Darkest Dungeon announced

A bit of browsing on Kickstarter has revealed to me the existence of Darkest Dungeon, a top-down dungeon crawler with some really intriguing mechanics relating to the psychological state of your party. Now in development by Red Hook Studio, Darkest Dungeon “was conceived as an antidote to the loot-piñata RPG experience which focuses solely on a character’s numerical capabilities. Squad leaders and sports team managers have to contend with the human factors as they strive to maximize effectiveness–why not in RPGs?”

The premise:

Darkest Dungeon is a gothic roguelike RPG dungeon crawler about the psychological stresses of adventuring. You will lead a band of four heroes on a perilous side-scrolling descent, dealing with a prodigious number of threats to their bodily health, and worse, a relentless assault on their mental fortitude! Five hundred feet below the earth you will not only fight unimaginable foes, but famine, disease, and the stress of the ever-encroaching dark. Darkest Dungeon focuses on the humanity and psychological vulnerability of the heroes and asks: What emotional toll does a life of adventure take?

“Wait a minute,” you might say. “Side-scrolling descent? I though this game was top-down?” Well, according to Red Hook developer Tyler Sigman, DD has something of a dual-nature Famaze thing going on:

You choose your path on the top-down roguelike map. You basically direct the party from room to room, choosing which passage way to take. But the movement is displayed in the sidescrolling panel.

There are not one, but two trailers out for this game right now. Sigman says that the first trailer uses mocked-up footage, while everything in the second trailer comes from in-game:

Darkest Dungeon has been successfully Kickstarted and then some. As of the time of writing, it is more than 200% funded only a few days into the campaign!

Darkest Dungeon is planned for release in January 2015, with early access due sometime late this year; for Windows, Mac and Linux.