In the dungeon, the emphasis switches from the overarching, to the granular. You need to be crafty and shrewd, making your meager wealth stretch as far as it can go while knowing you are compromising in one area to prop up another. All of the different services are desperately necessary and, especially at the beginning of the game, you’ll never have enough coin or heirlooms (different upgrade resources needed for different buildings) to maintain them all. Properly investing in the right aspects of your hamlet at the right time is just as important as making wise decisions in battle. Whether they relax through quiet meditation, or through the fleshy pleasures of the neighborhood brothel, paying for a few nights worth of recuperation can save them from breaking in the next dungeon.

Of course, the Abbey and Bar are necessary to provide comfort, meaning, and solace to your men. The Sanitarium will remove diseases of the mind and body (for a steep fee) that may otherwise render a hero useless. Services provided at the Guild and Blacksmith can improve your warriors’ skills and equipment. The Stagecoach ferries fresh meat and raw recruits to bolster your ranks and replace the fallen. Each aspect of the hamlet plays a crucial role in fighting the dark. In the hamlet, you are the omniscient master of the land, deciding who to hire, who to send on adventures, and which institutions to upgrade. The violence of your ancestor’s grand estate, overrun with monsters and turned into a pit of terror and malice, crashes full-on into the psyche of your mercenaries, leaving them ruined, shaking, hollowed-out shells of themselves. The quips are limited to vicious cursing, gleeful celebrations of cruelty after a precision strike, and the occasional surprised exclamation that something good has happened for once. There are no doe-eyed youths fighting for justice to be found, only grizzled veterans, zealots, and criminals who share a lust for coin. Violence is neatly compartmentalized in one area, and the personality and sanity of the protagonists are kept safely quarantined away in another, never to meet. Nathan Drake, with his ability to break a man’s neck one minute and make a lighthearted quip the next, is the poster child for video game psychopathy.

RPGs see parties of cheery young adventurers slaughter their way through entire countrysides worth of kobolds and giant rats for the sake of justice and good. Most games gloss right over the psychological effects of combat and stress.

Iron maidens darkest dungeon