Darkest Dungeon
Introduction
Darkest Dungeon, published and developed by Red Hook Studios, is a roguelike gothic role-playing horror game where players must navigate through difficult and terrifying dungeons. Originally it was released on January 19th, 2016 for Windows and macOS before being released on PlayStation 4 and Vita as well as Linux systems the next year. Xbox One and the Nintendo Switch got their own ports of the game in 2018. The game also has four DLC packs: “The Crimson Court”, “The Shieldbreaker”, “The Colour of Madness”, and “The Butcher’s Circus”.
In Darkest Dungeon, you have just received a letter from your Ancestor telling you that you must return to your family home and that he has killed himself. The game takes place in two areas: the Hamlet, and the Estate. In the Hamlet, players will set up the party of four they plan to take into the Estate, gather supplies, recover hit points and lower their stress levels. The main chunk of gameplay happens on expeditions into the Estate. Players can only really move left or right as they navigate through the many rooms and long hallways of the dungeon. Walking through the halls you will encounter several dangers in the forms of traps to disarm, enemies to vanquish or a curio; the interactable objects you come across on your expeditions. Upon making it to one of the dungeons' many rooms, players may encounter a boss battle, something special like a hidden room, and may set up camp if they so choose. The main game consists of five dungeons: the Ruins, the Warren, the Weald, the Cove and the Darkest Dungeon. Each has different treasures, enemies, bosses and environments.
To make it through and get rid of the dungeon of all its monsters, a good deal of strategy must be employed. By equipping the right group of heroes with the right equipment and supplies, the players may have a hope of surviving longer than 15 minutes (Ash; Stapleton). Even then, only so much preparation can ready you for the psychological toll of the Darkest Dungeon. These are all things you handle in the Hamlet, the other main area the game takes place in. The Hamlet is home to a few buildings that allow you to recruit new heroes, train those heroes, load them up with armor and equipment, heal the inevitable physical and psychological injuries they endure, and bury them once they die (Ash). Though they start in very disheveled states, as you progress through the game you can upgrade them to unlock more functions and increase their effectiveness.
The affliction system is one of the main things that makes this game so brutal, yet so intriguing at the same time (Stapleton). Each member of the player’s party accumulates stress while adventuring and once it reaches the threshold of 100 stress, that character is tested and as a result is either Afflicted or Virtuous. If a character fails the test and is Afflicted, they receive a temporary status that lowers their effectiveness, but should they succeed in the test they are deemed Virtuous, which gives them and their party members helpful bonuses. The system is the result of Red Hook Studios’ desire to create a game that focused on the mental strain that would result from an adventure like the one in Darkest Dungeon (Sigman and Bourassa).
Autoethnographic Component
I knew I wanted to write this assignment on Darkest Dungeon from the first day of class when we went through the syllabus. As one of my first real introductions to the horror genre this game was a big part of inspiring one of my favourite tropes and themes in horror and fiction in general. It really hit me while I was researching this assignment and remembering about the game just how much of an influence it has had on my creative interests. One thing in particular that I loved was the Journal Pages that can be found on expeditions. They tell the story of a previous failed expedition and really enhance the atmosphere. I also genuinely believe that any character I have thought up for a story or for a DnD campaign can probably be tied back to some character or joke my friends and I made while playing this game together. The game’s visual style is also something that is seared into my mind because of how hauntingly beautiful it is. It sets a wonderfully creepy mood that is only enhanced by the narrator whose voice is perfectly suited to the aesthetic of this game.
Cursed Land
If you were to boil the horror genre down to its most basic element, you’d be left with all things that go against what is natural (Reed 629). Be it from social transgressions or things that are truly physically impossible; some element of the ‘unnatural’ or ‘wrong’ can be found in any piece of horror media. It is therefore unsurprising that Darkest Dungeon has so many instances of its natural order being perverted in some way; as if the land itself is wrong. The idea of a place being corrupted or cursed is not uncommon in the horror genre (Thurgill 33; Simmons 248), but it is the way that Darkest Dungeon treats the landscape it takes place in as if it is a world unto itself that makes it so intriguing.
