Darkest Dungeon: The Crimson Court

The Crimson Court pumps Darkest Dungeon full of disturbing blood-sucking enemies, a challenging new class, and a marathon-style new area that forces you to think differently about how to sustain your team over a long run. While there's definitely enough new content in The Crimson Court to come back to Darkest Dungeon for, it's more the kind of DLC that mixes things up for a new replay than an essential upgrade you should install from the beginning.

While the aesthetic and feel of the game is better than ever, some design choices and repetition lean heavy on the Crimson Court

I'm conflicted. Conceptually, The Crimson Court is very much my cup of blood, but the execution, particularly when it comes to the first mission and the curse, sometimes feels off. That said, Red Hook has clearly been taking feedback seriously, and changes have already been made to make things a little less punishing.

If you're new to the dungeon or it's been a long time since you ventured into its depths, do yourself a favor and get your sea legs ready before wading into the bloody pools of The Crimson Court. If you're an experienced delver looking for a new challenge, then by all means, step into the moonlight and find out what the night has in store for you.

The Crimson Court can make you angry. It's makes tough game tougher. It adds new class, districts, The Crimson Court to explore and new type of enemies spread a disease that will make your party more aggressive and willing to attack, no matter who's the target!

The Crimson Court invites veterans of the game to experience yet another challenge, which can be a little bit too punishing for newcomers. Come on in, the party has just started.

If all of this added bullying isn't to your taste, you can just get the new districts and the new character, for instance, so it's not an 'all-or-nothing' affair, and it's this level of customisation that I feel saves Crimson Court from being perhaps just one vampiric bite too far.

Cruel, hard and ruthless, Crimson Court is the unmissable DLC of Darkest Dungeon, and it's more difficult to complete than the original game.

If you’re the kind of person that complains about games being hard, or unfair in their mechanics, then Darkest Dungeon probably isn’t for you. It’s in that same vein that, if you played the original game and thought that it was too difficult, The Crimson Court expansion probably isn’t for you either. In combination with the base game, it can make progression exceedingly hard, if not outright impossible for some. As end-game content, the process of completing it can become a grind, which takes away from the tension Darkest Dungeon carries so well with its initial design. The expansion isn’t all bad, with the additional content and mechanics themselves being interesting and unique additions to the game. Red Hook is actively updating the expansion content based on player feedback, and have been since its release. Hopefully, in the future, it will be much more balanced and live up to its potential. Right now, however, it’s just kind of a slog through Darkest Dungeon’s oppressive love taps.

With The Crimson Court, I feel like Red Hook is taking us even deeper into Lovecraftian parentage, not just in expanding its supernatural mythos and pantheons, but also by delving deeper into the sense of tragedy, the sorrow of fragile mortality that must be a part of all horror.