There are three variants (Cultist Brawler, Cultist Champion, Cultist Gladiator), depending on the level of the difficulty of the current dungeon run you're in, but essentially it's just the stats that change aroud. Oh, he's also shirtless and has two big-ass Wolverine claws strapped on each arm, allowing them to inflict Bleed, a damage-over-time status. Cultist Brawler is basically a pretty generic enemy, wearing a metal skull-mask that spreads out in this weird sun-like ring evocative of the game's Madness mechanic symbol. But some enemies show up basically everywhere, as sort of generic, simple enemies that tend to just fill up the random encounters table list. From the music, to the backgrouds, to the ominous and hammy declarations by the Narrator (who also doubles as the 'ghost' of your enigmatic Ancestor), while the gameplay is essentially a old-school Final Fantasy turn-based game with some additional wrinkles thrown in (the sanity meter and positioning), it's ultimately the style and the sheer neatness of the theme that drew me in.Īgain, we're reviewing monsters, so whenever posssible I'll try to avoid using too much gameplay terms.Ĭultist Brawler: What does 'global' mean? Well, at any given in-game week, you get a couple of parts of the four primary areas open at one time - the weald, the ruins, the cove and the warrens (plus two more with DLC's installed), and the enemies you face (and thus, the resistances and weaknesses they have) differ from place to place. It's amazingly done in conveying the theme and tone of its world is what I'm saying, I guess.

It's a pretty awesome and well-done game that, while perhaps trying a bit too hard to focus on the hardness and the grindiness of the gameplay (you can and will permanently lose the characters you built up sometimes if you run into a string of bad luck) but what it excels is really building up a glorious little gothic horror world inspired by the Cthulhu mythos, but not at all actually adapting any of the IP's involved.

Darkest Dungeon was a particularly fun game that combines two of my guilty pleasures into one - homebrew D&D and Lovecraftian horror.

Darkest dungeon narrator voice in file