Darkest Dungeon - Shit gets real.

"Darkest Dungeon focuses on the humanity and psychological vulnerability of the heroes and asks: What emotional toll does a life of adventure take?"

As we all know, dungeons are nasty places.  They're smelly, dirty, pestilence-filled shitholes infested with traps and slobbering monsters; full of horror and danger and fear.  So why do most games portray them as consequence-free playgrounds for their cast of shiny heroes to beat up and destroy?  And, more to the point, why does all this death, destruction and unadulterated terror have absolutely no long term effect on anybody involved?  Dark Souls is the only game that springs to mind where the actual environments themselves are thoroughly unpleasant and where all the characters show clear signs of impending insanity but, in general, heroes prance in, slaughter whole communities of monsters and then retire to some tavern somewhere to swap stories and carry on like nothing has happened.

Well.  It appears that this is about to change.

Darkest Dungeon is an upcoming game from Red Hook studios and it promises to make its heroes fallible human beings; subject to all the same anxieties and neuroses as the rest of us but just a bit more willing to leave the house. This is a world where your brave warrior has turned to drink, your priest bolts at the first sign of skeletons and the bard is still sat in the tavern muttering to himself and rocking back and forth.  Events will affect your characters, they'll develop paranoias and phobias and end up not being able to work with other party members or, conversely, they could get more determined, more fanatical and more confident.  Your job is to work out how best to cope with the bad stuff and magnify the good, which adds another dimension to the usual process of allocating points to skills and ruthlessly killing endless hordes of monsters.

It also makes you wonder why this hasn't been done before.  Call of Cthulhu does it, but even that took the easy way out when trying to translate insanity into a videogame.  The aforementioned Dark Souls does it to the player, rather than the character, and there was also the rather excellent Eternal Darkness, but really the mental effects of a character's experiences are very rarely tackled.

It's still extremely early stages as the game was only announced a few days ago but signs are good.  I like the art style, especially the plague mask on the doctor, and it looks like it could be a gritty take on a rather tired genre, if done right.  Red Hook are planning on a release in Autumn next year but will almost definitely have a Kickstarter before then.  You can find the website here and sign up to the mailing list to get updates on their progress, or you can follow them on twitter @darkestdungeon

Be careful out there.

Torchlight 2 Preview

This is turning out to be a good year for fans of clicky, killy, looty, dungeon crawling games.  Diablo III was released a few weeks ago (to equal parts acclaim and gnashing of teeth), Path of Exile is coming along nicely, and Runic Games are releasing the follow up to their surprise 2009 hit Torchlight “this summer.”  Recently Runic invited people to take part in a beta testing weekend and we jumped at the chance to get our hands on the game and put it through its paces.

In action RPGs like this the player explores a series of randomly generated dungeons (or outdoor areas), battling monsters and collecting loot.  There is usually a story about some great evil or other but the important bits are fighting, levelling up and collecting the lovely, shiny valuables that litter the ground.  Action plays out in real time and the player is controlled with a click of the mouse to make them move or attack enemies and hotkeys to select which skills to use, potions to drink etc.  The plentiful treasure is mostly randomly generated and weapons and armour can be common, magical, rare or unique - with each category denoted by a different colour.

Loot, glorious loot

The temptation here is to compare Torchlight II to Diablo III - not only because they are being released so close together but also because the Runic team includes people who worked on the first two Diablo games.  However, I don’t really want to do that as I think that this game deserves to be treated on its own merits and, probably more pertinently, I wouldn’t be able to anyway as my experience of Diablo only extends as far as the recent beta.  All I will say is that it will be possible to play Torchlight II in single player mode without any internet connection, you can choose different difficulty settings from the start, there will be no real money auction house, it will cost £15 / $20 to buy and I had no problems logging in at any point in the whole process.  

The boys are back in town

So, that said, what’s Torchlight II actually like?  Well, it takes everything from the first Torchlight game and does what a sequel should do.  It makes it bigger and better.  To start with there are now more, completely different, classes.  Players can take their pick from Embermage, Outlander, Engineer or Berserker – all with differing skills and options.  I didn’t have time to complete the beta with all four classes but I did with the Engineer, and the class can take a number of different paths, from tank to summoner to melee specialist.  By the end of my playthrough I had a small robot army following me about, with a healing bot, a gunbot and some extremely useful suicidal spider mines which threw themselves at any visible enemy before exploding.  Great stuff.

Ah, look at his little face!

And, of course, you have a man’s (or woman’s) best friend - your pet.  You can choose your companion from lots of different animal types, ranging from a mundane cat or dog to a quite odd velociraptor / cassowary mix, called a chakawary; and with panthers, wolves, hawks and ferrets also available there really is a pet to suit everybody.  You will soon come to rely completely on them.  They are good in a scrap - often better than your main character and you can give them special pet equipment to protect them and enhance their abilities even further.  They can cast spells for you (there is no finer sight in the world than a dog summoning some zombies to lend a decaying hand) or carry all your excess goodies and take them back to town to sell them - which enables you to stay out in the field for longer.  You can even give them a shopping list of items to buy in town.  Run out of identify scrolls or healing potions?  Tell Fido to stop off at the shop and get you some!  “What’s that Lassie?  They’re stuck down a mine and they need four... no, five healing potions?” “Woof!”

Ah yes, my favourite holiday destination

Players are also no longer confined to Torchlight itself.  The action is much more expansive and takes place over a much wider area - including (gasp) the outdoors.  This makes a nice change from the original game’s often quite claustrophobic tunnels and gives a much greater sense of exploring and travelling to specific destinations, rather than just getting to the next set of stairs going down. The beta offered a number of different, and quite distinct, areas to explore, from steppes to mountain passes, and the full game will offer many more.  Some of the areas are really quite large and contain a number of sub-quests and side missions which you can complete before getting on with your main task.  They can also include some special randomised locations, such as abandoned altars, which provide rewards when conquered.

Multiplayer has also been added, and this is the mode that was being tested during the beta weekend.  It works in pretty standard fashion, with players able to join games that others have set up or set up their own.  You can protect them with passwords and set it so that only your friends can join, or you can join in with a bunch of strangers and run around killing things together.  Loot is discrete, in that each player will receive their own stash, and enemy difficulty scales according to how many players are in the area.  This all ran very smoothly during the test, with little lag or other problems.  As other games have shown, this may change when the game is actually released - but so far, so good.

Great.  Spiders.

Ultimately what Torchlight II does is boil gaming down to its essence.  It provides you with an endless, relentless stream of enemies to kill and rewards to gather – all just by clicking the mouse.  There is something almost primeval about it, it appeals to that bit of the brain we share with lizards.  Every few seconds you progress in some way - whether it’s a new weapon, another level or just some gold, and everything increases exponentially the further you get.  Your damage goes up, your level goes up, you get more powerful, the monsters get harder, the weapons get better and it keeps going up and up and up in an unending addictive spiral of death, destruction and cute (but vicious) animals.  The great achievement here is that, despite it being simple, Runic manage to make this so much fun that you forget what it is you’re actually doing and instead become focused on getting to the next skill, the next level or the next weapon.  Torchlight II is a blast to play.  Runic have another hit on their hands.