As with the hugely popular Souls series, you learn and progress through dying, so it pays not to get too attached to any of your team members. The backstory is similar to many other RPGs, but the key difference here is how disposable your characters are. It is your duty to recruit and guide a party of unlikely heroes to explore around and beneath the mansion to uncover and eradicate the horrors that were released. It plays like a well-designed board game, with all the calculations and random numbers happening in the background.Īs the game begins, you are approaching the house of your deceased uncle, aware that he died in mysterious circumstances having dabbled in occult experiments. It features a similar mechanic of madness manifesting itself directly, albeit with the effects remaining more clearly within the game world.

The Cthulhu mythos has been well represented in gaming, but Darkest Dungeon is surely the finest use of such influences since Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube.

The game itself has a wonderful Lovecraftian aesthetic, complete with tentacled monsters and the constant threat of indescribable horrors.

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