Image Credits: Red Hook Studios
Living with the Specter of Death
What Darkest Dungeon Tells Us About Stress
by Oluwatayo Adewole
If you’ve ever played Darkest Dungeon, you know that two things are inevitable: stress and death.
The game’s systems constantly saddle characters with stress. Take stress if a party member takes a critical hit, if torchlight isn’t bright enough, if they get caught in a trap, if they walk backwards. They take the most stress if one of their companions dies. Just existing in the cosmic horror of Darkest Dungeon is stressful, both for characters and for you as a player.
The system feels prescient in this current moment. Living through a pandemic, worsened by the cruel persistence of capitalism, means the presence of death is a constant weight. Whether that death is personal or a broader awareness of mass death occurring, we all feel it. Waking up is stressful. Walking to the shops is stressful. Talking to a loved one who has fallen ill is stressful. Remembering to eat is stressful. This feeling is compounded for those of us on the margins, who are at far more risk from this virus because of a system that deliberately devalues our lives. Black people in the UK and US are several times more likely to contract and die of COVID-19, and disabled people are also disproportionately victims of the disease. For many of us, the imperceptible gravity of death is all too familiar. The deaths of people like us have been spread on social media and TV screens for our entire lives.
But we all feel that miasma of death differently. Similarly, the stress in Darkest Dungeon manifests differently on a character-by-character basis. When a character reaches 100/200 Stress Points, the game rolls the proverbial dice to decide if they become ‘Afflicted’ or ‘Virtuous’ for the rest of the dungeon. There are seven potential afflictions (e.g. Paranoid, Selfish) and five potential virtues (e.g. Stalwart, Courageous). Depending on the virtue/affliction, they’ll do things out of your control. If afflicted, they might cause more stress by verbally abusing another party member. If virtuous, they might spontaneously buff the party. In spite of the binary presented here, the system doesn’t feel like it’s making a moral judgement on those that don’t reach the heights of ‘virtue’ when maximally stressed. Instead, there’s a blunt acceptance of the inevitability of hitting that breaking point.
However, not everyone has the same chances. Certain randomly-generated ‘quirks’ like ‘Irrepressible’ and ‘Mercurial’ give a character a higher/lower virtue chance. Also, trinkets like the ‘Hero’s Ring’ or the ‘Berserk Mask’ can give characters higher or lower virtue chances and resistance to stress. While these mitigate stress, they never completely remove it. Even the most resilient characters aren’t immune, and the virtue chance can never go above 90%.
Like us, none of the characters are invincible. At times, we all crack under the load and hurt people around us. At the same time, none of us are irredeemable. In Darkest Dungeon, the virtue chance also can’t go below 1%. There is always that one-in-a-hundred shot where we look horror in the face and stand our ground.
We’re often told we can’t let the stress of living through this moment get to us, that we can’t stop being productive, even as hundreds of thousands of people die around us. Instead, we’re inundated with articles saying that if you drank enough water and went for a walk, you’d be able to avoid the stress caused by the weight of structural issues. On top of that, marginalized people are expected to deal with even more. As a Black person, I was expected to be educator and activist while I grieved for the deaths of people like me at the hands of the State. There has been outrage and counter-outrage. I have been angry, then tired, then tired of being tired. Time and time again, I have questioned the point of it all when the wheels of power won’t even make a single full rotation.
The frank nature of Darkest Dungeon’s stress system is refreshing because it recognizes there is no way to avoid stress. When I falter and lose faith, or when I’m overwhelmed by rage, it’s not a moral failing. The game reminds me that my reactions are the reality of living under the specter of death, especially death from structures designed to grind people like me into dust. In the acceptance of stress rather than ignoring it, we can find ways of coping, moving forward, and continuing to fight for something better. Once we do that, then - as Darkest Dungeon’s ever-present Narrator puts it—“Adversity can foster hope, and resilience.”
Oluwatayo Adewole is a critic, poet and columnist at Unwinnable. They're interested in the way that art interacts with and challenges society. You'll most likely find them rambling @naijaprince21 on Twitter.