[Game: Darkest Dungeon, Red Hook Studios, 2016]
Inordinate Exsanguination:

On the Design Decisions Bloating Red Hook’s Otherwise Terrific Strategy Game Darkest Dungeon

 

Introduction:

Despite all of its thematic darkness and mechanical brutality, Red Hook’s Darkest Dungeon can be quite a joy to play. It has a balanced mix of depth and breadth in its D&D-style strategy mechanics, making for a satisfying experience when formulating and executing plans. Its level of aesthetic polish stands out as exceptional, putting it alongside the work of other artistically gifted small development teams like Supergiant Games, Nitrome, and Team Cherry. And its level of difficulty makes for an agreeable challenge that requires players to develop non-trivial strategies for longterm success, as all strategy titles should.

I most assuredly have an overall positive impression of the game, and if this were a simple review of it, I would only feel that I was slightly misrepresenting my opinion if I closed by giving it an unabashed recommendation. It’s a very competent mix among an RPG, a roguelike, and a strategy game, all set against a backdrop of Lovecraftian horror—what’s not to like?

But the game’s literal tens of thousands of positive Steam reviews more than adequately cover its merits, so that’s not what I want to talk about here. Instead, this article will be focused on the abundance of small design decisions, surfacing roughly between the 20-hour mark and 60-hour mark of a playthrough, which serve to weaken the game’s demonstrable strength.

I should clarify right at the outset that none of the things I will be discussing in this article are elements covered by the title’s gameplay options (which include a number of toggles for enabling or disabling some of the game’s more contentious mechanics). Rather, the decisions I will highlight include non-optional mechanics that unduly slow its pace, that mislead the player to push them toward sub-par strategies, and that add challenge in ways that feel sloppy or even unintentional. Alone, any one of them would probably be nitpicking for me to discuss; but together, they sum into a disrespect that the game demonstrates toward the player’s time.

Darkest Dungeon screenshot with stunned giant - Red Hook Studios, design, mechanics, analysis, critique

The Implementation of Afflictions in Darkest Dungeon:

Even transitioning into my list of grievances requires beginning with some further praise, as the first topic I’ll be discussing relates to a relatively unpopular mechanic in Darkest Dungeon that I actually think is quite brilliant: its stress mechanic.

There is a huge amount of overlap between the content of Darkest Dungeon and the content of tabletop RPGs in the vein of Dungeons & Dragons, with both having: turn-based combat that plays out in initiative order; distinctions between short rests and long rests; damage and dodge mechanics reliant on chance; a narrator speaking over the action; character levels that increment slowly and cap off at a low number; abilities with limited combat uses; and highly numerical approaches to hunger, stealth, and torchlight. One of the mechanics that DD seemingly grabs to a large degree from D&D is how character death is handled.

When a character loses all of their hit points in Darkest Dungeon, they are not immediately killed. Instead, they continue to stand and fight with reduced stats while at death’s door, where any singular act of further damage is likely to kill them. But if they can be brought above zero hit points before they actually die, they are saved. With enough speed or multiple healers, characters could have practically infinite life due to the generosity of this mechanic—which allows a character to survive any attack regardless of damage, provided they had at least one HP beforehand. One of the ways that this state of affairs is balanced is through the stress system.

Stress is an attribute which characters accumulate while dungeon crawling, and it works sort of like an opposite health bar, as it operates by golf rules (where a lower number is better); when a character reaches 200 stress, they receive a lethal heart attack. This removes all hit points from a character, or counts as a potential deathblow if they are already at death’s door. As there are exceedingly few reliable player-controlled methods to reduce stress while in combat, one can not dance with death indefinitely without a deathblow by heart attack reaching a high likelihood.

But it’s not what happens at 200 stress that I want to address with criticism; I like what happens at 200 stress. Stress management adds a worthwhile layer of strategic complexity to the game, gives an additional avenue of attack to enemy designs, and (as I’ve mentioned) contributes to balancing out the game’s seemingly permissive character death mechanic. Instead, what I want to talk about is what happens at 100 stress.

