The curiosities you examine are unpredictable, sometimes granting strength and other times inflicting disease. Scoring critical hits, examining certain objects in the tunnels between rooms, and camping help calm your heroes’ nerves mid-quest, but even those are hardly guaranteed methods. Enemies attack by dealing stress damage as much as they do physical and is arguably more dangerous since stress cannot be healed as easily. Just keeping your party’s hit-points up isn’t enough to ensure their safety.

The stress mechanics are the hook of Darkest Dungeon. Build too much and they’ll suffer a heart attack and either be pushed to death’s door or killed outright. They become abusive or fearful, criticizing fellow party members for their actions in the case of the former or start sobbing uncontrollably in the case of the latter, both causing additional stress damage to the rest of the party. If the meter fills, they receive an affliction that hinders their performance in combat. As you explore, your team slowly builds stress, which affects their mental well-being. Your objective is usually to either defeat all enemies or survey 90% of the area. You move through randomly generated dungeons moving between rooms, grabbing whatever gold, trinkets, and heirlooms you find to help fund your continued expeditions. You recruit a band of heroes of various disciplines and head forth into one of four locales to try and quell the dangers within. And as the new caretaker of the estate, it’s on you to clean up his mess and restore your family’s reputation. He had a fascination with the occult, however, and in his pursuit to understand and harness the secrets of the ruins hidden beneath the family estate unleashed a menagerie of eldritch horrors onto the land. You take on the role of a caretaker of a small hamlet you inherited from your late ancestor. That’s because your adversary in Darkest Dungeon isn’t the monsters that lurk behind the shadows, but stress. No matter how many victories I accrued, that lingering fear never ceased to follow. No matter how strong my team became, how confident I was in our chances, I always felt like I was one misstep away from failure. Throughout my time with Darkest Dungeon, I was almost constantly on edge.

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