Darkest Dungeon Research

Darkest Dungeon is an RPG developed by Red Hook Studios and published Merge Games. The game plays like a turn-based dungeon crawler as the player takes control of the people that they hire to explore the mysterious mansion that they inherited. Where the game shines most is the emphasis that it places of the individualism of each character that the player hires. This is portrayed in a mechanical sense through the games stress feature, in which when a character gets too stresses, they will break down and develop a random trait. This trait is often both detrimental and beneficial, with there being some sort of trade off. Not only does this make the player re4consider getting rid of the new trait, it also helps to diversify the play style of individual characters from each other. The result of this, and the fact that there is a large variety of character classes that the player can hire, means that the player starts to value the characters uniqueness and even faults which makes them get very attached. This makes it even more tense when they are on low health or when they die as the player would lose that unique character that had been developed organically through their play sessions, which is something that the player can’t easily get back.

The reason that I am looking at this mechanic is to inform how to make the players character in my theoretical game feel unique and memorable so that when they come to collect the crown their sacrifice feels significant. Looking at Darkest Dungeon, a good way to achieve it seems to be having a cast of characters during a single run rather than just one as the player can’t have a favourite character if they don’t have a least favourite character to contrast with. The problem that comes with this however is that when it comes to the final sacrifice the player would probably just want to sacrifice their least favourite character. To fix this there would have to be a mechanic that encourages the player to sacrifice their most powerful character, such as the power of the wish being directly tied to the level and power of the character making the wish.