Manage your infrastructure, manage your personnel, head into the unknown. Perhaps the best analog to playing Darkest Dungeon is the experience one gets from FTL: Faster Than Light. None of these systems are terribly complicated, but they’re all satisfying, and so fundamentally intertwined that the full game is something entirely new.

I’m quite glad I did.ĭarkest Dungeon is a few things at once: town builder, roster manager, roguelike dungeon crawler, turn-based tactical RPG. 3, and I’d heard just enough of those positive impressions to take the plunge. The game became available through Steam Early Access on Feb. Darkest Dungeon kept popping up as a blip on my radar: something to keep track of, something that I might only need to hear a handful of positive things about before jumping on board. Here was a thing already in a playable state, with a slew of interesting mechanics, some of which had been rarely explored in other games. The game looked great, and footage of its unique style made it clear that these fellows had more than tenuous promises to offer. Vancouver-based Red Hook Studios launched a slick Kickstarter campaign for the game early last year, and claims that the project had already been in development for nine months were easy to believe.

It was with all this in mind that I grew tentatively excited about Darkest Dungeon over the past several months. My disappointment with that game was a reminder that even buying a game billed as “complete” can leave you feeling swindled, let alone dropping a chunk of change on an Early Access game that may not evolve to include promised features or a Kickstarter project that may never bear any playable fruits at all. I’d already decided years before that I was through with buying any games before I’d consumed a glut of post-release reviews and impressions, but, even so, I couldn’t restrain myself from pre-purchasing Civilization: Beyond Earth. You can find Dave on Twitter, which he promises he’ll start updating again.Ģ014 taught us a few harsh lessons about the risks of investing in video game Kickstarters and buying unfinished games through Steam Early Access. Dave isn’t a dad, but he loves games and, even better, he actually has the free time to play them. This is a guest post by Dave Kirby, co-host of the GeekDad Podcast Network’s Dice Section show.

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