Perhaps it’s better not to describe Darkest Dungeon’s characters as “heroes.” The folks heading to their probable deaths range from Bounty Hunters to Jesters to Abominations, each with different gear and abilities. Choosing heroes is an intricate exercise in checks and balances, and the number of statistics to consider can be overwhelming.

Characters with ranged attacks are better suited to the back of the line, for example, while melee-focused characters sit happily at the front others still might have healing or support abilities that increase effectiveness in the middle. Your four adventurers form an orderly line, as do their enemies, with their position determining which of their various abilities and attacks they can use - or how effectively they can use them. Most encounters in Darkest Dungeon take the form of turn-based combat. The actual missions aren't particularly grabby (and neither are the procedurally-generated dungeons), but it’s the in-mission experience that makes Darkest Dungeon so likeable. There’s a story that plays out as the game progresses, but the bulk of playtime is spent taking squads of four adventurers into the surrounding area to perform a range of unpleasant tasks. It’s not scary per se, but its game mechanics that invoke horror’s key emotion - dread - better than any volume of screen glitches, scuttling monsters, or screaming ghosts.īroadly speaking, Darkest Dungeon charges players with protecting a dingy town beset by demons, the undead, and other horrible beasties, thanks to a portal to another realm. Playing in many respects like a tabletop role-playing game, it pushes player-controlled heroes through a Lovecraftian world of horrors - sometimes under serious protest. Red Hook Studios' Darkest Dungeon, then, is a rare horror game that does something different. Even Resident Evil is now going the way of the first-person scare-’em-up, and the mechanical, YouTuber-centric predictability of the genre just isn’t working for me. There’s only so much inching down a spooky corridor, looking at spooky things, and getting spooked by spooky jump scares one can do before it blurs into monotony.

I’m gonna say it: the majority of horror games aren’t interesting to me right now.

Darkest dungeon gamespot review