Darkest Dungeon screenshot with 'fearful' affliction applied to crusader - Red Hook Studios, design, mechanics, analysis, critique

When any player-character reaches 100 stress, they have a base chance of 75% to become afflicted. An affliction is an almost absurdly severe penalty: it reduces max health by 10%; reduces all status effect resistances by 15%; reduces damage output, accuracy, speed, and/or dodging by anywhere from 5% to 25%; and gives the character a chance to do a number of negative things in and out of combat, including incrementing the stress of all player-characters, passing their turns, harming themselves, harming and/or applying status effects to other player-characters, interacting with curio objects and dungeon traps, selecting their combat action at random, and rejecting heals and buffs. And the things in the preceding list that can happen by chance are not rare; for most afflictions, there is a chance between 30% and 40% of one of those negative actions against the player’s wishes occurring any time they are potentially applicable.

Sounds pretty horrible, right? This mechanic is intended by Red Hook to simulate the effects of exceptional (and even supernatural) trauma on a character. In small part due to the severity of the penalties, and in large part due to the way that afflicted characters can rapidly increment the stress levels of all of their companions, even a single afflicted character can potentially doom a high-level mission. It is entirely possible to experience a stress cascade where one afflicted character causes the others to become afflicted, which eventually becomes one heart attack victim causing additional heart attacks. Even still, though, we remain in design territory that could be included in the game without causing any undue problems for a rational and strategic player. But now consider the tutorial tip that is used to introduce the mechanic:

When heroes can’t take the stress any more, they become afflicted. This manifests in different behaviors and stat changes. Afflictions last until you send them to treatment in town, unless you can reduce their stress to zero during the quest.

Well, that complicates things! We can set aside treatment in town, as whether an affliction has caused a mission to fail has already been decided before returning to the hamlet. But it turns out “you can reduce their stress to zero during the quest,” and this can cure an affliction. Moreover, as I said above, getting afflicted is not a certainty; its base chance is 75%. 25% of the time, the character becomes virtuous instead, which is a state that is roughly as good for the player as an affliction is bad.

There, so afflictions are not such harsh penalties after all! . . . except that the notion you can cure an affliction is tantamount to a lie, and virtues have the unintended side effect of encouraging players to play worse.

Darkest Dungeon screenshot with afflicted character rejecting camping skill - Red Hook Studios, design, mechanics, analysis, critique

Yeah, it turns out that both the few unlimited combat skills that reduce stress and the many limited camping skills that reduce stress count as buffs that are subject to that 30-40% chance of being rejected under most afflictions. As a result, in a full playthrough of the entire game and all DLC content spanning over 80 hours, I have never once actually managed to cure an affliction while inside a dungeon. The game pretends that this is an aspect where skillful play or strategy can allow recovery from a streak of bad luck, but it actually isn’t.

Virtues are exceptionally powerful, and they should definitely not be made more common unless they are first reduced in excellence. They immediately reduce stress by 55, provide temporary immunity to afflictions and heart attacks, add 25% to all status effect resistances, grant a couple stat bonuses, and regularly buff or de-stress allies. But how exceptional they are leads to a weird phenomenon, where new players are incentivized to take the risk of letting their characters hit 100 stress (particularly because new players will not be aware of just how much more likely an affliction is than a virtue, and will also be under the mistaken impression that afflictions can be cured during an adventure under normal circumstances).

It’s a weird situation; it feels as if the afflictions and virtues were designed by one member of the development team, the camping and tutorial tips were designed by a different member of the development team, and those two people never spoke to each other. By these elements, players are initially misled. In actuality, if it can be avoided, it is essentially never worth the risk of letting a character reach 100 stress unless that character is in the flagellant class or has significant buffs to virtue chance; one should always try to camp just before then, rather than just after then.

