Your health, it seems, is always going down.īut there's another danger to their health too: stress, and this is a key thing in the game - and it's one of the only role-playing games I know that plays around with it. They can take damage in battle, they can take damage from traps, and they can take damage from not having any food to eat, which is more common than it sounds. They can simply take too much damage and die - as in, permanently die. And on those missions, a number of things can happen to them. Think on it: in Darkest Dungeon, you send a team of four characters - I'm loath to call them heroes, actually, for most are anything but - into dungeons underneath and around the hamlet you're rebuilding. An extroardinary name for an extroardinary performance (and he's reprising his role in Darkest Dungeon 2). Also, I never fail to be impressed with the voice of the narrator while playing, who, I now know - I just looked it up - is a man called Wayne June. Why else would it pit so much against you? This game is timeless, I tell you, timeless. In many ways, Darkest Dungeon doesn't want you to win.

Whereas in other games, you're invisibly looked after until the game feels you're comfortable with it and attached to it, here, you're eternally, mercilessly, dragged down. Cruelty towards the heroes you send into the depths and cruelty towards you, the player directing them. The entire premise of the game is cruelty. But Darkest Dungeon doesn't care Darkest Dungeon delights in it. Cross it, and you risk turning an audience away.

Cross that line and a game becomes unfair. What stands Darkest Dungeon apart is an invisible line, drawn in the ground somewhere, that determines how far developers go - how far they're prepared to go - to challenge their audiences. But it's not that which really stands the game apart. That horror-movie voice over still shakes my bones, that paper-drawn art still oozes style. Blown up on my telly, this could easily be something new.

It's astonishing how, eight years on and now freshly added to Game Pass, Darkest Dungeon still manages to feel unlike anything else.

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