They can also drink or pray away their stress at the bar or church. If they reach high enough levels, they can even die of a heart attack.Īfter a dungeon, characters who have fallen ill, or need to unlearn a bad quirk can visit the sanitarium back at the estate. If a character’s stress level gets too high, it can either cause them to have a psychotic break (a terrible temporary affliction on the character) or, in some cases, a heroic virtue. Characters display two different bars, one for health and one that tracks their stress. The mechanic that really sets this game apart from others in the genre is its stress system. You level up your estate (your home base) and various characters to progress and venture into more dangerous ones. The whole game is about dungeon crawling.

The design is one of it’s largest draws seeing set in motion is like guiding your four-party team through a bleak, grotesque storybook. It has a strikingly dark, Lovecraftian art style that reminds me of Mike Mignola’s work on the Hellboy comics. However, now it has come to the Nintendo Switch– and with that comes more talking points.įor those that are coming into this blind, Darkest Dungeon is indeed a rogue-like with RPG elements. Originally hitting Steam back in 2015, it’s one of the rare babies born from the crowdfunding womb (Kickstarter) that’s been generally well received. Darkest Dungeon has been out on various platforms since before that game was even released, and has its own identity. Seriously though, that’s not even a fair comparison. So anyway, for those who haven’t heard of Darkest Dungeon, this is the Cuphead of turn-based roguelikes. When one sets out to talk about a game as challenging as Darkest Dungeon, you have to take a moment to remember one simple rule which for most writers in the video game industry has gone past cliche at this point: Do not start the review by saying “This is the Dark Souls of (insert genre here)” We can’t just make that comparison for every game with a high difficulty level… Platform: Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS Vita, Microsoft Windows, Linux, iOS

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