It’s not a problem that the affliction system is in the game; it’s not a problem that it has harsh penalties; it’s not a problem that it takes control away from the player. All of that is core to the uniqueness and themes of Darkest Dungeon. It’s just a problem that the way the game gets the player to experience the system is through a set of design choices that feel unintentionally misleading. This issue could be easily fixed by either simplifying the effects of the system, surfacing more of the relevant information to the player, or placing much heavier early emphasis on the need to avoid 100 stress.

Darkest Dungeon screenshot with critical hit on Brigand Vvulf - Red Hook Studios, design, mechanics, analysis, critique

Ultimately, this is not an innocuous point that can be forgiven by referring to the game’s thematic aims. Due to the rather lax difficulty of apprentice and veteran missions, a player is unlikely to detect this (possibly accidental) deception until it has caused losses in several Long-duration and/or Champion-level missions, thereby including the deaths of several high-level heroes. This is an expenditure of multiple hours of the player’s time being thrown in the trash, just to undo the bad strategic advice given and implied by the game itself. Large chunks of the player’s time are being wasted simply because of the precise way that the affliction system is implemented: the incredible harshness of its secretive mechanical effects, the fiction that it can be overcome at regular intervals, and the false hope of glowing virtues.

The Awkwardly Slow Town Mechanics in Darkest Dungeon:

We’re going to be stepping outside of the dungeons for this next topic, as it concerns the character management that takes place in the hamlet between missions. This is another area of Darkest Dungeon where there are elements of design that feel like they don’t fit together properly. As with the prior section, this leads to an unnecessary consumption of the player’s time—but the greater issue is how it negatively impacts the moment-to-moment experience of the game. And I do not mean that it simply provides the types of negative psychological experiences targeted by the game’s themes; it’s neither sadness nor tension that is created by what I’m about to discuss, but rather boredom and disinterest.

In the rebuttal section below, one of the aspects of Darkest Dungeon for which I’ll be providing praise is the way that it builds an attachment between the player and their characters, then provides very real threats to the lives of those characters. Some of the first messaging the game gives to the player (in between its intro cinematic and its main menu, showing every time the game is loaded) underscores this aspect of the game by saying as follows:

Heroes will die. And when they die, they stay dead. [. . .] How far will you push your adventurers? How much are you willing to risk in your quest to restore the Hamlet? What will you sacrifice to save the life of your favorite hero?

But what I’ll skip mentioning when I get to that praise is the fact that the game’s ability to foster that kind of attachment has an expiration date, due to the precise configuration of how the town and character roster are handled. The game clearly wants the player to maintain and utilize a balanced roster of characters. Thus, removing stress or negative conditions from them via activities in the safety of the township temporarily removes them from the pool of available characters for dungeon missions—and the game provides a steady flow of new characters that can be conscripted for free at the stagecoach. So far, so good.

Darkest Dungeon screenshot with numerous negative attributes 'rewarding' success - Red Hook Studios, design, mechanics, analysis, critique

But now, let’s dig into these features. After completing a mission, any given hero is liable to leave the dungeon with any or all of the following things: an elevated stress level, an affliction, one or more diseases, one or more negative quirks that merit removal, and one or more positive quirks that merit reinforcement.

In theory, barring a limitation imposed by available gold and ignoring the rare chance of characters getting multiple relevant detriments or boons during an outing, this constitutes at most three in-game weeks that a character would be unavailable before being brought back up to optimal condition for their next outing.

But here are a few complications: the stress relief mechanics have between a 20% and 30% chance to detain characters for one or two additional weeks; even fully upgraded stress relief centers do not guarantee a low enough stress level to bring a character into a mission with confidence, sometimes requiring two weeks of treatment; stress relief activities have a further roughly 20% chance of applying quirks that can themselves merit treatment; stress relief activities can apply weeklong debuffs that make those characters unfit for dungeons; at most three positive quirks can be locked at once, meaning that a preferable new quirk requires two weeks of treatment to replace a previously locked-in asset; and, as noted above, it is possible for heroes to contract multiple diseases or acquire multiple new quirks of either polarity while in a dungeon.

