A lot of interesting stuff has been written and said about the dark fantasy roguelike sensation, Darkest Dungeon. So much so that I almost feel incapable of adding anything to the discussion. Well, let’s break down the obvious to start; it has a gorgeous graphic novel presentation, reminiscent of Mark Mignola’s work on Hellboy. The UI is generally slick and lets you do what you want and do it in a quick and easy way, aside from a few niggling nuances that players generally find through extended play, which I believe is what the developers at Red Hook intended.

The core game play loop is thoroughly addicting. It’s hard for a game to hook me as deep as this, but hook me it did, for quite some time. I could go into the minute details, but I’m afraid that would simply bore both you and I. It’s more likely than not you know what Darkest Dungeon is all about, and if you don’t, there are other places on the internet that deal with that subject in excruciating, painstaking detail.

No, what I wanted to talk about in relation to Darkest Dungeon in how it got me to stop playing.

Don’t get me wrong, the game is mostly wonderful. There’s a reason I’ve slapped a great big You Should Play before the title. It is a highly engaging and fun dungeon crawling experience where you fight all manner of body horror focused beasties and even some nasty creatures that might have crept from the mind of a Cosmic Horror writer. It is addicting, compellingly written, well voice acted, and makes you think strategically.

See, you get a group of adventurers right? And naturally your elite adventurers, as they survive, become more powerful, allowing you to tackle more and more involved, longer and more difficult dungeons. Strategies have to be changed to adapt for horrible new enemies. And as they succeed even beyond those horrible new enemies, you become attached to them, with all their little quirks and horrible stress related deficiencies. They’re your heroes.

So when comes time that a hero is inevitably killed, a hero whom you have spent tens of hours with, the feeling of defeat is palpable. This is something other people have written about. But you can always rebuild, however tough. The strangest feeling though was one of exhaustion from victory.

I defeated a hard boss – a brigand warlord – by the skin of my teeth. Literally I had several people sitting on death’s door – two out of the four party members had been killed from the effort of the battle. It came down to lucky die rolls by the end, my Occultist healer (yes, laugh at me you fools, I brought an Occultist as my healer) being the one to land the final blow with a lucky stab. The town ablaze around them, the two survivors stood atop mountains of corpses they had crossed to defeat their enemy.

The stress and exhaustion I felt at this point was all-encompassing. I didn’t want to have to keep playing after that. That should have been the end of it, I thought. How can the game continue so nonchalantly, so ordinarily, after a boss fight of such magnitude? The game is normally either a relaxing combat experience or a stressful “should-I-shouldn’t-I” toss-up between retreat and plunging into the fray one more time.

So because of the stress, I set it down for months, and didn’t think about it. I couldn’t bare the idea of continuing with a campaign that was already grinding me down to a fine paste. It probably didn’t help that I was playing it in the middle of the pandemic, making stress feel even greater. So I left it.

Until I wrote this article. Now I’m back into it. Picking up where I left off months ago has left me in a slightly disadvantaged state, but I’ve already come back and cleared a few dungeons. The dungeon delving continues. Maybe one day I shall see what rests in the Darkest Dungeon sitting atop the hill. I almost doubt it; it seems better as an unconquered monolith, a place of such awful, horrendous horrors that I should never peer inside for fear of what will happen to the poor souls who have already been skewered by fishmen and poisoned by mutant freaks in the forest. I might write a piece or two on the expansions for the game, Crimson Court and Color of Madness. I haven’t found many reviews online for the latter, and it might be helpful to those searching if I tried to break down what it adds. Anyway –

I’ll finish with my favourite quote from the game. It’s some of the most beautiful purple prose I’ve ever heard.

Monstrous size has no intrinsic merit, unless inordinate exsanguination be considered a virtue.

You can get the original on Steam, and pre-order the new one on Epic Games.