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Whether ironically or intentionally, or both, the way the player must handle the restoration of their family’s name is not too different from the way the Ancestor ruined it. Split between six different locations, including the Darkest Dungeon itself, the majority of the player’s time will be spent wandering these murky interiors. However, the meat of the game takes place in the numerous and ever-changing dungeons of the landscape. For its job as a brief respite and as an appetizer to the game’s aesthetic, it is near perfect. The visual setup of the estate is memorable, a collection of ramshackle buildings ominously built below the watchful silhouette of the manor. It is one of the few static locations in the game and can be upgraded, though in subsequent playthroughs upgrades may not be permanent. While the bulk of the game is not spent here, familiarity with the estate is inevitable. Each week, or one delve into a dungeon, the estate refreshes.

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Here, players will recruit traveling mercenaries, upgrade those mercenaries’ abilities and equipment, relieve them of their stress, and attempt to cure them of their psychoses. Excluding a short introductory dungeon designed to teach basic game mechanics, play begins at the estate of the player, which serves as the game’s hub. This is where the player comes into the story.ĭarkest Dungeon is split into two distinct phases. Becoming the sole survivor of the incident, he writes to his next of kin that the evil must be put to rest and the family name restored. It isn’t until he digs too deep and unearths one too many doors that he releases the ultimate evil upon the land. Despite resistance from the locality, the Ancestor digs deeper and deeper beneath the mansion, creating vast, winding tunnels that undercut the area around it. The Ancestor, the original owner of the mansion, in a search for the ultimate pleasures, finds himself turning to the occult when earthly ones fail him.

Understandably, that package lead to quite the difference of opinions regarding the game, but how does the final product actually stack up? Is this darkly-themed dungeon-crawl a demented delight? Or will its umbral corridors only descend players into madness?Īs the inheritor of a decrepit mansion that has been subsumed by an old horror, the player is tasked with clearing both the mansion of its eldritch nightmare and restore honor to the family name of the one responsible for its emergence. Upon its final release, the game had a much more complete package to offer, but one that looked a fair bit different than what was once offered to the public.

Throughout its tenure in Early Access, it stayed in the spotlight, an infamy predicated on controversial changes made to the game’s core. On its initial reveal, Darkest Dungeon left an immediate impact, from its unique premise and its promise of true eldritch spelunking.

Darkest dungeon review