“Easy” isn’t springing a cage-headed skeleton daddy who can summon a veritable bones brigade to battle your band of least-experienced adventurers during their first foray under the earth. “Easy” isn’t giving your best dungeon-crawler a crippling fear of confined spaces and gleefully convincing him that he’s a lion when he’s meant to be fighting a squad of vomiting pig people. “Easy” is not having your first party chewed apart by Cthulhu-humping fishmen before they even got to level up their abilities.

Well, with this being Darkest Dungeon, Radiant difficulty is still not what a sensible person would call easy. But in a game renowned for its punishing difficulty and mind-shattering horrors, how does an easy mode even work? The new mode reduces gold costs for upgrades, provides more cash for dungeon visits, and bumps experience gains, with the effect of dragging the time of a playthrough down from the 80 hours quoted by its developers to a more manageable 40 hours. Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they've been changed for better or worse.ĭown a dark, dark road, through a dark, dark forest, under a dark, dark town, in a dark, dark - darkest - dungeon, there’s a new easy mode.ĭarkest Dungeon developer Red Hook Studios introduced “Radiant” difficulty to their infamously tough sidescrolling slog ‘em up early last year, making it quicker and cheaper for the game’s gang of highwaymen, lepers, grave robbers, and other playable miscreants to gain new skills.

Darkest dungeon removing afflictions