At first, Aungier didn't really stand out to me. As a class, Grave Robber lacks the sexy
propensity for reliable damage outputs that other back line fighters have, so even
though she arrived during my second week at the manor she's spent most of her
career since cooling her heels, occasionally stepping in when a party needed a
second back-ranks damage dealer and no one else was available, or a Priest
(misspelled as Vespel for some reason) was better off in the three-spot in
party order because of her particular ability mix, instead of the four-spot, where
Aungier excels.
It wasn't until she made a quick hop into the Warrens with a
collection of other reserve adventurers, and Bohun, a reliable second choice
healer who I thought might be well suited to keeping my band of haphazardly
selected misfits alive while they limp-stepped through short dungeons to rank
up, that I realized just how good she was at her job. Aungier quietly hurled knives from the back
ranks, danced forward for an opportune killing blow when she needed to and,
above all else, kept her cool. And for
her efforts she was promoted before any of her partymates: not because of some
flashy, last ditch maneuver that saved the day, or because I favored her
heavily, but because she quietly did her job in the back ranks, using her
knives to make sure that packs of spiders were weak enough to be killed by
follow-up blows once they came into range of front line combatants.
That's also, in a real sense, why she's survived so far. Other adventurers, adventurers I favored more
heavily and threw into combat with more reckless abandon, adventurers I cared
about more and thought were better at their jobs, like Tupperbell, Reynauld,
Hall, and Paixdecouer, are dead now. As
my A team, I threw them at challenges well before I should have, challenges I
didn't fully comprehend, challenges I should've walked away from. Because of my attention, because of my belief
in their competence and desire to see them succeed, they're dead now. Aungier survives them because she escaped my
attention until recently. I often found
myself forgetting who Aungier was when I was putting together critical or dire
missions, missions where we lost people (like the great battle with the Wizened
Hag and her cookpot, or that harrowing first Long Dungeon exploration). And so she survived, and has now risen to
prominence as one of a handful of adventurers cleared to go on Medium
difficulty missions.
Now that she's drawn my attention, I've also got a better
sense of just how much character Aungier developed while I wasn't watching. See, she's one of the best Warren delvers
around, adept at scouting that kind of terrain and dealing with the sort of
denizens one is likely to find in a Warren, but therein lies the rub: Aungier
actually hates being in Warrens. They
stress her out. So every time I bring
her skill set to bear, I'm forcing her to do a job she's good at, in a way that
most people in my roster aren't, a job that she also hates. She has, without me inserting one whit of
narrative into her existence without the prompting of the game itself, become a
portrait of long-suffering competence who has finally achieved a modicum of
success, and is now finds herself in a dangerous position: she's cleared for
more hazardous missions as part of a smaller, more elite team of soldiers
within my growing army. How will her
story take shape from here? Will Aungier
continue to thrive with her quiet, workmanlike effiency? Or will her competence become her
undoing?
This is the narrative pull of Darkest Dungeon. It's not
the sort of game that allows you to craft a narrative, the way that Dragon Age: Inquisition or Left4Dead might, with their responsive
systems that permit you to make decisions within their limited frames that
establish one of a set of known outcomes.
Darkest Dungeons is a set of
total unknowns. The dungeons themselves
are just a backdrop, a setting for characters to develop. The reality of the story taking shape in those
dungeons is so much more profound. That
character who snaps and has a paranoid break in the middle of a crucial battle in
the Weald might one day redeem himself.
After spending a night drinking heavily, trying to shake the feeling
that everyone's watching him, he'll wake up with a nasty hangover. Then I'll send him on a quick mission with
some second-stringers, people I'm less attached to, while my primary party
rests up for a more intense mission. On
that sortie that paranoid alcoholic, who once sat in a corner cutting himself
instead of fighting with his party, will redeem himself by striking down that
psychotic pig-man while one of his teammates teeters on death's door. After that, he'll emerge from his adventure
with a quality. It could be something
positive, like a propensity for dealing with stress, or ire for a particular
kind of foe. Or it could be something a
little less positive, like a fascination with corpses, or a refusal to pray in
light of the terrible things he's seen.
