It’s ever-present, constantly building, battering your expanding roster of adventurers with a plethora of debilitating mental maladies. What effect does the endless terror and violence involved in a life of adventuring have on the men, women and abominations who take up the challenge?Ī roguelike dungeon crawler from indie developer Red Hook Studios, Darkest Dungeon reinvigorates the genre by forcing players to deal not just with the regular busywork of commanding bands of heroes, maintaining supplies, health, upgrading armour, weapons, and skills, but also the effects all of this violence has on the minds of the characters you plunge into the darkness below your ancestral home.ĭarkest Dungeon’s central hook is stress. And if it is to cost these people their lives, their sanity? So be it. How many men have I lost? How many have I watched lose their minds entirely? But I must press on, there is a terrible wrong to be put right, I must restore honour to my family name.

For many months now I have sent them into the unholy dirt beneath my ancestral home, an endless tide of filth and evil marching ceaselessly towards them from the deepest, darkest reaches of hell.

Darkest dungeon ancestral review