Board Game Reviews: Darklight: Memento Mori - More Warhammer Quest-like than Games Workshop! (Patreon)

Foreword: A while ago I promised that we'd be getting some reviews of other games within the genre as a part of expanding content. I polled quickly over on the patreon about a few games I'd be interested in writing reviews for and there was a positive reaction to a few of them. 

So I'm going to return to writing reviews for board games, I will be releasing them early onto the patreon as bonus content (they will be in addition to the KD:M articles rather than in place of anything I do already) for you guys to get as a sneak peak of them before I put them onto BoardGameGeek a week or so later.

For those of you who are interested, these will be placed under the boardgames tag (I wish Patreon offered the ability to build a contents page), so they will all be in one place.  As for the genre, generally these are going to be cooperative games that usually have miniatures - there's nothing else available right now that's like Kingdom Death, but there are somethings that exist from the same family tree (KD:M and many others are all descended from MB Games HeroQuest).

This week we're going to start with a game that honestly needs more attention, a true diamond in the rough. 

The dungeon crawler - Darklight: Memento Mori.

Darklight came to my attention when the kickstarter launched, I was drawn in immediately because of how closely it resembled a game I played in my childhood - Games Workshop's Warhammer Quest (WHQ). I discovered WHQ in the 2000s, however it was released in 1995 and was the third iteration of a dungeon crawl game. MB Games HeroQuest was the first (itself clearly influenced by Dungeons & Dragons), GW's Advanced HeroQuest was the second and Warhammer Quest was the third.

WHQ represented a change in the style of the genre, the HeroQuest variants were Overlord Vs. Heroes style games that played like a simplified version of a roleplaying game. You had the fights, loot and character advancement, but no real characterisation or true roleplaying. As such the Overlord was less a stage director and more a direct opponent to the players. WHQ flipped that on its head with the introduction of "AI" controlled monsters and randomly generated events. While there was still a Dungeon Master/Overlord mode, the main meat of the game was a cooperative experience where four heroes would make their way through a randomly generated dungeon fighting randomly generated monsters. It was very much a board game rogue-like, with permanent death that resulted in the loss of all your loot and other similar elements.

WHQ had several hero expansions and a few other bits released, but ultimately it died when GW changed their direction and decided that board games were not worth supporting, the price of the game skyrocketed over time and interest in it continued for years and years.

Eventually GW changed management and returned to WHQ, we now have Silver Tower, Shadows over Hammerhal and the exceptional Blackstone Fortress. But for a long time, this originator of the cooperative dungeon crawl experience, the great grandfather of Kingdom Death itself, was a rare and chase item.

From the moment I saw Darklight on kickstarter I realised immediately that this was a heavily Warhammer Quest inspired game brought forward for the modern era. This was a very exciting prospect for me, because WHQ is a great game but also horribly flawed in several ways. It's one of the definitions of a 'hot mess', sometimes you're having the best time in the world, and others you're being ground down into an exhausted mess because the random event system won't give you a break.

So we're going to dive into this game now and look at its setting, components, mechanics, what's good about it and what's not so good.

The Setting:

Darklight takes place in a real grimdark fantasy setting, and while people accuse Kingdom Death of being edgy, I think it's worth noting that parts of Darklight make Kingdom Death look positively tame. 

Each player is one of four accursed, heroes who have died and been brought back by the Grim Warden and tasked with collecting souls for it (or get sent back to a true death) - there's an exception to this in the Revenant hero, who is just independently dead, but in general terms everyone is on their second existence.

There's a big old lore book available for people who want to drill into things with a bit more detail (https://www.darkicegames.com/darklight/downloads/) so I'm not going to lay it all out here. We have spins on the various dark fantasy tropes - both in the heroes who range from a giant down to a half demon outcast and the monsters, who include ghosts, mimics, cultists, demons, beastmen/orc-like Skorne and the showpiece monster of the game, the Dreadworm, which is built out of the bodies of hundreds of victims.

I will say that when you look at a few of the demons in detail, you will find that there are some very unpleasant sexual themes, especially with the deviant and the expansion monster the Libithin. However the models (mostly) reflect body horror/dark fantasy rather than anything vulgur (the Libithin has a mouth vagina though, so be warned about that one).

