Darkest Dungeon (2016)
Darkest Dungeon is a 2016 role-playing (rpg) video game made by Red Hook Studios.
Your ancestor dug too greedily beneath the family estate, and now something ancient stirs in the dark. Darkest Dungeon sends a rotating band of mercenaries, the plague doctor, the leper, the highwayman, into crypts and warrens that grind them down. Wounds heal; the mind does not. Stress mounts with every torch that gutters out, and a cornered hero may crack, turn paranoid, or find grim resolve. The turn-based combat is precise and cruel, the narration a low velvet growl. This is horror about attrition, and about what leading people to their ruin actually costs.
Quick answers
What is Darkest Dungeon about?
Your ancestor dug too greedily beneath the family estate, and now something ancient stirs in the dark. Darkest Dungeon sends a rotating band of mercenaries, the plague doctor, the leper, the highwayman, into crypts and warrens that grind them down. Wounds heal; the mind does not. Stress mounts with every torch that gutters out, and a cornered hero may crack, turn paranoid, or find grim resolve. The turn-based combat is precise and cruel, the narration a low velvet growl. This is horror about attrition, and about what leading people to their ruin actually costs.
When was Darkest Dungeon released?
Darkest Dungeon was released on 19 January 2016.
Who made Darkest Dungeon?
Darkest Dungeon was made by Red Hook Studios.
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Explore Darkest Dungeon guides
Darkest Dungeon in our writing
- Companion guide: Cosmic Horror
- Companion guide: Dark Fantasy
- Companion guide: Grimdark: The Complete Guide to Fantasy at Its Most Brutal
- Companion guide: Monster Hunters
A few thoughts on Darkest Dungeon
Junji Ito's Tomie matches its creeping, cosmic dread, beauty rotting from the inside. The series FROM traps ordinary people in a town ruled by things that hunt after dark, the same slow-tightening horror. For pure eldritch despair, read Berserk, where one man's endurance is pushed far past any reasonable limit.
Gothic horror about a place that slowly rots the mind
Darkest Dungeon's ruined crypts strip away a mercenary's sanity fight by fight, the same dread that seeps through The Thing's isolated Antarctic outpost and Junji Ito's Tomie and Uzumaki, where ordinary bodies and towns twist into something wrong. FROM's trapped, half-lit town carries that same slow, creeping horror, and Berserk's blood-soaked world shares its grim, punishing scale.
Ordinary people crushed by a darkness they can't outrun
Darkest Dungeon's stress meter cracks its mercenaries into paranoia and worse, a slow psychological unraveling that American Psycho's narrator and Mr. Mercedes's obsessive antagonist both embody from the inside. Thirteen Reasons Why traces a similar weight of guilt building unseen, and Death Note's chess match between two minds shows how quickly power curdles into ruin.
Grim fantasy and survival games where every fight could be the last
Darkest Dungeon's mercenaries rarely walk away from a torch-lit crypt unscathed, the same punishing stakes that run through The Witcher 3's monster contracts and Skyrim's dungeon delves. God of War's brutal, mythic combat carries that same sense of consequence behind every swing, and The Last of Us's constant scavenging for one more scrap of hope shares the same grinding attrition.
Heavy, dark music built for a punishing fight
The narrator's velvet growl over Darkest Dungeon's grinding combat pairs naturally with Iron Maiden's galloping doom on The Number of the Beast and Piece of Mind, and Judas Priest's Painkiller matches that same relentless, metal-clad aggression. King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King and Dream Theater's Metropolis Pt. 2 bring the same operatic weight to a bleak, drawn-out battle.