I’m going to talk about the latest video game sensation! Not League of Legends! Not Hearthstone! That’s right! You guessed it! The Darkest Dungeon.

Darkest Dungeon is an indie game funded through Kickstarter.

In the game a wealthy socialite turns to the Cthuluian mysteries for entertainment and he unlocks horror beneath his mansion. The evil spreads until the entire countryside is corrupted by monsters, cultists, and brigands.

The player controls various groups of adventurers hired by the caretaker of the mansion to rid it of the abominations that inhabit it.

The game is a fairly typical turn-based RPG. Positioning of your party members is also important, but there’s nothing new there.

The new mechanic in Darkest Dungeon is the stress bar.

If you’ve read the short stories by HP Lovecraft that inspired this game, then you’re familiar with how the characters go insane when exposed to otherworldy horrors. Well, the same thing happens to the adventurers you control in Darkest Dungeon.

Getting hit really hard by monsters drives your party crazy. When the monsters do creepy things your party goes crazy. When the torchlight starts burning low your party goes crazy.

All that crazy is measured by the stress bar which goes from 0-100. 0 is fine, 100 is insane.

There’s other cool stuff too. Every class gets special attacks and you can name all your characters, like Snoop Dog in that picture down there.

In between adventures your party can rest and recuperate from all that craziness. There’s plenty of buildings to upgrade in the little town you stay in and the gold you bring back can be spent to improve your adventurers’ abilities for future dungeon raids.

And best of all, the adventurers talk throughout the whole game. Here’s your boss, the caretaker, describing one of his favorite places to visit in town.

I like to gauge entertainment on a ratio of hours of entertainment to money spent ratio. Movies are $10 to 2 hour ratio. Darkest Dungeon is $20 to… probably about 100 hours? That makes it 25 times as much entertainment value as a movie! Not necessarily as much fun packed into two hours, but over time it’ll appreciate into something you can really enjoy.

Check it out on Steam now!

-GoCorral