Darkest Dungeon Completes Kickstarter Stretch Goals

Darkest Dungeon has come to typify early access development in my head, such that I forgot that it was also Kickstarted before launching on Steam. That's relevant today because the game's new Everything Burns update "completes the last of the Kickstarter game feature stretch goals."

The marquee feature of the update are "town events", through which the game can toss you "bonus recruits, extra supplies, facility closures, and more." Having learned their lesson from earlier, poorly received updates, the frequency of the Town Events can be adjusted via the game's options menu - though they cannot be reduced for the harder New Game+ mode.

Darkest Dungeon puts you in charge of a band of adventurers plundering their way through a grimdark fantasy world. The twist is that the grimdark world will depress, stress and permanently affect the psyches of your adventurers if you don't take good care of them, making for a tall challenge and more interesting battle stories than your usual grind/kill/loot loop. Here's what our Joe said in his review:

You’ll lose lives, money, resolve and the marbles of your crew, before you’re back at the hamlet with nothing to show, no further forward, another four bodies resigned to the graveyard. You’ll incessantly tour a ragtag mob of reluctant rookies into foregone conclusions. You’ll laugh at the fact you’ve wound up with a nymphomaniac alcoholic who is barred from both the Tavern and the Brothel. You’ll cry. And cry and cry and cry. But I think you’ll love it.

Now the team are going to move on to fulfilling the physical Kickstarter rewards, while more updates for the game are still planned. If you want to try this update out ahead of its general release, you can do so by opting into the “coming_in_hot” Beta branch on Steam. There are instructions on how to do so in the post linked above.