In a worst case scenario, this can mean more than one consecutive in-game month where some potentially important characters are sidelined, translating to over five hours of real time playing Darkest Dungeon without access to those characters. The developers are clearly aware of this state of affairs, as the number of available stress relief activity slots each week caps out way up at 16-17, with the maximum upgraded roster allowing room for a whopping 28-31 heroes (these ranges depend on difficulty settings and DLC installations).

When the campaign was early on, the roster was small, the dungeons were short, the diseases were rare, and the mission payouts were low enough to force decisionmaking in the hamlet—every death felt like a dramatic punch in the gut. That was amazing! The game had effectively instilled an emotional experience in the player. I was personally naming every character, training them from zero to hero, and feeling every threat to their fictional wellbeing with every ounce of my nonfictional empathy.

Darkest Dungeon screenshot with hamlet and several unavailable heroes - Red Hook Studios, design, mechanics, analysis, critique

But further along, as the roster size, reward payouts, and mission length grew, things changed. Longer missions mean characters exiting with more stress, more quirks, and more diseases. Higher payouts mean decisionmaking can be skipped, as it is possible to just build everyone into optimal heroes over time through slow effort. And a larger roster means individual characters are diminished in importance.

A player comes to care about a character by playing as or with that character, not by shuffling them between hamlet buildings in between missions. And character deaths are a lot less impactful when there are at least 24 backups sitting around back in town. You end up with two pools of characters: a group of powerful characters that you used to care about, who spend the vast majority of their time sitting in the hamlet, slowly gearing up to be used once every four or five hours; and a group of weaker characters that you never cared about, who you send on farming missions to accumulate resources for buffing the important characters.

The heroes you want to use are usually left behind, and the heroes you don’t want to use are usually brought along. In the end, you no longer really care about either group, and the immensity of the roster combines with the increasing level of incoming recruits to make the once-indispensible characters feel disposable. I stopped bothering to name characters about halfway through the campaign.

Compare this to the design of similarly roster-based strategy title XCOM: Enemy Unknown, where individual characters are just about never locked away for more than two consecutive missions. It still remains necessary to maintain a balanced roster of characters, yet—even though the individual characters in that game are more fragile, with lower health pools and a lower chance of surviving a loss of all HP—I continued caring about, fearing for, and personally naming characters throughout the entirety of the campaign.

If the goal of Darkest Dungeon‘s design is, as its developers have repeatedly alleged, to showcase the psychological toll that classical adventuring can have on its protagonists—then a smaller roster size, lower availability of gold, and/or inability to remove negative quirks (à la Rogue Legacy) should have featured heavier in the design; such limitations would force the player to bring psychologically damaged heroes back into duty.  If anything, the design featured in Darkest Dungeon unintentionally pushes the opposite theme: not that heroes are forever altered by their questing, but that heroes can overcome just about any trauma, no matter how horrendous, if they’ve just got a month or so to spend relaxing.

Darkest Dungeon screenshot with district building menu - Red Hook Studios, design, mechanics, analysis, critique

Without maintaining limitations to mandate difficult decisionmaking, the entire set of mechanics related to persistent character detriments have as their (hopefully unintentional) primary effects a dulling and slowing of the game. This issue is exacerbated by the restrictions on characters reentering the final mission area, as—even at their most permissive—those restrictions essentially require that 16 characters be fully groomed to combat perfection, with amenable trinkets, equipment, quirks, and abilities. This translates directly into considerable additional farming, well after the game has run out of new content in the four standard dungeon areas.

On the subject of new content, although the majority of this analysis doesn’t really dig into the DLC, the trinket set bonuses and district buildings (both principally from The Crimson Court expansion), are further extensions of the design decisions highlighted in this section. Both trinket sets and districts allow characters to get noticeable upgrades that include essentially no gameplay drawbacks, which makes them extremely enticing. But since they have no directly detrimental in-game attributes, they’re balanced in another way: by requiring a massive amount of repetitive farming to access them. In an echo of general hamlet management, a situation where limitations and challenges could’ve led to additional engagement instead dangles treats behind hours of redundancy in a manner reminiscent of a free-to-play title.

