Whether this is an intended effect or not is beside the point: it's ingenious. I probably look serene at these moments, quietly contemplating the dungeons' amber glow, but inside it's a hurricane. Every turn in battle brings a little knot of fear, as I wonder whether they'll follow orders or give in to their own baser natures. I know my characters are now in greater danger, and if I push on things will get worse.

I know my chances of escaping this dungeon laden with loot have just decreased. When they break anyway, as they eventually do, it's almost a relief for a few seconds – your faint hope of a positive resolve test still shining – and then when they go mad it increases your own stress. As the stress meter rises towards 100 you get anxious about it, trying to stress heal that character and prioritising stress-dealing enemies even more than usual. The increased pressure on your party therefore finds an echo in the player. It makes things more difficult, and it frustrates you. What madness does, in terms of how Darkest Dungeon works, is two things: increases the chances that another member of the party will have their resolve tested, and takes away control from the player. What I initially admired about this system is how it loosely parallels what's going on in the player's mind. There are exceptions, but generally it's something that bites in the latter half of quests – when you've got something to lose. The stress system is designed so that it starts in the background of each mission, slowly ticking up, before you notice about two thirds of the way through that your characters' meters are looking very high. In short, you never want them to go mad.īut the game makes this inevitable: of course it does. When it hits 100 their resolve is tested, which usually results in their tiny mind cracking and the emergence of an undesirable quality – maybe they'll start berating their teammates, increasing stress levels further, or go masochist and start wounding themselves.

The most unusual feature of Darkest Dungeon, and what intoxicated me about it at first, is the stress system: as your party explores creepy deathtraps and fights horrific nasties, each member's stress levels increase. The nasty flipside to this being our old friend Dr Permadeath. The idea is that, as you loot dungeons, you're also building up your town hamlet and a considerable fighting force to face the game's greatest challenges. When Darkest Dungeon was released I couldn't get enough but, over many hours, it has gradually driven me away – in a manner so fitting it must have been intended.ĭarkest Dungeon is a roguelike dungeon-crawler where you build up a barracks of troops and, over missions, they level up and become more effective. It helps to be a freelancer of course but it always happened anyway: when Resident Evil 4 came out I used to walk home in my lunch hour just to get 20 minutes in. When I discover something new it becomes – for a day, a week, maybe months – an obsession that devours time. People have called me a maniac for my gaming habits, but they know nothing.

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