Darkest Dungeon

Darkest Dungeon is a 2016 role-playing game from Red Hook Studios, funded on Kickstarter. An ancestor has unleashed horrors beneath the family estate, and you send parties of four heroes, hired from a coach that arrives each week, into the dungeons below.

Combat is turn-based, with the four heroes in a line where their position decides what they can do. The key system is stress. Fighting, darkness and horror raise it, and a hero who breaks may become paranoid, selfish or hopeless and turn on the party. Heroes who die are gone, and the hamlet's buildings, a tavern, a chapel, a sanatorium, are where the survivors recover and are paid for.

Its stress system is one of the most imitated ideas in recent games. It makes the mind of a character as important as their body, and it makes retreat a reasonable choice. The art and the narration are distinctive and grim.

It is long and grinding, and it is built on accepting losses that some players find punishing.

Darkest Dungeon shares Jagged Alliance 2's roster of hired people with fees and quirks, and its money that never quite stretches. Its stress is a darker version of Jagged Alliance 2's morale and complaints, where an unhappy mercenary does not just leave but brings the others down.