A hero who drops from 50% HP to 0 from a random enemy crit can still be saved from Death’s Door with any healing or by ending the combat before he gets hit again.

At a glance, this system is actually more generous than it seems. Any healing at this point will bring him off of Death’s Door, but he will suffer intense stress and debuffs for the rest of the mission.

At 0 HP, whether through battle or a heart attack, a hero enters Death’s Door, a special state where the hero stops taking damage and instead every hit against him rolls for the possibility of instant, permanent death. This, however, is still not the end for a hero. But even beyond 100 stress, a hero may carry on, dealing with the effects of his damaged psyche, until 200 stress when the hero has a heart attack and falls to 0 HP. At 100 stress, the hero will have a mental break and occasionally act out by refusing healing, damaging himself or the party, passing turns, or using random moves. Heroes have two health bars: a standard one and one that fills as the party takes damage or as enemies use attacks to inflict stress instead of damage. Keeping heroes alive is expensive, but new arrivals are free, making it viable to send waves of apprentice characters into the dungeons and then only keeping the ones lucky enough to survive and gain a few levels. Heroes fully heal between quests, but their mental stress remains, requiring expensive stress treatment lest they be already fatigued when you deploy them again. A limit on the total numbers of heroes in your roster means that you cannot have one of every class in every level tier, so your party compositions will always be limited by what you have available. High-level heroes will refuse to embark on low-level quests, meaning your newbies will always be in danger as they try to level up. The main gameplay loop of Darkest Dungeon is about trying to do the best you can in a situation that never allows for maximum effectiveness. After The Ancestor’s death, his will bequeaths his estate to the player, who must assemble a team of heroes to cleanse the monsters summoned by The Ancestor’s dark rituals and then find what he left at the bottom of the Darkest Dungeon It centers around a hamlet built in the shadow of the castle of a mysterious figure known as The Ancestor, who is also the game’s narrator.

Darkest Dungeon is a lovecraft-themed dungeon crawler about depression, death, hopelessness, and the fight against impossible odds.

When to clear stress darkest dungeon