The landscape on which the estate stands is very strange, and you can see this pretty much the second you start the game. There are countless gravestones lining the sides of the road into town, strange mushrooms standing taller than a person and perhaps most peculiar of all is that the Caretaker’s stagecoach seems to be the only way on or off the Estate. The game is also designed in a specific way as to not lend itself to any specific era, rather it incorporates elements of various historical eras. Isolating the game’s landscape through these strange temporal and geographical characteristics is only one way the game generates the sense of dread that can be felt throughout all parts of the game (Simmons 248; Reed 626). Creating unescapable dread and fear through setting and atmosphere is a staple of the Lovecraftian horror genre from which Darkest Dungeon takes inspiration. The Lovecraftian genre also fits well with the uncanny nature of the types of landscapes like that seen in Darkest Dungeon.
The kinds of rural landscapes like the one in Darkest Dungeon lend themselves to feelings of unease. The game uses this to its advantage by incorporating elements of popular perceptions of rural landscapes. A lot of the time, horror media taking place in rural settings paint these spaces as being homes for profane rituals and spiritual practices and for concepts that are strange to the urban mind (Thurgill 34). Adding an element of Lovecraftian horror to this then works to reinforce the game’s atmosphere and unsettle you further. The cultists and necromancers you fight in Darkest Dungeon evoke the fear of rural spiritualities while the injection of the eldritch doubles down on the strange elements of rural landscapes.
Cursed Creatures
Something that Darkest Dungeon understands greatly is the way that monsters stand as prime examples of what is unnatural (Reed 629; Cruz 161). From the undead, to horrible hybrids to alien abominations, Darkest Dungeon covers its bases when it comes to monsters. While many of the enemies you face in the game represent a corrupted natural order, the enemies in the final area of the game, as well as the game bosses, really show the full extent. The reason these enemies are so important is that they are ones that exist in their current forms directly because of the Heart of Darkness; either being directly spawned from it or being changed by it. And while the concept behind these enemies as well as the lore explaining their creation is inspired by Lovecraft, their designs are distinctly very reminiscent of body horror. These horror subgenres are often connected to each other as the perversion of the human body is a good way to show how alien to our understanding of reality the cosmic entities in these stories are (Simmons 249; Cruz 164). It is their power to corrupt the natural order that makes them so terrifying.
The mixing of cosmic and body horror in Darkest Dungeon serves to represent the fallibility of human beings. The enemies you face that have been directly affected by the Heart of Darkness represent this through their very existence. Some of these enemies are people who have been corrupted by the Heart and turned into monsters while others are just strange collections of flesh. The latter group stands to completely dislodge your understanding of what is natural (Simmons 242; Reed 634). They are strange in form and unknowable in their desires. They harm our grasp on reality by questioning all the things we know (Reed 630). However, it is the former group that is even more horrific.
These hybrid human-eldritch creatures hit our most basic fears. They represent a loss of a person's agency and control (Simmons 244; Cruz 164). By seeing the eldritch corrupting a human body, we can no longer have any hope of being safe from the horrors. Fighting an enemy like an Antibody, there is a clear difference between us and them. Fighting something like a Rapturous Cultist brings all the terror of the unknowable into physical form. Breaking down this boundary shows you how little control you have and that no amount of preparation and practice can ever hope to best what is coming (Reed 630).
Cursed Obsession
As scary as unknowable cosmic entities can be, all those elements are not the most haunting part of Darkest Dungeon. In fact, what is maybe even worse than the idea that there is some malevolent entity beneath us are the depths of the Ancestor’s obsession and how understandable it is.
