Players are also advised to upgrade buildings in the village, as they provide various effects to the adventurers you’ll be sending out on missions. Every in-game week the player selects adventurers, buys their gear, and coaches them through various mission objectives that usually involve recovering ancestral documents and artifacts. Unlike the most well-known cosmic horror games - Eternal Darkness, Call of Cthulhu, Alone in the Dark - which were largely about the player character facing the horrors alone and with minimal resources, Darkest Dungeon takes a step back and puts the player in the role of puppeteer.

This is how I came to sink 30-something hours into Darkest Dungeon, the notoriously unforgiving roguelike about excavating the cursed ruins beneath a recently-inherited mansion. These days, the genre offers the relatable experience of a 2 AM panic attack fueled by existential dread and awareness of one’s own mortality boiled down to a squishy eyeball aesthetic. Cosmic horror is, at its most basic, about fear of the unknown other, a subject that was drenched with racist overtones as originated by HP Lovecraft it nonetheless managed to endure because those unknowable cephalopodic evils also imagined a universe indifferent to humans, where death isn’t coming for you but crushing you incidentally as it walks by. It can be appealing to watch society fall apart in a way the viewer can plan for, with trigger warnings that can be verified and an ending that can be quantified and reduced to a wiki entry. Something about the apocalyptic state of the world has recently sent me once more into the arms of cosmic horror.

Darkest dungeon wolves at door