Overall, the setting for me is just a nice bit of fluff that provides justification for the style of the game and the models.

The Components:

This is where we reach an absolutely massive plus. Darklight has some of the most beautiful and well designed single piece PVC models in the entire gaming world. These sculpts were one of the primary reasons why I decided to back this game in the first place, especially the Black Knight.

I'm a sucker for a hero in evil looking plate mail and the Black Knight ticks those boxes. However, I feel that on the whole the hero models are not the best looking part of the game, it's the monsters that have the better sculpts and designs. Here's a link to the gallery of the miniatures in the game: (https://www.darkicegames.com/darklight/gallery/). Just look at these stunning models, each of which is in a unique 35mm+ scale that helps keep their detail.

The only downside is that because most of these models are a single cast piece, some of the poses look very flat from certain angles (especially the Exorcist) - but most of the weak looking poses belong to the heroes, the monsters are incredible. Just look at that Mimic, the Cultist, the Skorne and the aforementioned Dreadworm, they're beautiful. But my absolute favourite is the Cultist Overlord boss (expansion content). Dario Pane is the sculptor, and he is an absolute talent.

The rest of the game's components are also gorgeous. Have a look through the board game geek gallery (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/154910/darklight-memento-mori/images) and just marvel at it all.  The tiles are thick, high quality and have gorgeous illustrations on them, the hero tracking boards are a marvel in themselves, both well designed from an engineering/use viewpoint and as good to look at as they are to use. This game comes in a big square box and it absolutely justifies its size. 

I think my only criticism about the game's components comes with the cards, they're a little generic in their appearance. Not bad, but not as inspiring as the rest of the game.

I don't know exactly what it is about these cards that leaves me a little cold, but something about their design doesn't engage me. But this is often the case with cards. Also pictured here is the Darkness Wheel, which tracks when bad stuff will happen and also provides a storage place for the extra lives/party healing mechanic.

I also want to give a quick shout out to the boss monster decision, there are 6 massive boss monsters in this game, however you only get the Dreadworm model in the core box; the Cultist Overlord, Colossal Dreadworm, Shadow Lurker, Skorn Berserker and Skorn Champion miniatures are in the Boss Monster expansion box. But. BUT! All of the rules to use them are in the core game and you get printed discs to represent these foes as well. They didn't gate off the game content here, they just reduced the price of the core game by selling the miniatures separately. I think that was a super generous move on their part and I love this kind of pro-consumer behavior.

Overall though, in the matter of components, I think that the incredible amount of stuff jammed into this box scores a 9/10 and represents huge value for money.

The Mechanics:

At its heart Darklight is a re-skinned and re-hauled version of 1995s Warhammer Quest, it's truer to the original experience than any of the newer Games Workshop releases are, warts and all. It has a random procedural experience beating away as its heart, one with a lot of unexpected things, emergent storytelling and getting wrecked because you once again rolled a 1 on a six sided dice. 

The full rules can be read here (http://www.darkicegames.com/Public/Documents/Darklight_ENG_Base_RuleBook_Public.pdf) so I am not going to regurgitate them and instead I'll give a brief overview before moving on.

You will pick to either play a one off session, experience the campaign story or an 'endless' campaign of your own (true WHQ style). Then you select an accursed to play as, you have a Tank (Black Knight), Archer (Outcast), Wizard (Blood Witch) and a
Cleric/Paladin Semi-tank/healer (Exorcist). There are also 4 additional expansion characters who are a berserker giant (Nephilim), a rogue/assassin (Revenant), a duelist (Courtesan) and a minion summoning Necromancer. While the character cards have a male and female variant pictured on each, the miniatures only come in one gender for each choice. There is the hope of a future set of alternate miniatures so you can play a female Black Knight or male Courtesan, but that's all it is for the moment.

You then get your starting gear and a random trinket that links to your life before your death and you're ready to rock.

The game breaks down into a cycle that's familiar for many players of dungeon crawls, you explore, fight and loot. Collecting gear and one of the game's main currency (souls). This cycle continues until you find the boss chamber and defeat it (or complete whatever objective this scenario has). Then you leave the place and return to "civilization" with the plan of spending and upgrading.