Instead of placing a focus on stress, tension, and trauma, the rhythm of the hamlet management in Darkest Dungeon is an area of design that yet again simply seems like it harbors some contempt for the time and effort of its players. Through this aspect, Darkest Dungeon morphs from its stellar early-game as a compelling strategy title about characters adventuring in incredibly harsh circumstances (aligning well with the stated thematic aims of its developers) . . . to its grindy late-game, where middling characters are churned through dungeons to power up increasingly forgettable hamlet-dwellers (aligning poorly with the game’s thematic aims, and serving to unnecessarily stretch the game’s duration).

The Interaction of Character Death and Positioning in Darkest Dungeon:

This section begins with talking about the corpse mechanic—but not in the way you may be expecting. Famously, during the game’s early access development period, players enraged by the addition of the mechanic (where felled enemies drop temporary corpses rather than vanishing, to maintain positioning) rallied against it so vociferously that an option was added to the game to turn it off.

Personally, I would never think of turning corpses off, as I actually think they are a terrific addition that deepens the strategic gameplay of the title. Without them, it would almost always be reliable to funnel combat activity through a heavily buffed and supported front-line striker; with them, varied approaches and balanced team compositions are required.

Darkest Dungeon screenshot with corpses for enemies and none for player-characters - Red Hook Studios, design, mechanics, analysis, critique

My personal gripe with the mechanic is entirely different: that it does not extend to the player’s party. When a player-character sustains a deathblow, they simply vanish, making the far left position of the character lineup immediately unavailable. But character abilities are intimately tied to where in the lineup they’re standing. Some characters have full suites of mutually advantageous abilities, all of which can only be accomplished from one or two of the four available character positions.

Losing a character is already a huge disadvantage, but this state of affairs essentially means that multiple characters can be completely destroyed as combatants by a single character’s death. Situations where a fight could still be won against the odds with just two or three living characters instead become impossible.

Characters leaving corpses behind would have been one way to address this—but simply allowing characters to continue occupying empty positions would have also been a perfectly acceptable solution. Having neither feels like a horrendous oversight. It is deeply annoying to lose a boss encounter simply because one’s surviving characters refuse to stand a few feet to their left.

If this side effect of character death is an intentional design decision that was fully considered and purposefully implemented by Red Hook, then it is at least as egregious in terms of wasted player time and energy as are the mechanics discussed earlier. There is no logical reason that a long-range fighter would rush into close combat after the death of a comrade. Even if the automatic movement of characters upon the death of their allies were retained, to simulate the notion of the enemies clearing out the front line and closing in on the further heroes, it remains an obnoxious imposition to prevent those characters from spending their actions to then move further away on their next turn.

Interestingly, the player-vs.-player Butcher’s Circus DLC does feature corpses for player-characters, specifically to address this exact issue. But at the time of writing this, that system has not been added to the single-player campaign, meaning it’s still absent from the vast majority of the game’s content. As it stands, situations that feel like they should be entirely and even trivially winnable despite losing a character must often be immediately abandoned instead, simultaneously bringing about two negative consequences: unnecessarily throwing away the 30-60 minutes that the player spent getting there, and discarding a clear opportunity to create engaging, dramatic, tense scenarios for the player.

Preemptive Acknowledgement of a Likely Rebuttal:

It is fair to assume that by this point in the article, if any of them are still reading, the game’s most ardent supporters have long since declared that I am missing the point of the game—that the game is intentionally frustrating as a means of communicating its themes about trauma, stress, and dark revelations of the human psyche.

Darkest Dungeon screenshot with still from intro cinematic - Red Hook Studios, design, mechanics, analysis, critique

Along these lines, I applaud the game for the way it builds up investment and attachment in characters, only to allow them to permanently die in sudden and tragic twists of fate; the way characters can perish from an overwhelmingly massive quantity of stress just as easily as from physical attacks; the way its later missions are truly difficult and cannot be won with lazy or haphazard strategies; and the way its gorgeous artstyle, somber music and sound design, and cynically macabre narration all sum together to establish a dour and oppressive tone. I love all of that!

