Rumours once pointed to a sacred underground tomb housing untold wealth, thus, driven by greed, he’s spent his entire family fortune - your family’s fortune, it turns out - in a selfish pursuit to grab what he can. Worse still, it wastes no time reminding you of this at every turn.Ī patriarch attuned to a lifestyle of opulence and excess has excavated the caverns that wallow beneath his family’s sprawling estate.

Unlike its genre siblings, though, it’s far from a whimsical fairy tale depicting valiant warriors and fervent champions, but the complete opposite. It’s as much about micromanagement, resource gathering and squad building as it is about luck, perseverance and determination, where the line between hope and despair is often as hard to determine as guessing which mindset your haphazard crew will grudgingly drag onto the battlefield. It’s a game that can be stubborn, incredibly frustrating, at times baffling, and often wonderful. Its prudent candor is what stands it apart from the hordes of commensurate permadeath-operating, procedurally-generating roguelikes available elsewhere. But does the game make death and despair engaging? Here's wot I think.ĭarkest Dungeon is the realisation of its theme and cruel twist on dungeon-crawling. These preeminent words of wisdom project an honest sentiment that’s not only a tone-setter for Darkest Dungeon, but also serves to define its makeup: through each stage of development - from its beginnings, its crowdfunding success, a year-long stint in Early Access, and now onto full release - developer Red Hook Studios envisioned a brutally difficult game that would offer little in the way of concession. Your actions are permanent, therefore the quests you embark upon will often end in failure. It’s a game about making the most of a bad situation, you’re told from the outset. Darkest Dungeon begins with a foreboding admonition.

Darkest dungeon review gamesradar