Roguelike game set in a dark gothic world. You manage a group of adventurers that explore dungeons. The game’s unique game mechanic is that your characters lose their minds as they adventure, so you must manage their sanity by sending them to the church, the bar, or the brothel. If they go too insane they start accumulating positive and negative buffs that can become temporary or permanent.

Another game mechanic I hadn’t seen before is that the skills your heroes can cast and on which targets depend on the heroes and the enemies’s positions, so a skill may only be cast in the front and only affect the front and next to front enemies’ position which adds interesting strategic variety.

You start with a set of heroes but you can hire more and each character has different skills that you can level up. You can also level up the church, bar, blacksmith, and other buildings, which gives you a lot of flexibility and variety.

The visual style is unique and the heroes and monster animations are fun.

The story is too dark for my taste, but I was willing to ignore that in exchange for the customizability of the game.

However, after two hours, I stopped playing and shelved the game for good. Why? One of my heroes got killed, Reynauld the crusader, and when a hero dies in Darkest Dungeon, they’re gone forever. Reynauld constantly stole loot that belonged to me so it hurt less than if I had lost anyone else like for example my nymphomanic cleric, but still, the game made me care about his sanity, his skills, his equipment, his future, and when that skeleton killed him, the loss of both time and care for its pixels was too much.

I love plenty of games where your units die forever, like Civilization VI and Age of Empires II, but in all those games there’s no attachment to units because they’re nameless and fungible.

For me, video games are fun when I can play them, that is, explore, experiment, and improve my skills in a safe environment. Perma death removes the “safe” aspect and, for me, that removes the incentive to play.

Connections

• Dark Castle: the game’s town screen design reminded me of Dark Castle
• Plants vs Zombies: that’s what the game’s enemy animations reminded me of, goofy and scary.
• Perma-death design choices: Diablo 3 and Diablo 4, among many other games, have perma-death, but it’s up to the player whether they enable it or not.