Over time the monsters become harder and harder, with higher level versions of them appearing, and the rewards scale to match. This puts it in a superior place to the original WHQ, which would keep changing the monsters as you leveled up, because WHQ was an exercise in selling as many different miniatures as possible, you're not forced to buy dozens of beastmen, demons and dragons here. However, this does mean that the monster cast remains pretty static visually for the entire game. New monster types don't turn up halfway through a campaign, it's just that the old ones get upgraded and learn a few new tricks.

The written campaign gives you a very solid framework for exploring the game, providing a route map with fixed events, set objectives and just a solid story to follow. After you've played a few games to get to grips with the rules, I'd recommend playing the campaign over anything else. It is good to have a focus of some kind, though once you have completed the story, the only thing that is left is replaying with randomly generated content and only emergent storytelling or having a creative member of your group build their own custom campaigns to run for you. 

The Good:

This game is immense fun to play, it was an instant hit with my gaming groups who all loved the style, the mechanics, the characters, the unforgiving harshness and the challenge. Darklight is not an easy game at all, but it is a rewarding experience.

The components are phenomenal, the world is interesting and mysterious and the design as a whole sits well without being broken. Basically, most of the broad strokes on this game are perfect. However, as we will discuss now, there are issues - but there is also a massive silver lining to these issues.

The Bad:

Darklight, for all it's wonder, is a flawed game. The exploration phase is very poorly described in the rulebook and you will be confused and muddling through that part a lot of the time. Additionally, the monster balance is all over the place, some of the level 1 bosses are absolutely brutal, as are some of the normal early game monsters. 

The tests mechanic, which only allows for success on a 6, made it incredibly difficult to succeed at things and the journey portion of the game - where you travel back to civilization after a dungeon crawl, is way, way, way too punishing. Our very first game where we got out of the dungeon resulted in a total party wipe during the journey phase.

Also, the heroes are rather unbalanced, the Nephilim is so strong that the Black Knight is almost obsolete. Mauro Pane (the designer) is new to board games, and it shows.

Also this game has made the decision to use the standard six sided dice for its mechanics, this increases the chances of wild successes and total failures in equal doses. For budding designers out there, I would recommend that you avoid using the six sided dice if you are having a 1 = fail and 6 = success mechanic in your game, instead you should look at using either the D10 or my personal bestie dice the D12. They both offer a wider range of odds with less weighting on the top and bottom results. 

Also the monster AI is very simplistic, with only a little evolution from the days of WHQ, Blackstone Fortress offers a more complex system without too much additional padding while Kingdom Death remains the king of AI through it's AI deck. 

However, these issues did not harm the fun we had when playing and more importantly Mauro is constantly open to criticism, feedback and has been an absolute marvel when interacting with the community. He is currently working with the players of his game on revising and updating the mechanics before re-releasing the game. I am thoroughly impressed with how he conducts himself, the way that he can take on board people's feedback/suggestions and still remain strong about the parts of the game design he wants to remain. 

We already have a lot of things updated/clarified in the public Errata (http://www.darkicegames.com/Public/ERRATA_PostLaunch.pdf) and Mauro continues to work on balancing the monsters and accursed to balance difficulty against fun/enjoyment (for example there is this thread). You can see in the optional rules section a whole bunch of anti-frustration mechanics that you can employ if you want to make the game less hardcore and just enjoy the campaign story. 

The Summary:

As a genuinely impressive and enjoyable iteration on the cooperative dungeon crawl/rogue-like genre, Darklight is superior to many of the other options out there on the market right now. It is one of the few true kill and loot games for a group of friends who want to sit down and battle against the odds. It looks good, it feels great and it has a sprawling grandeur to it that captivates through components, mechanics and story/theme.

You can still get the core game for Darklight over at the store: (https://www.darkicegames.com/darklight/product-category/world-shop/) and honestly I think this game deserves to be sold out, the combination of mechanics, theme, components and a design team that actively works with the community and listens to players feedback is absolutely massive. I've got a huge amount of time for Dark Ice Games and I want them to succeed wildly.

 Overall I score this one an 8/10 and this game, to me, is a must buy for fans of the cooperative campaign miniature genre.