Darkest Dungeons newest DLC isnt quite like anything else in the game prior. The expansion, called “The Color of Madness,” is a clear homage to an H.P. Lovecraft story—“The Colour Out of Space”—in a game already full of such homages. But it also incorporates a whole new style of endless mission into Darkest Dungeons grueling grind.
Also, there are aliens.
Like the story on which its based, “The Color of Madness” starts with a comet crash landing into a farmstead. The impact spreads strange, slimy crystals across the surrounding land and its inhabitants, morphing them into a new enemy faction called Husks. Husks arent particularly tough but make up for their weakness with numbers. “The Color of Madness” mostly plays out as an endless, wave-based horde mode, granting better rewards the longer a single team survives the thronging masses. And if your team dies? Itll just be temporarily lost in time and space, keeping its items and progress without that pesky perma-death.
This “Endless Harvest” requires very different tactics than the main game and its other major DLC, “The Crimson Court,” where attrition is as much about exploring dungeons as battling monsters. But developer Red Hook Studios has never been afraid to dramatically change the flow of its game. Sometimes that leads to controversy and outright hostility among players. Still, the fact remains that Darkest Dungeon is a fundamentally different game now than it was at launch. Specifically, its now a game Im happy to “suffer through” all over again.
Diving back in
Darkest Dungeon is famously difficult. Learning to mitigate and tilt randomness in your favor is largely the point, but it still gets frustrating when a nasty critical hit permanently kills a hero youve spent hours grinding to the level cap. “The Crimson Court” made things even harder by introducing infectious vampirism that can kill those same heroes at home base. Its the kind of game you finish with a sense of triumph, yes, but also relief. You dont beat Darkest Dungeon. You survive it.
And I did survive it, in late 2016, shortly after the game came to consoles. Then in 2017, I dipped my toes into The Crimson Courts murky red liquid just enough to see the new content. Some major balance updates coinciding with that DLC made the return trip that much more enticing, but I ultimately lost interest before concluding another run through the endgame. I had done my duty in surviving that crucible once before. Like the maxed-out heroes that complete any of the titular Darkest Dungeons missions, I refused to go back inside.
Eerie alien lights on the horizon are a good hook for DLC. I'm sure this ominous, glyph-covered portal is nothing to worry about. Oh wait, it was something to worry about. Husks aren't terribly tough, but they never stop coming. Stress takes more of a toll than health damage in the Endless Harvest. Different waves introduce different modifiers (and sometimes enemies). The state of the Darkest Dungeons, er, estate in 2018. This Flagellant dodged and resisted more than 18 strikes before killing the Baron! But I still lost a lot of folks… Rewards increase every few waves. A new vendor and a new currency will net you a lot of new upgrades.
Then “The Color of Madness” touched down. It drew me in with its overtly extraterrestrial aesthetic juxtaposed against a primarily fantasy backdrop, like an unnatural glow in the fields. Now its got me hooked with its strange bosses, unique rewards, and something very odd for Darkest Dungeon: a high score to chase.
It still doesnt hurt that developer Red Hook has once again heavily overhauled most character classes. Parties built around critical hits are more viable and stuns are harder to abuse. Learning the ins and outs, particularly against the Husks, has been like learning to play a totally different game.
The rub is that in-game time doesnt progress when you enter the Endless Harvest. The space-time continuum is funny like that near the comet. So your stressed-out and diseased heroes wont recover from their afflictions until you complete a non-Endless Harvest mission, which keeps you from grinding for alien rewards indefinitely.
As a result, Im taking on more and bigger main missions to grind up troops for the harvest, which makes me increasingly invested in the overall run. And the Endless Harvests unique loot is just the stuff to spice up your heroes for the main game. In fact, the trinkets can make entirely different party compositions viable in totally different scenarios. The fabulously-named Non-Euclidean Hilt, for instance, gives Crusaders—an otherwise straightforward bruiser class—their first taste of damage-over-time poison.
Losing the grind
Of course the Crimson Court wont be denied its pound of flesh (er, pint of blood?) either. The new expansion all but forces you to open a floodgate of Bloodsuckers into normal missions, nerfing the amount of stress your heroes restore in town until and unless you do. Once theyre free, they start to spread their curse, giving your parties their own thirst for blood. At that point, youll need to farm that blood to keep your people alive or cleanse the infection altogether by killing Crimson Court bosses. If “The Color of Madness” enticed me toward riches, the court dragged me into its cruel depths by necessity.
The pacing created by this new mix couldnt have been more perfect on my latest run. All the futzing around with alien crystals and selectively dispatching major bosses let the infection sneak up on me. By the time I fought the Baron, the courts first serious boss, nearly my entire roster was parched for plasma. I didnt have enough to slake them all. So I swept into the Barons base for one final push—losing three fourths of my strike team in the process—and finally stole my luckiest victory in the game to date. My reward was a total purge of the curse impairing my soldiers.
Naturally, I went right back to chipping away at the Endless Harvest. The extraterrestrial riches inside will be just the thing to kill the next brick-red boss, after all. But my infection notifier warns me the Bloodsuckers are already rallying. Thats fine. The trinkets they drop might help me chew through the secret bosses in the deeper levels of the Endless Harvest.
All of this has been a very different experience than the one I had in 2016. That version of Darkest Dungeon was all about guaranteed grinding. It took time, but if you stuck with it, youd eventually gain the money, experience, and upgrade materials necessary for the best odds of surviving that endgame oubliette.
Now, there are overarching layers of plates to spin. Blood needs to be farmed. “Optional” bosses must be killed to quell plagues of vampirism. In-game stress needs to be managed much more carefully if you want to farm the time-warped hordes under the comets influence. And you do want to do just that, because it opens up too many tactical options to pass up.
Im having fun just theory-crafting these new hero lineups and builds. But it wouldnt be half as enjoyable if the Lovecraftian, vampiric, and alien stakes to successfully implement them werent so high. All three of these major pillars now support one another. They form a journey that feels completely unlike the one I thought I knew. The destination hasnt changed all that much, but so what? I already survived Darkest Dungeon once. Now I finally feel like I have the tools to master it.
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Ars Technica
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