The Games We Played: The Darkest Dungeon
by Shonté (@JohnnyxH)
For the end of the year, we take a look at the Games We Played, and the effects they had on us. Today we bring in poet, writer and friend
of the site Shonté
Daniels, whose other work can be found at http://shonte-daniels.com/.
Games are no stranger to the disposable body. Difficulty-driven titles like Super Meat Boy or Darkest Dungeon rely partially on the notion that characters will always die as part of their appeal. Darkest Dungeon plays with this, though, by giving characters agency and emotion. Adventurers feel less like dominos planted to fall, and more like living beings whose physical and mental wellness determine the success of the game.
But maintaining a healthy party is what makes Darkest Dungeon enjoyably difficult. A character’s resolve slowly begins to wane as they explore and battle throughout different areas in the game. Anything from low lighting to demonic traps could cause a character to wizen under the dungeon’s hardship. When a hero becomes too stressed, they are either rewarded with a positive trait, or plagued with a new affliction, both of which can cause characters to act without player guidance. Characters, if stricken with paranoia for example, could refuse to be healed or refuse to retreat, causing the entire team to stay in a torturous fight.
The way each trait and quirk enhances a character’s identity puts the disposable body idea on its head. Losing an ally feels like a punch in the stomach, and a giant step backward in ever beating the game. And like many people, I adored that aspect of the game, until eventually I had played too much, and the excitement dissipated. Eventually, I just wanted to beat the damn game.
Every roguelike I play always comes to a point where the story is in the way. I start to hear the same lines, or read the same text, until it’s static. When I dedicated a weekend to beating Darkest Dungeon, I started to only see static. I spent hours grinding until I had most of my group at the highest level. I had so much money and items that my abundance became cumbersome. My team, like my gold, was disposable. Everything provided to me turned purely into materials for uncovering the secret in the final area, appropriately named the Darkest Dungeon.
When I did finally enter the final stage, the atmosphere was suddenly soothing. The dark reds and black background is overtaken by a galaxy of purple spots (I hesitate to say they were stars, because that sounds too romantic for a game like Darkest Dungeon). The ancestor, who narrates the game, is a ghost leading me a corridor, as he relays his tale about his doomed estate. The ancestor’s quest for cosmic truth lead him to the anarchic monsters that dwell in his manor. His search turned him into an “avatar of the crawling chaos,” and the final monster to defeat in the game.
In his musings of the dungeon and his fate, the ancestor says something that catches me off guard, something I had never realized: “In your petty pursuit of family redemption,” he says, “you consume those who rally to your cause.”
I fell right into Darkest Dungeon’s trap; the game led me straight into own selfishness. I had felt no connection or relation to the ancestor, and yet hidden in my own desire for the end was a shared bond for unearthing the unknown, no matter how many bodies it took. It scolded me for being so careless with my allies, those arrived at my inherited estate via carriage down an old road.
It took me about 162 hours, or 368 in-game weeks (approximately 7 years) to beat the game. At times, demonic faces appear over a hero’s image. A quick mouse swipe over the image makes it return to normal, almost in a cartoonish sense, as if rubbing your eyes will suddenly make it go away.
I love games that break their structure. Darkest Dungeon, in its simplest form, is a roguelike. It has permanent death, procedurally generated rooms, random encounters, turn-based gameplay, and so on. But it differs from the typical roguelike in that it emphasizes how hard the disposable body falls. In this case, these heroes who felt compelled to join my team died because of my selfishness, and my desire to “claim my birthright,” as the ancestor says in the game’s opening scene. Perhaps this is just a Lovecraftian trope I’m not familiar with, but to me it feels like a great example of a game exploring roguelike traditions to create a new way of looking at the ways games allow for unlimited lives without question.
Darkest Dungeon rewards your grinding through misery with simply more misery, and then scolds you for going so far. It’s a game I consider replaying often, because it’s fun, and then not playing, because I know how it will end.