Finding peace in the Darkest Dungeon
I’ve been thinking about dread lately. It’s something that’s been on my mind a ton and, if you’ve listened to Point to Point, I’ve talked a bunch about my mid-30s pivot to horror. I think there’s a few reasons—it is 2025—but this past week, I’ve started to feel the dread in modern life.
For the last week or so, I’ve been traveling with my family of three back to my hometown in Wisconsin. It’s a trip we usually make once or twice a year and, every time, I have this mounting anxiety and stress. There’s something a little surreal about returning to your hometown after having left sixteen years ago. Most things are the same, but the store names have changed. Parking lots have sprouted strip malls and old high school haunts were bulldozed over or burned down. Cookie cutter ranch houses are clone-stamped in rows, manicured lawns blending together in a green ocean. And then there’s the unending march of time: hair is grayer, family is more wrinkled, and each gathering is missing an older member or two.
Leading up to the trip back, I did what I always do: aspirationally grab a book and download a game or two. Luckily, the flight was uneventful (besides some Moana watching and snack-supplying with the kid), so I pulled out my Switch and flicked on some feel good in-flight entertainment: Darkest Dungeon. Remember? I’m pivoting to horror.
On Friday, we went to the Thresheree, a harvest festival specifically devoted to the equipment of yore. We wandered the rows of vintage tractors in vibrant reds, oranges, and greens, while a hobby-sized train circled the machine graveyard. Coal fires belched smoke and the ear-splitting pssht of steam bled from the hulking tanks of towering ironclad hulks; mechanical dragons with bellies of pitch and forked iron wheels of red. Removed from the bright daylight, this place would be a steampunk nightmare. A steam-powered pile driver rhythmically clangs as a stake is driven deep into the earth.
It helps me to think of these places and people as Midwest Gothic, to frame them as locations I’m delving or interactions with Dark Souls NPC. I hold the trinkets of a lost time in the flea market or wipe ash from my shirt as the train labors around the park yet again. I stifle a cough as the exhaust fumes overwhelm my delicate air-purified lungs. It’s all rather dreadful. It’s a difficult thing to put your finger on because I’m having fun; I’m happy to see most of these people.
In Darkest Dungeon, I’m immediately overwhelmed by the statistics, the Hamlet, and compiling the right team. I don’t know what I should focus on or care about. When does it make sense to ungraded a skill or how many torches should I bring? The first runs are simple enough, but after five or six, I’m sitting with a full roster of heroes and most of them carrying stress. One run, stress—a meter tracked alongside your health—is running high. A chance enemy critical kills my lead hero, the death and crit dealing a massive amount of stress to my already beleaguered troupe. The remaining three cross 100 stress and each pick up a new negative trait that will affect the rest of the run and possibly future ones. I finish the fight, but the team is too physically and emotionally brutalized from the run, we abandon it, heading back to the Hamlet mostly empty handed.
Each day of the trip ends in a mental exhaustion that is reserved for these trips to Wisconsin. Somewhere between introverted overload and the overwhelm of so much mixed nostalgia, sleep comes fleetingly. It’s a familiar unfamiliar bed and the house creaks aren’t my own. It’s eerily silent outside—far from the sounds of the Boston metro–but diesel trucks roar down residential streets. The pitch-colored iron beasts haunt me even here.
Another run in the ruins outside the Darkest Dungeon. The team is on a roll, pacing from left to right waiting for the next thing to pounce. Treasure is aplenty and we leave having achieved our goal. Drinks in the tavern, meditation in the church, wheezing cough is removed in the sanatorium. Another member is dismissed from service. Even on the good runs stress runs high.
I sit at the kitchen table, a movie blares from the TV, unnecessarily drowning out the chance for conversation. Over the sound of cartoon fisticuffs, my mom asks me to close my eyes and hold out my hands. A gold watch—a $60 Spiedel with an elastic chain bracelet—lands in my hands. My grandfather’s watch. His last watch. For a working class family of union and city workers, it’s as close to an heirloom as you get. I hold it reverently and look at the scratches on the links that would rest on his chair. There’s no power to it; honestly, he probably bought it less than a year ago.
My son sleeps a few feet away and I should be napping too. Instead, I slip the Switch from its case and rejoin the procession through the Darkest Dungeon. I’m having fun, I’m happy to see most of these people. The stress always come, the sweaty palms starting as the hit points tick down. You make mistakes, you overindulge, you get paranoid. Is there a red-faced occultist nearby, is there a red-hatted cultist nearby?
But there’s always an end to the delve, the long exhale at the end of a long journey. You find the exit, you breathe for a moment away from the party, you board that plane. You come home to your humble home and rest on a well-worn sofa. All the while a $60 gold Spiedel ticks on your wrist, your inheritance from a man you share a name with, ringing with the same rhythm as that pile driver.
