Darkest Dungeon – Stressful but Satisfying

Play Log #2

 

               You receive a letter from your ancestor. Something terrible has arisen in your family’s old homestead, and you must make haste in order to restore an iota of your legacy’s honor. To conquer the Darkest Dungeon, sacrifices must be made, terrible creatures must be felled, and the most harrowing of terrors must be faced.

Darkest Dungeon is a roguelite role-playing game developed by Red Hook Studios. In a similar vein to the punishing souls-like games of today, Darkest Dungeon prides itself on its brutal difficulty that borders on inaccessibility. There’s not much I could say to explain this aspect of the game’s character that the game doesn’t outright tell you within moments of you first opening it.

As the ‘warning’ states, Darkest Dungeon features permanent consequences for each one of the player’s choices, including death for the heroes they control. It isn’t like the heroes aren’t expendable, though, as throughout the game the player can build a varied roster of heroes of a bunch of different classes, from RPG classics like the paladin-esque Crusader to more off-the-wall options like the Jester or the Plague Doctor. It is from this roster that the player forms their adventuring party and seeks to explore and conquer one of an endless number of procedurally generated dungeons. These dungeons can be very detrimental to the playing experience. The way the corridors and rooms are laid out are artificial and repetitive, and barring a few pre-built dungeons, they’re all randomly generated, which can lead to annoying exploration sessions with far too much backtracking to keep the player engaged.

However, around every corner and hidden in every room lies the threat of dangerous foes. Darkest Dungeon employs a turn-based battle system where every participant moves after one another based on speed statistic values. What the game has that many other RPGs don’t is the ranking system. The player’s party, four heroes at most, is organized in a line from front to back. Different abilities can only be used in certain positions in the rank, and each different class has eight different abilities they can build their four-ability pool from. What this means is the player can use the different classes in different ways, either to increase party synergy or fit their personal playstyle. For instance, the Vestal class, most akin to a Cleric with their signature healing abilities, can either stay in the back two rank positions to provide support for their team or fight from the front two rank positions and wail on enemies with their holy mace.

To further increase the gameplay’s complexity, some classes and enemies can inflict certain status conditions. While the game has traditional damage-over-time conditions like Bleed or Blight and certain stat Buffs and Debuffs, Darkest Dungeon also features a completely unique status condition/statistic as well – Stress. Every hero has a Stress stat, which can both rise and fall depending on certain events. Hero critical hits, enemy deaths, and certain abilities like those of the Jester or the Houndmaster can all lower a hero’s stress stat. Enemy critical hits, the environment’s light level decreasing, and certain enemy abilities like the Cultist Acolyte’s Stressful Incantation can all increase a hero’s stress level. When a hero’s Stress stat reaches 100, their resolve is tested. Most likely, the hero will receive an Affliction, a psychological weakness that affects their actions. Different Afflictions can cause a hero to skip their turn, hurt themselves, or refuse to follow the player’s instructions. Afflictions are disastrous for the player, as it can completely remove their agency in the game space. Although, there is a small chance that a hero will overcome the test of will and receive a Virtue. Those with Virtues can reduce the heroes’ Stress stats, heal themselves, or provide buffs to themselves and their teammates.

When a hero’s health reaches zero, they stand at Death’s Door. While at Death’s Door, every time they take damage has a chance to permanently kill them, or else add on massive stress. If a hero’s Stress stat reaches 200, they have a Heart Attack and instantly enter Death’s Door. If a hero already at Death’s Door has a heart attack, they die immediately. When combined with the game’s intense soundtrack and enrichingly gruesome sound design, all the negative effects piling on the player’s characters can make the game feel downright oppressive, especially when you add on the game’s random elements. Every damage roll has an incredibly wide range, and every attack has a chance to miss. All battles can descend into catastrophes, and it can feel like the game itself is coming to life and plotting against you. For instance, in the first turn of a 4-on-4 battle, two of my attacks could miss, and all 4 of the enemies could pile on my weakest hero and bring them to Death’s Door. Darkest Dungeon’s gameplay is designed to stress both the heroes and the player, as every moment your characters can come closer to dying, and more importantly, stunting your progress towards conquering the game’s challenges.

In a similar vein, all the player’s actions further their progress towards conquering the titular Darkest Dungeon. Heroes go on missions to gain experience and level up, a necessary step to gaining better Armor and Weaponry, as well as gaining access to the game’s harder dungeons. Relics, different types of collectibles, are gathered in the dungeons and used to upgrade the buildings in the Hamlet where the player can restore and upgrade their heroes by spending gold won from battles. By contrasting the game’s oppressive despairing tactics with this constant inevitable goal for the player, the entire game feels like a battle against fate itself. In a vacuum, Darkest Dungeon’s gameplay is not very fun. It feels unfair. It can be incredibly frustrating to the player when they do everything they can only to have the game decide that they lose. However, within the continuously intense conflict against the Darkest Dungeon, every victory, no matter how small, feels monumentally satisfying.

