There's no Game Pass game quite so cruel as Darkest Dungeon

It’s astonishing how, eight years on and now freshly added to Game Pass, Darkest Dungeon still manages to feel unlike anything else. Blown up on my telly, this could easily be something new. That horror-movie voice over still shakes my bones, that paper-drawn art still oozes style. But it’s not that which really stands the game apart.

What stands Darkest Dungeon apart is an invisible line, drawn in the ground somewhere, that determines how far developers go – how far they’re prepared to go – to challenge their audiences. Cross that line and a game becomes unfair. Cross it, and you risk turning an audience away. Few do. But Darkest Dungeon doesn’t care; Darkest Dungeon delights in it.

The entire premise of the game is cruelty. Cruelty towards the heroes you send into the depths and cruelty towards you, the player directing them. Whereas in other games, you’re invisibly looked after until the game feels you’re comfortable with it and attached to it, here, you’re eternally, mercilessly, dragged down. In many ways, Darkest Dungeon doesn’t want you to win. Why else would it pit so much against you?

Think on it: in Darkest Dungeon, you send a team of four characters – I’m loath to call them heroes, actually, for most are anything but – into dungeons underneath and around the hamlet you’re rebuilding. And on those missions, a number of things can happen to them. They can simply take too much damage and die – as in, permanently die. They can take damage in battle, they can take damage from traps, and they can take damage from not having any food to eat, which is more common than it sounds. Your health, it seems, is always going down.