Quirks are the game’s way of reminding you that each character is distinct and that you’re going to watch them evolve under your lead, good or bad.

So even if you do everything correctly and nail an expedition, one or all of your Heroes might end up traumatized. What’s more, Heroes can also attain Quirks through questing.

Others present more challenging mechanics to the player, like ‘Bloodthirsty,’ which increases a hero’s fascination with injury and torture - a curiosity that will likely get them killed. Some are simple and are easily worked around, like ‘Deviant Behavior,’ which means your Hero can’t use the brothel when they’re in town. These are personality markers, which can be positive (ones that help during adventuring) and negative (ones that don’t). While it’s hardly an entirely novel idea – games have been fiddling with fail states outside of a depleted health bar for years - Darkest Dungeon is a sincere attempt to map a labyrinthine concept like mental health onto something a bit more sophisticated than a binary ‘sanity meter.’ The basic balance is simple and frugal: as Heroes, the hired help that you enlist get overworked and eventually need rest, you, as their leader weigh their needs against your own goals.Įach ‘Hero’ comes with a randomly chosen set of traits as well, called Quirks. But as Darkest Dungeon wears on, its finest moments become fewer and farther between, and what started out as a feeling of kinship for your luckless adventurers simply becomes another complicated way of saying ‘You Died.’Ĭredit where credit’s due, Darkest Dungeon is probably one of the more innovative attempts at modelling mental health within a videogame. At its finest, the guilt trip the game sends you on becomes an ouroboros of anguish and disturbance.

Especially at those pivotal moments when you knew – you knew – that you were pushing these characters past their limits.

Even if you haven’t played Darkest Dungeon, you’re probably familiar with its infamous stress mechanic, in which your team of dungeon explorers can succumb to mental encumbrances from fatigue and psychological trauma.

Darkest dungeon stressed