Darkest Dungeon Review

Red Hook's insight is that the interesting resource is not health, it is nerve. Every guttering torch, every critical hit, every corpse left in a corridor raises a character's stress, and at one hundred they roll an affliction: paranoid, masochistic, abusive, refusing heals and screaming at the party until somebody else cracks too. Occasionally they roll a virtue instead and carry the run single handed.

That one meter turns a party of numbers into four people you actively resent, and the hamlet's stagecoach keeps delivering replacements so the game can afford to lose them. Wayne June's narration is the other half of the trick, a dry aristocratic voice that congratulates you on a corpse with such relish the whole thing tips from grim into funny.

Chris Bourassa's heavy ink and high contrast art is the best looking crowdfunded game of its decade and has been imitated ever since. The complaint is arithmetic. Position based attacks, accuracy rolls and trinket drops mean a run can be lost to dice rather than decisions, and the endgame's demand for a deep roster turns a tense crawl into payroll management. Excellent for forty hours, a spreadsheet for the last thirty.