I had to sit down when I heard Darkest Dungeon and its sequel were arriving on GeForce NOW Powered by Pentanet. I have over 400 hours across both titles and now, with the ability to take them on the go, there’s no putting them down. Darkest Dungeon is a grim, dark-fantasy dungeon crawler that puts you in charge of hiring adventurers to wade out into the dangerous wilds and find the darkest dungeon, and I love every second of it.
When my friends ask me to explain what Darkest Dungeon is about, I joke to them that its title should be Adventurer Management Simulator 2016. Which is not a wholly inaccurate description. You, the player, are not in the shoes of any of the adventurers, you may control them, shepherd them through the dungeon and see to their welfare back in town, but they are your hirelings.
You are the inheritor, a recipient of a mysterious letter from an even more mysterious ancestor. This letter leads you to take hold of your family’s ancient crumbling manor and use it as your staging post to find the darkest dungeon before his tragic failings spell doom for us all.
Home, for better or worse (surely worse)
This foreboding setup lays all the groundwork needed to open the game up to you. The manor and its estate are your base of operations, with armouries, taverns, and hospitals to tend to your adventurer’s needs as you gear them up for expeditions and set out into the dark. The darkest dungeon is not your only destination, merely the final one, and along the way, your teams of adventurers will explore sunken caves, destroyed chapels, pig-mutant populated prisons and more.
The moment-to-moment gameplay itself takes the form of a highly tactical turn-based RPG, based heavily on the positioning of your party, the enemy you face, and the light level of where you’re fighting (managed by a dwindling supply of torches). The game is difficult, and defeats will come regularly as you learn the game’s ways and adjust to its tempo. Those defeats will come with losses though, as the game utilises a perma-death system, each member of your adventuring company has but one life to give.
The pig prisons are the worst.
The game is wonderfully atmospheric, narrated by the ancestor himself (portrayed by Wayne June) in his woeful baritone rumblings. As the light fades and the orchestra rises, you truly feel as if you’re sending these people to meet a terrible end. So very often, you are; Darkest Dungeon is a punishingly challenging game. You not only need to manage your party’s health, but their stress levels as well, and should that stress rise too high, not only will they begin to go mad (developing afflictions that will have them act erratically and even steal control from you) but can eventually suffer a heart attack and so, instant death.
So yeah, the game is pretty hard, but thankfully, it can be solved. See, Darkest Dungeon is much less RNG based than many other RPGs. It provides you all the information you need to succeed; you just need to apply that information correctly.
Bringing the right equipment before an expedition can make or break your chances of success; going to the pig dungeons? Bring bandages, as their hooks inflict bleed. Bring extra food too, even if you must go light on torches, as you can’t trust anything down there to be safe to eat. What about your party? Bring a flagellant; they thrive on bleed damage, so that’s one less person to heal. Bring a plague doctor who can patch up the rest along with a crusader and graverobber as your primary sources of damage and stress healing. Now suddenly those pigs turn from terrifying mutant hogs into your next BLT.
Prior planning promises portentous prizes.
Darkest Dungeon is a game of harsh lessons; the more you learn, the easier it is to succeed. At first it may seem unfair, rife with random chance punishing you to the nth degree. But as you learn those lessons and get your hard knocks, you’ll turn the tables, punishing the game as it punished you. Bit by bit, you’ll train up your favourite squad, equip them with all the best gear, remove any diseases and maladies, and finally send them off to the darkest dungeon itself.
And godspeed, because nothing can prepare them for that.
Darkest Dungeon is now available to play on GeForce NOW Powered by Pentanet. The perfect game for the on-the-go with its easy controls and turn-based systems. It’s easy to manage an expedition or two on your lunch break and then take advantage of long session times to grind out the real deep dives after work. Do you have what it takes to end this terrible affliction, or will you and all your adventurers just be more food for the gaping maw that is the darkest dungeon...
This spotlight was written by Pentanet team member “Motley” and does not represent the opinions of NVIDIA or Pentanet.
