Darkest Dungeon - Color of Madness Review

Ars Technica takes another look at Darkest Dungeon and its new DLC and finds it a different game from two years ago.

Like the story on which it’s 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 aren’t 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? It’ll 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, it’s now a game I’m happy to “suffer through” all over again.

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