How far will you push your adventurers? How much are you willing to risk in your quest to restore the Hamlet? What will you sacrifice to save the life of your favorite hero? The game pulls no punches about it either – every time you boot it up, you get this message:ĭarkest Dungeon is about making the most of a bad situation. This sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Despite all this, Darkest Dungeon is a compelling experience: easy to learn, difficult to master, a proper challenge where you slowly but surely become better at handling the unyielding brutality the game throws at you. To top it off, you must even look after the mental health of your adventurers: their life of constant violence and exploring dark caves leads them to get stressed and otherwise psychologically afflicted, which pushes them to the brink of insanity and effects their personality and behavior. The game can be a difficult, even cruel experience with turn-based combat that punishes every mistake you make, murdering characters you’ve spent time and money investing in, training up, and getting to know.

Your task in Darkest Dungeon is to assemble teams of adventurers and lead them on various quests for gold and glory, piece by piece purging the surrounding lands of the hideous undead skeletons, cultists, pigmen, sea monsters, and God knows what else that now populate them thanks to the twisted magical experiments of the narrator, known only as The Ancestor. It tells a story of grim, medieval Lovecraftian horror and raises deep, difficult ethical questions in an ingenious way. Darkest Dungeon and Ethics Making the Most of a Bad Situation James Cartlidgeĭarkest Dungeon is a critically acclaimed, award-winning video game developed by Red Hook Studios which, since its release in 2016, has maintained a strong cult following.

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