He'll grow, in part because of choices I make, but also because of how
things beyond my control unfold, in and out of the dungeons.
Unlike other Rogue-a-likes, with their unforgiving and
sudden swishes of fortune, Darkest Dungeon
builds slow. In Steam Marines, the other Rogue I've been spending too much time on,
if I make a single misstep, my party is wiped.
Technicality-no-down-boo-over, wiped in a few turns by a handful of
regular enemies I see in every fight on every floor. If I accidentally turn the wrong way, or
misread the terrain, or don't check ammo before I set up guard positions, or
just run into something unexpected around a corner without enough action points
to flee, it's game over in a few seconds.
The game wears this unforgiving nature on its sleeve, randomizing the
names of its marines into ridiculous caricatures. "Freeze" and "Point"
aren't names you can get attached to.
Even "Mac" is barely serviceable. Steam
Marines is going to kill your party from the get-go, and it wants you to know
it. It wants you to get on board for the
death-parade. Its over-the-top dumb
naming conventions, its achievements, aimed at letting you tick a new box each
time you die in a new area. When you
play Steam Marines, there's no reason
to get attached.
But in Darkest Dungeon,
you're slowly growing with your stable of adventurers. You're watching them learn, watching them
grow and develop, succeed and fail. When
they die, sometimes it's because you just made one mistake, or there was a spat
of bad luck. Sometimes, it's because you
overextended them, or because someone had a morale-break, which cascaded the
rest of the party into oblivion, but whatever the cause of your wipe is, you're
going to care. Most adventurers start
out as nothing. You build them up by
sending them out on adventures, equipping them with gear and training them in
new and interesting skills as they go.
These aren't disposable tools that you break, then replace. These are assets that you have to invest
yourself in in order to build them up.
And therein lies the rub.
There's some chatter from Rogue fans who find Darkest Dungeon too easy. It
is, in many ways, much more forgiving than other Rogues. In Dungeons
of Dredmore or Rogue Legacy, if
my hero dies, whatever. I get a cute
little sentence about it, and they appear in a log of dead heroes, and I
randomly generate a new hero to take on the world with. That's a by-product of the unforgiving nature
of Rogue-a-likes as a game type: there's no reason to get attached, since your
character is almost certainly going to die, and you're just going to iterate on
their story in an hour or two by making a new one. Darkest
Dungeon eschews this punishing cycle of violence, instead opting to ask
players to slowly build up connections to their adventurers, sending them out
on missions and, in the end, forcing them to sometimes overextend, or field
inexperienced parties to complete particularly challenging missions.
So there are fewer character deaths overall, but when those
deaths happen it's all the more meaningful.
When you lose that A-list party because you went up against a boss
unprepared and exhausted, you're going to feel it a lot more than when you lost
that awesome Ninja a few steps into a boss-fight in your fifth or sixth attempt
to kill some giant, screaming, flaming skull.
And each death also becomes a learning experience. I lost a character during the tutorial. A highwayman ended up in the front line,
taking hits instead of a crusader and, sure enough, he died. Hard.
But that highwayman, whose name is lost (to me, not the game - Darkest Dungeon memorializes that shit
to an impressive degree) taught me an important lesson about positioning party
members, and the difference between front-line and back-line fighters. If I'd kept him on the back line, he might
still be with me today. If I'd known to
keep some healing items around so I could get up to full-health before
boss-fights whenever possible, or if I'd been better at scouting, or if I'd
controlled the skeletons that that necromancer threw at me a little better, my
adventurers would be alive now. And
that's the power of Darkest Dungeon:
it provides me with "never again" moment after "never
again" moment, iterating on that tradition until I find myself here, with
Aungier, learning an important lesson about keeping strong, reliable
adventurers in the wings to fill out my party.
You never know when they might come in handy, after all. And you never know who might break. But we'll talk more on that later.
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