5 Tricks to Surviving Darkest Dungeon (Sometimes)

Darkest Dungeon is set for its full release from Early Access on the 19th of January, and having followed the game through its development since July of last year, you can bet I’m pretty excited about finally being able to enter the final dungeon. As a roguelike, Darkest Dungeon is soul-crushingly punishing to even veteran players, exposing them to both the stress of Lovecraftian horrors, and the horror of being torn apart by angry mushroom people. Keeping this in mind, here are my five tips to surviving Darkest Dungeon. You know, sometimes; this is a roguelike, after all.

1. Never skimp on provisions

You’re brave, you’re reckless, and you don’t want to spend any of your hard earned gold on shovels: what could possibly be the harm? The first thing to realise about Darkest Dungeon is that, although it’s completely randomly generated, luck will always be against you. You can go through ten dungeons without ever being poisoned, but I can guarantee that the first time you don’t buy any antidote is the time that your party suddenly becomes incredibly susceptible to spider venom. Ever hear the saying “it’s better to be safe than sorry”? Well forget that; this is a difficult game, and it’s always better to be poor than dead.

2. Choose your party and your quest carefully

The different heroes of Darkest Dungeon each have their own playstyles and unlockable skill sets that you as the player will need to master; learning how each character’s attack interacts with the rest of the party is the easiest way to develop an adequate strategy. If you have a hero that must stand in a particular position for any of their moves to be useful, you’ll want to be avoiding characters that shift the party around, such as the Jester (the Jester’s a loose cannon anyway, just leave him for the pig-people). You need to know your team, but you also need to know what they’re up against. This will allow you to choose between more bandages or more antidotes with far more certainty, as well as which characters should be going into each dungeon type; it’s no good developing a party that relies on bleeding damage if you’re going to be fighting mutant crabs.

Naw, she's fine.

3. Don't underestimate stress

Stress is lethal to any gamer; it causes them to lose focus, make stupid decisions and drop their controller for all the sweat that seeps from their fingertips. Darkest Dungeon also introduces virtual stress so that all of your characters can feel just like you do when you play. This stat will gradually build up as the expedition meets with darkness and brutal injury, while some special enemies will damage almost nothing but your stress level. Once you hit one hundred, the hero will either become courageous or pessimistic, causing a party-wide chain reaction that can either make or break the quest. Let your stress reach two hundred, and the hero will suffer from a heart attack, by which point you are already dead. The madmen and the stress witches will cause your party to die slowly long after the battle is already won: kill them, and then deal with the zombie dog chewing on your leg.

4. Take risks

With great risk comes great reward: Darkest Dungeon will kill you far more often than any of the Souls games if you give it enough time, meaning that it’s sometimes worth sacrificing a life or two to explore those final rooms. Yes, there may be eldritch horrors in those extra, non-essential rooms, but there might also be MONEY, and you like money, don’t you? If you’re feeling really ambitious, it might pay off in the long run to hold off on buying those torches as well. When the light level in a dungeon is low, your heroes have a far greater chance of hitting their foes with a devastating critical strike, which will remove an enemy’s troublesome corpse from the battlefield if that happens to be the fatal blow. A low light level will also mean that the loot you find will be of a higher quality, which might even pay you back for all of those food packages that you never ate.

5. Know when to quit

The sin is not in being outmatched - but failing to recognize it; you as the player are able to pull the plug on a quest at any time, whether that’s because you want to keep the gold and trinkets that you’ve collected, or because you want to save your favourite heroes. Outright failing a dungeon is incredibly disheartening and you will want to stop playing because you feel as though you are personally responsible for those deaths. Dying also comes with the penalty of losing any money that was spent not only on the expedition, but on the heroes themselves. If you quit while you’re ahead (or tottering on the brink of defeat, at least), you’re able to save face and cut your losses. There will be another chance; your heroes will recover, and you’ll be able to better prepare them when that time comes.