Apart from its signature tone, Darkest Dungeon features clever orienteering tricks as well. Observe the game’s screenshots and notice how everything moves left to right. This pattern continues even in the game’s hub – the Hamlet. When the player decides to Embark, the ‘camera’ moves to the right to the dungeon select. This simple placement choice effortlessly reinforces the game’s feeling of continuous progress. The art cements the game’s tone as deliciously gothic. The faded colors and the heroes’ shaded faces are drab yet intricately designed and surprisingly expressive. I also really enjoy how abilities look during combat. All the involved parties are placed at center stage and strike dynamic action poses, while everything else fades into a blurry backdrop. It’s an artistic choice that really accentuates the movement and engages the player in the moment of action.

Darkest Dungeon is punishing, difficult, and oftentimes frustrating to play. At the same time, it can feel rewarding or satisfying to tackle near-impossible odds and come out victorious. The game leans hard into this pendulum-like feeling, and it is as addicting as it is inconsistent. I’ve not seen many games that commit to a distinctive tone this hard and manage to pull it off so effectively. While at times playing Darkest Dungeon can feel like being bullied, the heart-pounding back-and-forth of hope and despair keeps bringing me back.

 

 

Wingspan ~ Fully-Fledged Fun

Play Log #1

 

Wingspan is a card-focused engine-building board game designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and produced by Stonemaier Games. While an observer might dismiss the game as a tired exercise in complexity, that certainly having been one of my worries, it’s anything but for the birds! Wingspan is a beautifully constructed experience with plenty of care put into every aspect, from its almost flawless game balance to its richly detailed art style.

Fitting the bill, Wingspan is a game all about admiring and collecting birds, and to that end, all its mechanics and end goals are appropriately avian-themed. At the end of the game, players are given points based on a flock of different factors (the player with the most points being crowned the winner). Throughout the game, players can place birds down in the three different habitats, each bird having its own number of points rewarded to its keeper at the game’s end. Points are also given for each egg laid on a player’s bird, and eggs can be laid in the Grassland habitat. Additionally, points can be obtained via bonus cards with hidden objectives that a player holds in their hand, and/or, depending on the game mode you’re playing, via special checkpoint goals that fall in between certain turns. Nothing in the game is possible without first playing a bird, however, and certain steps must be taken first. In the Wetland habitat, players can draw one of three face-up bird cards or take a random, hidden bird card from the deck. In the Forest habitat, players can obtain food from the birdfeeder, an essential resource for playing a bird, as each one has a unique food cost. In the Grassland habitat, as previously stated, eggs can be lain on birds already played, which are necessary to play a certain number of birds in any one habitat. Also, the habitats’ abilities become more powerful the more birds are laid in them, leading to an escalating game state the longer the game is played. Each bird’s habitat and food cost are displayed at the bird card’s top-right, and the egg cost for a certain habitat’s spot is displayed prominently in a similar manner.

One more particular item of note: some birds, once played in a habitat, have a special ability that triggers when the habitat is used (gaining food, laying eggs, drawing birds), and it’s these abilities that allow for the game’s deeper, engine-building mechanics to endear themselves to more hardcore players. The game’s mechanics combine into a well-oiled machine that is complex enough to entertain the cleverest enthusiast and simple enough to welcome any player who might be new to such a game.  Even a birdbrain could fowl-low along! The cherry on top of the well-designed sundae is the game’s element of randomness. The first action each player takes is choosing a few birds and some bits of food (a total of five between them) and selecting one of two bonus cards. It makes every Wingspan session unique and distinct like other card-based games might not allow for. As I’ve only played the digital version of the game, I was gifted with a tutorial upon first opening it, which helped ease me into its mechanical caw-cophany.

On the note of digital vs physical release, the game’s UI makes for an interesting discrepancy! In the digital release, the three habitats are delegated to smaller areas stationed just a click away from each other, but the physical version is forced to use a larger, slightly clunkier mat for each player. Regardless, both versions of the game’s interfaces are intuitive and explanatory by themselves, further assisting new players. While the digital release also cleanly sorts all your laid eggs, stored food, and action cubes (a marker for the number of turns left to play), the physical version doesn’t have that luxury, instead using small tokens and a limited number of dice that I imagine could be easy to misplace. Looking into online reviews and reading through the game’s page on Stonemaier Games’ website assures me that the physical game’s pieces are of top quality, though stressfully numerous. Moving through the game is, in a sense, easier in the physical version as one doesn’t have to click through the different habitats. Nevertheless, in both versions, it’s very easy to envision each of your possible next moves, making the game’s flow as smooth as a duck’s down. A byproduct of the game’s structure, where all players make their moves sequentially in turns, is that those at the front of the queue may have less time to think than those who perform later, or a player might fail to think through their next move, which can lead to a small halt in flow at times.

The game’s art style, combined with the thrush of birds, is what drew me to it in the first place. If I had to describe the art style on the fly, I would compare it to the paintings of puppies in baskets that you’d see in a dentist’s waiting lobby. To define it in a more modern way, I might classify the game’s sweeping backgrounds as “cottagecore”, but such descriptors are neither here nor there. Every graphical morsel in this game is gorgeously painted, such that I caught myself staring at the bird drawings for minutes on end my first time playing. Combined with the delicious sound design, featuring every bird’s call and atmospheric nature sounds, the homely art almost hypnotizes you into forgetting how nearly frighteningly complex the game’s mechanics can be. All said, the mechanical and artful aspects of Wingspan combine to create an atmosphere that is both cozy in its nostalgic familiarity and exhilarating in its mechanical depth.

(I am owl-fully sorry about all the bird puns.)