Game details Developer: Red Hook Studios

Publisher: Red Hook Studios

Platform: Windows (reviewed), Xbox One, PS4

Release Date: June 19, 2017

Price: $10 (DLC)

Links: Steam | Official Website Red Hook Studios: Red Hook Studios: Windows (reviewed), Xbox One, PS4June 19, 2017: $10 (DLC)

Darkest Dungeon's first-ever DLC, The Crimson Court, is going to be a hard sell for many players. That's not just a pun on the expansion's extreme difficulty, either, although there is plenty of that here.

For those new to the game—and perhaps looking at The Crimson Court as an excuse to hop aboard the crazy train—Darkest Dungeon is a brutal turn-based dungeon crawler. In-game time passes when you send bedraggled squads into the depths of different dungeons. Managing time, resources, and a revolving door of adventurers is a delicate balance that players either learn to walk or bow out of altogether.

The Crimson Court DLC isn't self-contained, which presents the expansion's first structural hurdle. You either need to start a new campaign or use an existing save where you don't mind turning that balance inside out with new enemies, objectives, and dangers.

That was a pretty tall request for me. I've got a friend or two who have been more than happy to play Darkest Dungeon to completion multiple times since it left Early Access in 2016. I'm not like them. I was plenty happy to beat the grueling game once and walk away. So when I learned that The Crimson Court's addition was more extension than expansion, I was worried I wouldn't be able work up the nerve to commit to the game again from scratch.

Maybe I'm more like my friends than I thought. Either that, or the new, vampire-centric Crimson Court is just that tantalizing. Probably both.

All hail the new flesh and blood

That's not to say Crimson Court is inviting. The expansion’s new horror begins on week five of a regular Darkest Dungeon campaign, at which point the Hamlet—your home-away-from-horror—is beset by mosquitoes. These literal and figurative buggers put a dent in how much stress your returning spelunkers regain in-town each week. In a game where too much stress can cause your party members to go off the deep end, that's a very frustrating development.

The solution is to enter the aptly named Courtyard to burn out the mosquito nests therein. This new zone comprises the bulk of new content specific to The Crimson Court. Of course, you'll want to dive in right away: both to reduce the strain on your employees and to see the new stuff. I recommend waiting, however. Once you pop the seal on the Courtyard, new and potentially devastating enemies start springing up in each and every one of the game's randomly generated levels.























That wouldn't be a huge problem, but these new tick- and mosquito-inspired foes can infect your party members with the so-called Crimson Curse. You'll end up spending a lot of time and energy managing the Crimson Curse, a change that fundamentally alters how you think about Darkest Dungeon.

The curse is mostly bad. It lowers a given dungeoneer's resistance to just about every negative status effect, reduces their maximum hit points, and increases the chance that they'll go batty when stress gets too high. If that weren't enough, the curse gets worse and worse over time, until the infected adventurer croaks completely. And cursed allies also have a chance of infecting their companions back at the Hamlet.

Drink up

You can only mitigate the curse with the proper application of The Blood, a new resource that drops randomly from enemies. This actually buffs your cursed units for a time. Unfortunately, it also adds a random chance that they might freak out and perform negative actions, much as they would if they'd had a stress breakdown.

Mercifully, you can cure the curse. But early in the campaign, curing is only possible by completing missions inside the Courtyard... which requires another random enemy-dropped resource called Invitations.

Crimson Court's new enemies, zone, bosses, and hero class (a cross-breed support class and frontliner called the Flagellant, focused on making enemies bleed) are an enormous breath of fresh air. Darkest Dungeon gets plenty of (somewhat deserved) guff for overtaxing its same few areas to support a very long game. The Crimson Court almost sabotages its best feature—more space to play in and around—by stretching out its running time through a reliance on forced loot drops. Basically, a very grindy game got bigger to make the grind less noticeable, but it added more and different grinds on top.

The grind is good! The RNG is evil!

I'm conflicted. I have a pretty high tolerance for grinding in games, which goes as far as appreciation in the right circumstances. Vanilla Darkest Dungeon met those circumstances better than nearly any game I've ever played. So much of the game is about taking risks in the short-term and mitigating those risks in the long-term with better gear, soldiers, upgrades, and knowledge. The Crimson Court plays into that risk/reward structure perfectly.

But even if the game needs a bit of grinding to work—for those scads of disposable units to turn into a few shining diamonds—the grind itself shouldn't be totally random. Far from it. Darkest Dungeon succeeds largely because, at any given point, you know what kind of danger you're throwing your resources into and what kind of rewards await. Missions warn you in advance how long and difficult they'll be, what kinds of enemies you'll face, and whether or not a boss is waiting for you at the end.

Crimson Court's totally random drops on necessary items, like The Blood and Invitations needed to enter the Courtyard, slightly throw off the balance between firmness and fairness.

Thankfully, the developers at Red Hook have proven themselves extremely amenable to rebalancing. In fact, The Crimson Court dropped alongside a massive update that changed many existing heroes, added entirely new building mechanics in the Hamlet, and just generally rejiggered the whole experience. Since its release, Red Hook has already bumped up drop rates on The Blood multiple times.

Darkest Dungeon has never been a stranger to change. I'm confident that with enough time and tweaking, Red Hook will get its reconfigured concoction just right again. In the meantime, though, The Crimson Court is still a gruesome, enticing infusion for the game. It was enough to rope me back into the madness after I thought I was home free. And I'm very excited to see what comes next.

The Good

New areas, enemies, and allies to shake up the grind

Flagellant support skills ease the ostensible "need" for Vestal-class healers

Enemy designs are excitingly original (and predictably gruesome)

Coincides with major balance changes, together making this a great time to jump back in

The Bad

Over-reliance on random chance to progress and maintain troops

Slightly difficult to access early on

The ugly

Reliving all the frustration you thought you'd escaped by beating the game last time...

Verdict:

Randomness keeps Darkest Dungeon's signature grind in a holding pattern, but new content breathes life into the whole experience. Buy it.