gain positive and negative perks over time, adding micro modifiers that are hard to strategically plan around. The game features permadeath for characters, which can be emotionally impactful. Initial characters are not essential, as adventurers can be easily replaced.
Performance:
- The game generally runs smoothly on a variety of systems, including older laptops, with minimal lag or bugs. The hand-drawn graphics style contributes to its smooth performance. Some players report occasional short graphical lags, but these are not game-breaking.
- Some players report lag, slowdown, crashes, and instability, especially after updates or when using mods. One user reported the game using up to 20GB of RAM, suggesting a memory leak. These issues appear to affect both 32-bit and 64-bit versions and can occur even in the main menu.
- Players report that the game plays better with a mouse than an Xbox controller. Additionally, when using a controller during combat, the game may pre-select combat options from the previous round, leading to input errors.
- Players find the game's controls intuitive and the menu navigation well-implemented, contributing to a positive user experience.
- Some players have experienced slow response times when interacting with the settings menu.
Recommendations:
- The game is highly recommended for its challenging gameplay, dark atmosphere, and strategic depth. Players should be prepared for permadeath, resource management, and psychological challenges. Many reviewers consider it a masterpiece for fans of the genre.
- New players should be cautious when enabling DLCs, as they can significantly increase the game's difficulty. It's generally recommended to start with the base game and add DLCs later as players become more experienced.
- Several reviewers suggest waiting for a sale before purchasing the game, as it is frequently discounted. This makes it a more worthwhile investment for those unsure about the game's difficulty or their enjoyment of the genre.
- The game requires acceptance of loss and difficulty. Players should be prepared for character deaths and setbacks, and learn to adapt their strategies accordingly.
- Some reviewers recommend playing on Radiant difficulty to reduce the grind and make the game more accessible. This difficulty setting retains permadeath and combat mechanics while easing the resource management aspects.
Miscellaneous:
- The game is noted for its complexity and depth, with engaging systems that create emergent stories. While challenging, the game's price is considered reasonable, and it often goes on sale for a very low price.
- The story centers on the player inheriting a manor plagued by horrors unleashed by their ancestor. The player is tasked with restoring the manor and saving the world from the consequences of their ancestor's actions.
- The game features a distinctive art style with gothic and Lovecraftian influences, often compared to Bloodborne. The overall design combines comic book aesthetics with a tale-like quality, creating a unique visual experience.
- The game features permadeath, meaning characters are permanently lost when they die, adding to the challenge and realism. This mechanic emphasizes the expendability of characters as resources.
- Each character has a unique backstory and personality traits that are revealed through individual tasks. Players experience their stories and fates throughout the playthrough.