You don’t learn that much about your Ancestor over the course of Darkest Dungeon, but what you do find out paints a picture of a man driven to do terrible things because of his madness and obsession. When I said that it was understandable, I don’t mean the bad things that he did, but rather how understandable his obsession is. For obsession is a common thing among people (Geller). For the Ancestor, this obsession was with the dark things that existed under his feet. It led to the deterioration of the Hamlet and the rest of the Estate, as well as the creation of the bosses you fight in the game. His actions were destructive not only of all the things around him, but also of himself as the game begins with his suicide. While obsessions in the real-world usually don’t have such dire consequences, they are also often self-destructive (Geller). For some they result in us pushing away the people closest to us, for others it might end up similarly to the Ancestor. No matter what the case is, many of us will become obsessed with something at some point in our lives. This is what makes the Ancestor’s turn to madness so understandable.
It doesn’t just stick to being relatable; however, his obsession has a way of spreading to you. The game has a way of making you follow the same path as the Ancestor; becoming callous and motived only by the pursuit of whatever it is that exists below you (Not Saber). It isn’t just a mission we have to complete but also morbid curiosity. We want to know what it was that drove our Ancestor to suicide because this kind of self-destructive obsession is fascinating to us (Geller). The game does this so effectively that many players won’t even realize their transformation until the final few moments of the game (MAJOR SPOILER) when in the final cutscene you see yourself sitting at the same table you Ancestor did, writing a very familiar letter with the same gun your Ancestor used to end his life sitting next to you on the table.
Gameplay Video
No commentary god dog "Darkest Dungeon Gameplay part 1 - 4K 60FPS no commentary." Youtube, April 19, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=655U5UPgj0U&list=PLK0DptiFa5gFiuPFG5VF8TzFYHmrVPgal
AI Disclosure
No AI was used in the completion of this project.
Sources
Ash. “You Should Try: Darkest Dungeon” Gamesear, May 22, 2016, https://www.gamesear.com/you-should-try/you-should-try-darkest-dungeon-a-brutally-difficult-turn-based-rpg
Cruz, Ronald A. L. “Mutations and Metamorphoses: Body Horror is Biological Horror.” Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 40, no.4, 2012, pp. 160-168, https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/doi/epdf/10.1080/01956051.2012.654521?needAccess=true
Geller, Jacob. “Fear of Depths.” YouTube, 10 April 2020, https://ww.youtube.com/watch?v=7MOKTU9tCbw
Not Saber. “The Game Where You’re The Villain”. YouTube, August 29, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0qn1Rs17Iw&t=1492s
Reed, Charley. “Resident Evil’s Rhetoric: The Communication of Corruption in Survival Horror Games” Games and Culture, vol. 11, no. 6, 2016, https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/doi/10.1177/1555412015575363?icid=int.sj-full-text.similar-articles.1
Sigman, Tyler, and Chris Bourassa. “Game Design Deep Dive: Darkest Dungeon's Affliction System”. Game Developer. May 27, 2015. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/game-design-deep-dive-i-darkest-dungeon-s-i-affliction-system
Simmons, David. ““Bringing … Uncertain Geographies Under … Control”? Exploring the Lovecraftian ‘Walking Simulator’.” Lovecraft in the 21st Century: dead but still dreaming, edited by Antonio Alcala Gonzalez and Carl H. Sederholm, Routledge, 2022, pp. 241-252.https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/reader/read-online/495bcc1c-8ca7-4485-8d88-5625054885de/chapter/pdf?context=ubx
Stapleton, Dan. “Darkest Dungeon Review” IGN, January 10, 2020, https://www.ign.com/articles/2016/01/27/darkest-dungeon-review
Thurgill, James. “A Fear of the Folk: On Topophobia and the Horror of Rural Landscapes.” Revenant Journal, edited by Dawn Keetley, March 2020, pp. 33-56, www.revenantjournal.com/contents/a-fear-of-the-folk-on-topophobia-and-the-horror-of-rural-landscapes/.