This article is not a complaint about the game being frustrating or depressing, and I would hope that my long history of praising games that are famous for their high difficulty levels and thematic darkness could make that abundantly clear. As an aside, anyone complaining that Darkest Dungeon is too difficult is probably just stubbornly refusing to reevaluate their strategies upon reaching the highest-level missions, and may even be the type of player who refuses to use any ability that neither deals damage nor heals.

Instead, this article is a complaint about a game whose affliction system plays make-believe that it is itself subject to strategic play when it is actually better avoided; whose many redundant systems and random town events come together to counterproductively reduce the emotional impact of character deaths; and whose character positioning system can turn a single lost character from a large setback into an actually impossible arrangement.

That the game’s structure loses the interest of its players along the way is a statistical fact; only an abysmally low 4% of players have actually beaten the game’s campaign according to Steam. For reference with regards to other indie titles that are at least as difficult across a few genres: that’s about two-thirds of the share that have beaten Super Meat Boy, less than a third of the share that have beaten Opus Magnum, and less than a fourth of the share that have beaten Hollow Knight. This is especially regrettable because some of Darkest Dungeon‘s very best content is tucked away in its final missions, yet has never been reached by over 90% of its players.

Darkest Dungeon bills itself as a game about ‘making the most of a bad situation,’ but that’s inaccurate. In truth, it’s a game about ‘making the most of good situations,’ by capitalizing on synergistic character abilities and strokes of good luck. The game’s actual bad situations are the things that can’t be overcome—such as lengthy stress removal rituals, grindy town and character upgrades, and unevenly implemented or misleading mechanics operating at apparently cross purposes. It’s meaningless to suggest that one must make the best of the game’s bad situations, when the bad situations in question do not make the gameplay more difficult—they just cause the game to take considerably longer to play.

Darkest Dungeon screenshot with late-game enemy encounter - Red Hook Studios, design, mechanics, analysis, critique

Conclusion:

There is really only one thing that unites all of the seemingly strange design decisions detailed in this article, and turns them from clumsiness into something more concerning: that all of them serve to make the game take longer and be slower. It takes time to repeat quests that spiraled out of control because afflictions are falsely presented as curable under normal circumstances. It takes time to repeatedly manage stress, afflictions, diseases, positive quirks, and negative quirks for characters while farming resources with others. It takes time to make additional attempts at bosses that only beat the party because dead characters moved living characters irrevocably out-of-position.

There is some very solid strategic gameplay in Darkest Dungeon, especially when playing a level 5 or 6 mission with a carefully selected team. But to get to it, one must reach through a few layers of sticky time-wasting gunk. I like Darkest Dungeon; it’s a great game . . . but if it weren’t bogged down with the gunk, it could have been a staggeringly exceptional game—an indie strategy masterpiece on the level of Slay the Spire and FTL. If one is being particularly uncharitable (which would probably be a pretty fair way of describing this article), one could say that Darkest Dungeon is a game with 30 hours of truly incredible content that takes at least 60 hours to complete.

The design decisions covered in this article, and some others of this kind, truly do seem to serve the primary purpose of swelling the duration of the game. There is nothing inherently favorable about continually stretching the length of a game to be as long as possible. On the contrary, none of these things became grating issues to me while playing until after I was over 20 hours in. Actually, the eloquent narration of the Ancestor in Darkest Dungeon includes a line that captures this concept very well: “Monstrous size has no intrinsic merit, unless inordinate exsanguination be considered a virtue.” So that’s what this article is, then—a bit of bloodletting.

[Game: Darkest Dungeon, Red Hook Studios, 2016]
Inordinate Exsanguination:

On the Design Decisions Bloating Red Hook’s Otherwise Terrific Strategy Game Darkest Dungeon

was last modified: August 26th, 2020 by Daniel Podgorski
Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed