Darkest Dungeon

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Ruin has come to our family. [...] You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial. It is a festering abomination! I beg you, return home, claim your birthright and deliver our family from the ravenous clutching shadows of the Darkest Dungeon.

Darkest Dungeon is a 2016 Roguelike/Dungeon Crawling video game by Red Hook Games in which the player takes on the role of an heir to a once-proud but now-fallen noble house. The heir is summoned to the old estate by a letter from his ancestor, which explains that he heard rumors of great power dwelling beneath the manor, spent the family fortune excavating it, and unearthed terrible things. The player then recruits, equips, and dispatches teams of heroes into various dungeons surrounding the manor to put down the monsters that have come to dwell there, and clean up the Ancestor's mess.

Tropes used in Darkest Dungeon include:

• Apocalyptic Log: Some of the rare finds in dungeons are diaries of adventurers from the Ancestor's days.
• Ascended Meme: Wayne June (the voice of the narrator/Ancestor) recorded a set of Darkest Dungeon-themed voice notifications for streamers. It includes some Shout-Outs to Undertale, Dark Souls, and "Truly, this is the Dankest Dungeon."
• Announcer Chatter: The Ancestor provides commentary on battles, encounters, and town events, but he doesn't really "chatter"; he makes ominous, portentous comments about victory and/or doom.
• Arc Symbol: The "Stress" symbol (which is, incidentally, an "arc symbol" with lines through it, resembling a thorny halo) begins to figure more and more prominently on enemy attire and the architecture as the heroes plumb greater depths of the dungeons.
• Army of Thieves and Whores: The brigands which inhabit the Weald are such an army, and the player's roster of heroes may not be much better.
• Awesome but Impractical / Boring but Practical: There is almost always a trade between effectiveness and reliability when it comes to heroes. The Vestal, for example, has two reliable healing abilities, but only heals for a few HP each turn. The Occultist, on the other hand, can heal a hero up to 100%, or heal for zero HP, or even inflict bleeding, depending on the whims of the Random Number God. Likewise, heavy-hitting heroes tend to be squishy, inaccurate, or costly or limited in some other way.
• Body Horror: Many of the enemies (especially the swinefolk) are quite horrific. The Ancestor and Heart of Darkness can also inflict Body Horror on the heroes as an attack.

Ancestor: "The flesh is fluid, it could be changed, reshaped, remade!"

• Book Ends: "Ruin has come to our family."
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: One of the apocalyptic logs that the heroes can find is a note from Red Hook thanking the player.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Creepy ancient manor? Check. Eccentric ancestor unleashed horrible eldritch things from beneath it? Check. The end of the world is inevitable, if not now, then some generations later? Check.
• DLC: The Musketeer, The Crimson Court, The Shieldbreaker, and The Color of Madness.
• Driven to Suicide: The opening cutscene implies that the Ancestor committed suicide after writing the letter to his heir. The final boss battle implies that this may not have been exactly the case. He also suggests that the Heir may be Driven to Suicide himself.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Several enemies (Madmen and the Prophet and perhaps the Ancestor) already have, and as stress mounts, the heroes run the risk of following them. Some enemy attacks explicitly revolve around revealing unsettling things to the heroes to increase their stress and provoke their fall into madness. In the ending, the Ancestor implies that the Heir is next.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Dungeons are labeled as Apprentice (balanced for heroes of resolve level 0-2), Veteran (2-4), Champion (4-6), and Darkest (challenging even for 6's).
  • The game itself can be played in Radiant, Darkest, and Stygian modes. Radiant isn't really "easy", per se, but some mechanics are changed to allow the game to be completed more rapidly (e.g. experience gain is increased, reducing the number of missions required to level up heroes). Darkest is the normal difficulty, and Stygian (the former New Game+ mode) makes the enemies tougher, locks the difficulty options to maximum, and places a timer and death limit before the Heart of Darkness wakes up and the player loses.
• Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: Not only are they single-use, but each one costs money during provisioning. Sometimes the Random Number God will smile and bestow extras during a dungeon, but in general, it's up to the player to guess how many they will probably need for the coming mission and purchase accordingly.
• Luck-Based Mission: Dungeon layouts are randomized, and while they have "Apprentice", "Veteran", and "Champion" designations, there is still a wide variation of difficulties within each, and party and trinket choices add even more variables to the pot.
• Our Vampires Are Different: For one thing, they're Not Using the V Word. Vampirism is referred to as the "Crimson Curse", and enemy vampires have the "Bloodsucker" type. The bloodsuckers themselves are themed after insects rather than bats. Some of the enemies are simply giant insects, while others initially appear human but then morph into insectile forms after drinking the heroes' blood.
• Posthumous Narration: The Ancestor is implied to have committed suicide shortly after writing the letter that summoned the Heir, but that doesn't stop him from commenting on everything that his Heir does. Or maybe he's not so 'posthumous' after all.
• Random Number God: Hitting, critting, dodging, blighting, bleeding, debuffing, stressing, hero deaths, and in some cases healing are all based on rolls of the dice. The player can upgrade hero equipment and skills, and use trinkets or certain supplies to improve their odds, but rarely is any action truly certain to succeed.
• Sanity Meter: Each hero has a stress meter. Enemy critical strikes, certain attacks or unsettling curio encounters increase it, and player critical strikes and some player abilities reduce it (as does spending time at the Tavern or Abbey). There's no Interface Screwing as the stress mounts, since it's not really tracking sanity per se, but when it reaches 100, the hero is "tested" and will obtain a virtue (e.g. "Stalwart") or, more likely, an affliction (e.g. "Abusive") until their stress is reduced. If the hero becomes afflicted, their stress can mount higher still, until reaching 200, when the hero suffers a heart attack and risks dying. (A Virtuous hero cannot increase above 100 stress, though the effect only lasts for the duration of the expedition.)
• Schmuck Bait: Many curios are more troublesome than they are worth, such as books and corpses (unless the proper item is used -- though even if the player knows this, heroes with certain quirks have a probability of touching them anyway), but a few are downright cheeky, such as the Shambler's Altar. "Place a torch if you crave the void!" Suuuuure. The torch gets dropped to zero, and the heroes get sent into the "outer spheres" and fight the Shambler.
  • Likewise, the "Bandit's Trapped Chest" in the tutorial: "Something is not quite right with this one..." Enjoy your blight if you have the hero touch it.
  • And in the Stygian (formerly New Game+) tutorial, the "Transcendent Terror": "Surely nothing good can come of a dialogue with the dead...?" +100 stress and an affliction for the rest of the dungeon -- and the next dungeon as well, since no stress-relief activities are unlocked yet. Sometimes jokingly stated by fans as "Talk to the ghost in the tutorial to get your NG+ bonus!" for extra schmuck-baiting.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: The Ancestor has a pretty severe case of it, sometimes. "Monstrous size has no intrinsic merit, unless inordinate exsanguination be considered a virtue."
• Shout-Out: The default name of the Occultist is "Alhazred", named for the author of the Necronomicon in the Cthulhu Mythos.
  • The default Houndmaster's name is "Shag and Scoob".
• Sistine Steal: The icon of the Occultist's "Unspeakable Commune" skill shows his finger reaching out towards a tentacle. Appropriate, given the allegation that humanity is born from the eldritch Thing that the Ancestor discovered.
• Start of Darkness: The Crimson Court DLC reveals that the Ancestor was never a morally upstanding individual, but that his encounter with the Crimson Curse was what specifically set him on the path to discovering the Heart of Darkness and attempting to harness its power.
• Unwinnable: Averted (outside of NG+) -- no matter how many heroes die, there will always be more, and while it costs money to upgrade them, they will join your roster for free. As the game says, "Heroes are a renewable resource."
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Darkest Dungeon itself, with twisting passages, Alien Geometries, and enemies that tax the heroes' (and the player's) sanity. Theoretically, it is accessible from the very beginning of the game, but it's not recommended to tackle it without leveling up some heroes to max in the other dungeons first...
• A World Half Full: Despite the inevitable Cosmic Horror of the Heart of Darkness destroying the world when it wakes -- and it will..., the world is saved (for a while, anyway) not by paragons of virtue or mighty armies but by a small band of flawed, imperfect humans.

Ancestor: These creatures can be felled, they can be beaten!

• Xanatos Gambit: If you hadn't answered the Ancestor's summons, the Heart would have escaped in the future when the stars were right, and because you did answer, the resulting bloodshed and chaos have accelerated its awakening.