#i specifically miss when my art was inspired by the spooky month art style....

[lobotomize-d]

I wanna do a cool "ooh look at art made at the beginning of the year redrawn at the end of the year!" Thing but I'm looking through a lot of old art and I'm like.... Damn.... I had some good art style eras....

[bmaxwell]

Number 1: Darkest Dungeon

Ruin...has come to our family.

Every so often a game comes along that feels like it was made specifically for you. So it was with Darkest Dungeon. First off, the game’s art style is breathtaking, I’d never seen a game look quite like it. The heavy shading on the characters gives everyone a severe, mysterious look. The combat is turn-based, with the twist that skills and abilities are based on where the characters are standing in a formation. It invokes HP Lovecraft* and makes the emotional stresses of being sent into dangerous places to battle horrors and abominations into a gameplay mechanism. The music is great. There’s a cool, spooky narrator. There are a bunch of different classes, and a town hub to upgrade. Darkest Dungeon ticks...all of my boxes? Almost. Make the adventurers high schoolers who attend classes, form social bonds, and manage relationships during the day before fighting monsters at night and you’d have it. 

I’ve played several hundred hours of Darkest Dungeon, and I still rarely skip the intro video when I launch the game. 

The first time I saw the above video, I was immediately reminded of two things:

- Eternal Darkness, a Gameube game about exploring mansion of your recently-deceased uncle and discovering an evil book that has been passed down through the generations.

- Lurker at the Threshold, which was my first HP Lovecraft story.**

This is my kind of horror. I dislike blood and guts slasher horror, but I love cosmic horror. This is very difficult for most games to capture, a lot of Lovecraft-inspired games tend to be about fighting tentacle monsters with tommy guns. And Darkest Dungeon is about fighting cool scary monsters, but Red Hook implemented a system in which your characters will have to deal with the psychological toll that living through life-threatening encounters with unspeakable horrors would take on a person. 

It’s easy to boil this down to just another meter to manage. “Oh, this monster monster used an ability which inflicted 6 points of stress on my Crusader, he is only 13 stress points away from his limit.” Most games can be boiled down to their mathematical skeletons. This is where the game’s incredible writing, art direction, and voice acting come through. Combat actions are often accompanied by a line of dialogue written over a character’s head and/or a line from the narrator (the excellent Wayne June). 

For example, you encounter an enemy called a Madman - a fairly disturbed fellow in a loose straightjacket. One of his attacks his one of your party members, inflicting stress and a debuff. How this looks in practice is like this: this dude in an unbuckled straight jacket who has been holding his head in his hands suddenly points and screams something muffled with one hand over his mouth. One of your party member’s screams “I-I don’t want to die here!” and the narrator says “Gasping...reeling...taken over the edge into madness!” The imagination doesn’t have to wander far to picture this distraught man suddenly pointing at you and screaming something he can’t possibly know about you. This marriage of theme and mechanisms is something that makes video games special. 

As someone who has always enjoyed the math puzzle-like nature of turn-based combat, Darkest Dungeon managed to somehow feel both familiar and innovative. Having combatants lined up from left to right seems like such a simple thing, but it brings into a play a whole layer of strategic considerations. There are abilities that can only be used from certain positions, or can only hit specific ranks on the enemy side; there are abilities that push and pull, that lunge forward or fall back. On any given delve, you are choosing a party of four from 17 classes, each of which has an assortment of abilities to choose from. Early in the game you can kind of get by with whatever party you choose, but as the difficulty ramps up you have to really think about your party makeup before setting out.

Darkest Dungeon’s late game features a fairly brutal difficulty spike. Most of my plays of the game are me having a laid back good time with the game until I get my ass handed to me in a few Champion dungeons, then putting the game down for months before starting a new save. This understandably turns a lot of players away from the game. Shit can go wrong in a hurry. Shit WILL go wrong in a hurry. If the enemies focus on a specific character and/or get a couple of critical hits in succession, you can lose party members permanently, and those setbacks can be deflating. You can’t avoid bad luck, but you can mitigate it and plan for it. And overcoming an “unfair” challenge is exhilarating. 

One of the things the game does brilliantly is give you those hopeless situations and occasionally offer a beacon of hope. This is by way of the game’s stress and affliction mechanism. When a hero’s stress level reaches 100, they will either become afflicted with a negative trait such as Paranoid or Abusive, or they will become virtuous, gaining a trait such as Stalwart or Focused. This seems to be tilted in favor of affliction about 70/30. Either way, this event is accompanied by a line of text from the character, and a callout by the narrator. 

In the case of an affliction, things go from bad to worse. Characters will change positions on their own (a fearful character will move back in the formation, or a masochistic one might move toward the front) or skip their turn altogether (if they’re hopeless). Afflicted characters will stress the rest of the party out as well whether it’s by being mopey, or verbally abusive - a paranoid arbalest who misses a shot will say “WHICH ONE OF YOU BUMPED MY ARM!?” and so on. On the other hand, sometimes when hope seems lost a character will become virtuous. They will shout encouragement, grant buffs and healing and the such. 

The game’s other big source of drama comes from its death’s door mechanism. When a character reaches zero health, they do not die. Instead they are in a state called death’s door, which means that any damage they take while at zero health could kill them. This leads to every attack being accompanied by held breath and a tightly clenched asshole. The game’s design lends it so much personality and breeds so many memorable stories. 

As impressive as the game’s design is, it is matched by the game’s sound design. Stuart Chatwood did an incredible job with the score. The music is deeply unsettling, a low thrum while you make your way through poorly lit dungeons where traps lie in wait and horrors potentially lie around every corner. Distant howls and screams  help set the stage. The battles themselves are against pounding drums and upsettingly realistic sounds of blows landing and gasps and chokes. 

Wayne June’s contribution as the narrator cannot be overstated. He is the heart and soul of Darkest Dungeon. Hs voicework captures the game’s dark humor, hope, despair, triumph and everything between. I cannot envision this game without him, and was thrilled to learn that he has signed on for Darkest Dungeon II.

It’s a game of long odds, despair, determination, and triumph. As someone who lives with depression, the game probably means more to me and hits me differently than most. The idea of throwing yourself headlong into a situation that seems hopeless, falling into despair, then getting back up and going again means something to me. The game brought tears to my eyes the first time, when a hero hit their stress limit and became Stalwart rather than afflicted, I heard Wayne June deliver the line “Many fall in the face of chaos. But not this one. Not today.” 

Darkest Dungeon isn’t the best game ever made by any metric, but it’s my favorite. 

*I’ve managed to make peace with enjoying Lovecraft’s fiction while being aware of what a racist, xenophobic shit stain he was

**Technically more August Derleth than HP Lovecraft I know.