Darkest Dungeon is a rogue-like RPG about your attempts at bashing your head in (or rather, your employee's heads in) against the onslaught of a nascent and indescribable horror bent on destroying the world - and it might be your fault..? This game is a Lovecraftian horror through and through.

The game begins with you receiving a letter from a distant uncle of yours who tells you of a fine manor that is in your family's estate that has fallen to ruin and monstrosity - and if you can undo your ancestors mistake you might be able to make a pretty penny at the same time. As you arrive with just a few guards you are ambushed and must make your way to the relative safety of town. Once there, you begin planning your assaults on the nearby dens of monsters, human or otherwise. You yourself do not do battle, but rather you hire heroes every week to do the fighting for you - you just organize the raids and choose the targets. While functionally you do control what all the heroes are up to, this provides a nice narrative weight to the fact that you are often deliberately using up newcomers and the broken folks who come to you for help in your quest to make progress in The Darkest Dungeon. Because yeah that title? It's the final dungeon of the game and it is visible and attainable from literally the first week in the game! It is suicide to go there without being prepared of course...

So gameplay-wise, this is a fucking solid turn based RPG. You control 4 different heroes (of about a dozen+ classes) in each 'raid' and you walk through the dungeons finding loot and occassionally finding bosses. Each mission has a set parameter of what to accomplish while delving into the dungeon: destroy 3 shrines, kill the boss, explore all the rooms, etc. There are also multiple dungeons to go through, each with different musical and artistic themes, enemies and particular challenges. Also as your characters level up the strength of the missions also raises to provide new challenges, and this keeps things feelings pretty fresh for 30~odd hours it took me to beat it, up until the end anyway. Speaking of art design: hell's bells this game looks and sounds amazing. There's a very gritty cartoony style to everything that makes it look dirty and beaten down, like this is all centuries old and you're just a tiny little gnat in the scheme of things. The enemies are grotesque and what we learn of them is often a horrifying look into your ancestors actions, it seems in fact that he is responsible for most of the heinous things you have to defeat! The 'twist' at the end of him being the herald of the Heart of Darkness is pretty well telegraphed hahaha... The final dungeon as well is just a revelation. It begins with creepy geometric halls and descends into the literal bowels of a growing monstrosity, a city of flesh of bone and madness. I'm fucking stealing the shit out of it for my Pathfinder campaign!! Thanks DD.

So there are a lot of mechanics that prevent you from progressing too quickly - characters develop positive and negative quirks that are EXPENSIVE and time consuming to fix, stress is another hit point bar functionally that takes time and money to fix, they can contract diseases, etc. Unfortunately I didn't find this very fun so I modded the HECK out of this game and that might be a major part of why I loved it so much. I essentially ripped all of these annoying parts out of the game or I just made them much easier to get around, so I was able to keep a solid stable of about 10 characters essentially the whole game and not have to worry about finding replacements, which is kinda going against the spirit of the game? These characters are MEANT to be disposable to you, and in fact the story calls you out on doing just that in the ending (the Darkest Dungeon and the ending are fucking amazing by the way) which rang a touch hollow to me because of how I manipulated the game design. However, I DEFINITELY never would have seen the ending without such changes, so I guess it's a good thing I did? This leads to a small conundrum - do I rate the game for what I played it as, or what it was intended to be? I can respect what it was trying to do but I just can't enjoy it.

Darkest Dungeon is a game about beating you down, but also about rallying back from defeat to try and snatch away some small victory. It's dreary and somber in tone and art, but thrilling and exciting in its rewards as you march along its halls. It is perfectly Lovecraftian - you can fight these horrors but they are never beaten... only sleeping, until the time is right again.