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When a suicidally depressed leper is your party's healer, you've got problems.Darkest Dungeon is the antidote to all those cheery heroics in other games. You think it'd be fun, actually going into the bowels of the Earth and fighting undead hordes, slobbering maggots, giant spiders, and your own mortal fears. Not so much. It's a game of fighting evil, yes, but also depression, mental collapse, and fear of both the dark and the fear of the unknown, all wrapped into a simple side-scrolling RPG made no less morbid by smacking somewhat of more pleasant games like Bookworm Adventures and Mario and Luigi. It's a place where the traditional trinity of tank, healer and DPS really needs a fourth member, therapist, for those moments when the healer suddenly decides that pain is fascinating, or becomes masochistic enough to demand the monsters give them their share of agony.
All of this isn't simply a little aesthetic flavour, but a big reason that Darkest Dungeon works so well. It's morbid, but not without a sense of dark glee, balancing a world that makes Diablo's look like Center Parcs with a presentation that makes it fun to explore. The snarling character portraits. The deliciously hammy narration. The increasingly insane hollerings from your team as they go from variably heroic hopefuls to broken husks. In a game like XCOM, it's common sense that everyone should stay alive, that they might get stronger and better.That's largely true here too, in that time and experience can hone even the simplest jester from a feral opportunist with a talent for sticking in the knife to a slobbering killing machine.
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