Having to juggle the mental wellbeing of your heroes – as well as their gear, experience, health, and moveset, as you would in other RPGs – feels perfectly natural in Darkest Dungeon, and it’s a task that fits the grimdark flavour of the world beautifully. In extreme cases, your characters can suffer cardiac events and die where they stand – slain not by some foetid reanimated corpse, but instead by their own heart giving out under the weight of the horrors they’ve been exposed to. They may become too scared to fight, and spend their turn babbling nonsense into the darkness instead of hefting their blades and cutting down enemies. If your characters become, and stay, stressed, it’ll start having extreme and unpredictable adverse affects on them. If you send your band of doomed heroes into the depths of some unknown dungeon without food or light, or if they witness the death or injury of a fellow party member in battle, or suffer the blights of unholy enemies, they will take mental damage – and (just like in real life) the results of stress and anxiety can be costly. Perhaps the most unique part of Darkest Dungeon comes from the Affliction system a novel way of representing stress, trauma, psychological harm.

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