Darkest Dungeon

Darkest Dungeon is a roguelike role-playing game in which the player manages a roster of heroes and adventurers to explore these dungeons and fight the creatures within. Prior to entering a dungeon, the player can use facilities in the Hamlet, the game's "hub-town" near the mansion to manage a roster of heroes and inventory. The facilities can be used to cure heroes and reduce their stress, recruit new heroes, upgrade character stats, and buy new items. Each hero belongs to one of twenty character classes, and has their own statistics and skills that can be upgraded over time. If a hero dies while exploring a dungeon, that hero is lost for good.

Once the player has completed preparations, they select four of their heroes to go explore a procedurally-generated dungeon. Combat encounters play out in a turn-based manner. A core element of Darkest Dungeon is its Affliction system, which indicates heroes' stress levels or resolves. A number of factors impact Affliction while in a dungeon, such as adventuring without food or light sources, witnessing the death or wounding of a fellow party member in battle, or from blights cast on them by enemies.

At the outset of Darkest Dungeon, the player learns that they have inherited an estate from an Ancestor who, while seeking to fulfill his ambiguous ambitions by excavating the dungeons and catacombs beneath his manor, has unearthed some terrible monstrosity and released a number of horrific and evil creatures and corruptions onto the world. Now as the owner of the estate and the surrounding lands, the player must recruit a roster of adventurers and mount expeditions to cleanse the estate of its vile inhabitants.

As the player ventures into the manor, the dungeons below it and the surrounding lands, they find their Ancestor's memoirs telling of the terrible deeds he had done in pursuit of knowledge and power, as well as personal desire. Eventually, the player is able to enter the Darkest Dungeon itself, the source of the land's corruption, taking steps to reveal its ultimate form. Within the deepest chamber, the player encounters the disembodied spirit of their Ancestor, who now remains as "an Avatar of the Crawling Chaos". After defeating the Ancestor's apparition, the party battles the Heart of Darkness - which the Ancestor reveals to be the heart of the planet itself.

Director Chris Bourassa and lead designer Tyler Sigman had become friends while working at Backbone Entertainment, and had talked about the idea of building a game together, but their commitments to other studios left them unable to do so. During 2012 and early 2013, they had brainstormed a number of ideas for potential games to develop. In April 2013, they found they had the time to work on this project, and decided it was a "now or never" moment, forming British Columbia-based Red Hook Studios to develop the game. By 2015, their team included six people in addition to three more supporting their sound, music, and narration for the game.

The main gameplay of Darkest Dungeon started out as a tile-based game that had the player control a group of characters as they moved about in a dungeon, eventually transitioning into a combat mode when they had encounters. The two recognized that players would get bored of looking at icons of the characters' heads all the time via the top-down icons, which would not allow players to come to bond with the characters. This led to the concept of presenting characters from the side view in combat, making the player feel they were at the same level as the characters, alleviating some of these issues. This gave Bourassa, the principal artist on the game, an opportunity to show off more of his work.

The game received generally positive reviews on its full release in 2016, holding a score of 84 out of 100 on Metacritic. The Escapist awarded it a score of 4 out of 5, saying "Darkest Dungeon will kill your party, drive you insane, and leave you a gibbering mess at the Sanitarium. Yet it's so compelling and rewarding at the same time, you won't be able to resist diving back in for one more quest." 1 out of 10, saying "Darkest Dungeon is a punishing and awesome game of tactics, management, and pushing your luck to the breaking point."

PC Gamer awarded it 88%, saying "A wonderfully executed, brilliantly stressful reinvention of party-based dungeon-crawling, Darkest Dungeon is great fun, even when it's cruel." GameSpot awarded it a score of 9 out of 10, saying "Darkest Dungeon plays the long game. It builds you up for a grand bout that will test everything you've learned, as well as your ability to plan several in-game weeks out."