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crowdomain · 2 years

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Why Darkest Dungeon Is A Minimalistic Storytelling Masterpiece

Asa speaking! This is going to be a long essay-post, so buckle up! In case you don’t have enough time to read through all that, or you just don’t feel like it, here’s a TL;DR: Darkest Dungeon, although not story-driven, manages to tell you just enough about the characters and the circumstances to get you hooked, but not enough to clearly explain what exactly is happening, giving the players lots of ground for theories, while at the same time forcing no plot on the players. The best a player can do to understand the characters is collect the bits and pieces we are given and interpret them.

The Darkest Dungeon fandom is one of the wildest I’ve been in. Everyone has different interpretations for the same characters, and the headcanons (well, most of them) manage to uphold the integrity of the characters to a great degree, despite how random they can become. This of course owes to the way the plot is written and executed.

I admit, a big reason why I play games is the plot. I love myself a good story, with fleshed-out characters I can relate to, and having a story is a great way to keep me involved even if the game ends up being too hard, because I will push through in order to see where the story goes.

Darkest Dungeon is not one of those games. I originally wanted to play it for the art style and the memes, to be honest, and it has grown into so much more since then. I play when I’m bored, I play while chatting with my friends through Discord, and strangely enough, I play when I’m feeling too stressed (at least when my favourite character dies I’ll be stressed because of that and not because I didn’t pass my lessons). I think about the game every day, and it never ceases to amaze me, both because every mission is unique and because you can always find something new in the game, a new detail, or perhaps a playstyle you hadn’t thought of before.

This game is one of the most original ones I’ve seen. Many concepts are subverted or twisted and made into something spectacularly different than what you would expect. At the same time, the plot and the differences are not forced upon the player; a player who is in it for the gameplay can just go on and start assembling new teams to fight bosses without having to go through pesky cutscenes, and the characters are essentially nobodies, which takes away the worries of what would happen if they die. (In fact, I believe that this is one of the aspects that discouraged many players from playing the second game; the fact that, unlike the first one, this one is more character-oriented. I understand and respect that, no two people find the exact same allure in a game. That, however, is a matter for another day).

On the other hand is the player who likes the story. This player, a player more like me and Bedelya, can spend countless hours looking into game content, and still find new things to fuss about. (This may be because both of us love literature and giving meaning to everything, but I’ll get to that in an instant). Where the gameplay-oriented player may enjoy the Ancestor’s monologues before the bosses because they offer a distraction until the game loads or collects the journal entries to boast that they collected them all, the story-oriented player enjoys them because they offer a deeper understanding of the game’s world. They will read them carefully, and perhaps wonder when all these troubles began.

The story-oriented player, however, will not stop there. An inquisitive mind will wonder who these people are, what brought them to the Hamlet. A keen eye will notice that the stressed players’ lines are no mere filler text. Maybe a skill or two has some strange properties. A restless player in love with stories will try to give those little details meaning, and in turn, once they have their meaning, they will seek to perfect their understanding.

This is where the wonder of this game lies: even being given the least details possible, one can deduce the identities of the characters, their motives, their loves, their fears…

You begin the game with two characters: Reynauld and Dismas. You only know their names, their professions, and their skills, and the fact that something drove them to the Old Road, where they are to help the Heir reclaim the Estate. You open up Reynauld’s character sheet. One of his quirks is “Kleptomaniac”. With a little looking around, you learn that this is a behavioural disorder people might develop when under extreme pressure. This means that Reynauld had been in a stressful environment for a while.

You take your heroes to a mission. Dismas is stressed and becomes irrational. Many of his quotes seem to be about a woman he loved, who is now following him in the form of a ghost. These might be the ramblings of a madman, but he references similar –not identical, but similar- scenarios a lot of times, and you begin to wonder: are those bits and pieces of his past, a past he left behind?

A jester comes into your stage coach. This man carries with him a sickle and a lute. One of his skills, only one, has a dirk. This skill has low accuracy compared to the rest. It bypasses guard and drives him one rank forward. You execute the skill in combat. He seems like he’s putting his whole weight on the hand with the dirk. Even the grave robber, who uses her pickaxe only once, has it mentioned a lot of times; the blacksmith, the guild, even on her equipment, it gets upgraded alongside her far more used daggers. The jester’s dirk is nowhere to be seen. Something is off in this situation.

Next up we have the comics; each of the characters has one comic that depicts a part of their past, the one that played the most important role into making them the characters we know in the game. The catch: these comics have absolutely no words, not even as sound effects, like “slash”, or “bang”. One has to pay close attention to understand what is happening, and even then, many of them remain mostly unclear. Why did the antiquarian kill the wizard? How did the occultist get to the shrine?

Even something as small as the characters’ unique trinkets can say something about them. In the base game, the bounty hunter’s trinkets are mostly helmets, so it might mean that it is highly important for him to hide who he is. He also has two talons, which show an affinity for birds of prey, who kill swiftly and silently. He is shown, in his comic, to kill four men in a matter of minutes, and he has a whopping amount of 21 quotes comprised purely of three dots, showing silence, and 14 more with non-verbal sounds. Then, you get to his Crimson Court trinkets: a vengeful kill list, which means that there are people who have wronged him, and a collection of teeth, which means that he keeps trophies from his victims, which, being a bounty hunter, could mean that he needs to show proof of his work, or, if he’s been killing for a long time, that he has developed a serial killer urge, and that removing the molars from his victims is something he feels the compulsion to do. Perhaps it is both. Then, there’s his quote for the Crimson Court set: “They Will Pay”. We know for sure that someone wronged him, but we know neither what happened nor the identity of the offending party, or how many people they were.

It has become clear that this game offers huge amounts of information, while at the same time offering very little. In my opinion, this also makes it extremely fleshed-out and realistic. You meet those people who came here for work. You only know what they do, not who they are, but their words, the items on their person, the way they move, they are the only things that let you get a glimpse into these people’s desires, ideals and worries. You are a cold employer, or a nonchalant colleague; you do not know who they are. You are only interested in their qualifications and in keeping them in good shape, so they can serve you better. There are no guides to tell you of these folks’ past, no in-game flashbacks to tell you why they are who they are. The only way to learn about them is to study them, learn about them, perhaps even ask them about their past. The comics, if you’d like to take it that far, could be times when a character asks another about themselves, and they answer. There are no words, because that was a long while ago. There are feelings, hence the frequent appearance of the stress halo and the importance of colours, and they all see things differently, hence why each of the comics has its unique elements; the plague doctor’s comic is the only one illustrated like a guide to a procedure.

I enjoyed talking about this subject. It’s been on my mind for a while now. Perhaps those are some far-fetched ideas of a person with lots of curiosity and the desire to find meaning and explanations in everything. Perhaps all this is too much and false. Perhaps Red Hook really did intend to hide all those details and have players find them out. I don’t know for sure, and I won’t know until I ask.

I would like to thank a Tumblr post I saw a while back for bringing the Dirk Stab’s stats to my attention. I do not remember the blog I saw it in, sadly, but I would love to find it and give it proper credit. I would also like to thank one of my friends, who made me realise that, even though you start the game idealistically (“Oh no, look, my highwayman Caen got masochistic, time to get him to the gambling hall!”) you end up becoming quite the mean boss as you see that you can’t keep everyone in good condition (“Oh, my antiquarian got a creeping cough again? Who cares, she doesn’t attack anyone. What’s her name again?”). Lastly, if you got this far, I’d like to thank you, for sitting through this essay and listening to my ideas. Give yourself a pat on the back and a cool glass of water!

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